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Feb. 21st, 2005 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rymenhildI read a book today about some children on summer holiday in rural Wales. During this holiday, the children discover that they are linked, in ways hitherto unsuspected, to supernatural events recorded in medieval Welsh texts. They see some significant standing stones, meet a farmhand who knows far more than he should, and encounter or hear mention of symbolic ravens, harps, sheepdogs, foxes and owls.
I have never read this book before.
Did I mention that Alan Garner's The Owl Service was first published in 1967, a year before Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising?
In a way, The Owl Service is grimmer than the Dark is Rising Sequence. The darkness of the book comes from its lack of a moral center. Where Cooper's Simon Drew can say, "[W]ell, there's a good side and a bad, and those two are absolutely without question the good side," there is no good or bad anywhere in The Owl Service. Every character is human and severely flawed. The interaction between the modern humans' errors and the errors of Gwydion, Lleu, Gronw and Blodeuwedd in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi creates the tension of the plot. The class distinctions separating Gwyn, the cook's son who dreams of educating himself out of poverty, from Alison, an English future society lady who technically owns the house in Wales, and her stepbrother Roger, bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, help drive the narrative and create its underlying bitterness. While Garner tempts readers to favor Gwyn, the authentic Welshman, over the intruders Alison and Roger, Gwyn is no better than the other two, and his failures threaten Blodeuwedd's valley more seriously than anyone else's mistakes. In its unflinching portrayal of interlinked failures, The Owl Service is true to its source materials in the Mabinogi.
I have never read this book before.
Did I mention that Alan Garner's The Owl Service was first published in 1967, a year before Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising?
In a way, The Owl Service is grimmer than the Dark is Rising Sequence. The darkness of the book comes from its lack of a moral center. Where Cooper's Simon Drew can say, "[W]ell, there's a good side and a bad, and those two are absolutely without question the good side," there is no good or bad anywhere in The Owl Service. Every character is human and severely flawed. The interaction between the modern humans' errors and the errors of Gwydion, Lleu, Gronw and Blodeuwedd in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi creates the tension of the plot. The class distinctions separating Gwyn, the cook's son who dreams of educating himself out of poverty, from Alison, an English future society lady who technically owns the house in Wales, and her stepbrother Roger, bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, help drive the narrative and create its underlying bitterness. While Garner tempts readers to favor Gwyn, the authentic Welshman, over the intruders Alison and Roger, Gwyn is no better than the other two, and his failures threaten Blodeuwedd's valley more seriously than anyone else's mistakes. In its unflinching portrayal of interlinked failures, The Owl Service is true to its source materials in the Mabinogi.
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Date: 2005-02-22 01:40 pm (UTC)