Over sea, under stone

This book has been on my "to read" list for about four years now, as has the whole [b:The Dark is Rising|11312|Over Sea, Under Stone (The Dark is Rising, #1)|Susan Cooper|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1443993959l/11312.SY75.jpg|742] series. because friends recommended it, or wrote good reviews of it.

My search became more urgent when a reviewer compared my children's books The Enchanted Grove and Of Wheels and Witcheswith the series "The Dark is Rising" and suggested that it might have been an influence on my writing -- see his review here . It couldn't have been an influence on me, because I hadn't read it yet, but there certainly are similar tropes in both my children's books -- children on a quest, getting separated and searching for each other, an older boy who is a bully, some getting captured by the villains and threatened by them. There is even a hair binding that comes undone causing one character to lose her pony tail. But my influence came more from [a:Alan Garner|47991|Alan Garner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1363273417p2/47991.jpg] and I wonder if [a:Susan Cooper|7308|Susan Cooper|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1379606336p2/7308.jpg]'s did too.

Anyway I found the book a very good read. I liked the characters, the children especially, since more than half the adult characters were evil.

In the Good Reads page for the book there was a question about why the book was written in such an old-fashioned way, and so I watched out for that while reading it. As some people remarked, it could be because it was written over 50 years ago, and speech was different then. In the book the children wore "plimsolls", but by the time the Hatty Potter books appeared, 30 years later, "plimsolls" had become "trainers", so that would probably have appeared old-fashioned even 25 years ago, when the Harry Potter books first appeared. I was particularly aware of that when I went to England in the 1960s, because I thought of "plimsolls" as marks on ships, and we called such footwear "tackies", both then and now.

Some language would have appeared old-fashioned even in the 1960s -- I don't recall any children at that time referring to their male parent as "Father" with a capital F. But what really struck me as an anachronism was that one of the characters found two 50 pence pieces in his pocket, in a book published in 1965. Even in 1968, when the edition I read was alleged to have been published, though two of the new decimal coins were beginning to circulate, a 50p piece was not among them, they were still 10-bob notes. So if 10-bob notes miraculously changed into 50p coins, why did plimsolls not change into trainers? Or Father into Dad?

I've spent some time commenting on the language in this review, but that's because I found little else to criticise, and because someone asked a question about it. And now I hope I'll be able to find the rest of the series and renew my acquaintance with the characters.

Revisiting OSUS after about 35 years during which no detail of the book survived in my memory, I might as well never have read it, so totally unknown were the plot, setting and characters to me on a second read. What prompted me to re-read it was the vague memory of Arthurian themes in this and the other books in the series. In fact, these are much less present in OSUS than in my mis-recollection -- a Grail serves as a McGuffin for the sake of which the protagonists exercise their bravery and ingenuity, and the villains their treachery and wickedness, but the lore is treated very lightly. What I enjoyed most this time around was the depiction of the Cornish coastal town in which the action was set -- the landscape and characters were vivid and detailed. The main trio were curiously underdrawn -- I had no idea how old they were, and the two boys were indistinguishable for most of the book. The girl was a real drip.