Date: 2007-11-07 22:38 Subject: The first half decade Security: Public

Esme and I finished reading The Grey King tonight, the fourth book of Susan Cooper's five-volume The Dark Is Rising series of YA novels. For those out there who haven't read the series, these are grim and difficult books, written in a high literary style and filled with long paragraphs full of strange hallucinogenic imagery. The story, in its broad outlines, follows several tween-aged kids, some ordinary and some very much not ordinary, who are trying to complete a series of quests that will allow them to defeat the vicious magic of a cosmic Darkness that threatens to engulf the world (or at least England). The stories draw on disparate elements of the Arthurian mythos and ancient Welsh and Celtic legends, although they are set firmly within the world of the 1960s-70s when they were written. In other words, these are probably not the typical stories one would normally think to read to a five-year-old (Esme was still four when we started them in September, hot on the heels of the much-beloved Prydain Chronicles), and if anyone had predicted to me when she was born that I would be reading them to her now, I think I probably just would have expressed alarm.

In fact, I do feel some alarm when I think of how far Esme has come in five years. I have to remind myself that she's very much a five-year-old in so many ways. Her birthday party was a fancy pink princess-fest, and one of her abiding life ambitions is to marry a prince (good luck with that, kiddo). She has an attachment to television that earlier today drove her into outright deviousness. She spent the early part of the evening putting on a play with Barbie dolls, "Barbie's Big Finale", which unfortunately never got anywhere close to a finale, or even through the first scene, and which, it's worth noting, was preceded by a preview of a forthcoming play, starring "a different Barbie", called "Sleeping Beauty Is Asleep Again", wherein the Prince has gone on vacation and therefore can't kiss her awake; how will she be awakened? Be sure to tune in and find out.

Esme also wails at the slightest injury, completely lacks a sense of humor when teased, and spends much of her time mentally reviewing her notes on which kids at school are her friends and which ones are not, and why. Her diet consists mainly of chicken nuggets, lentil soup, and mac 'n' cheese, and the whining that ensues when these things are not made readily available has roughly the volume, pitch and insistency of a smoke alarm. She refuses to pick up a single thing she has left on the floor. She draws a dozen pictures in as many minutes, then painstakingly writes on each one, "To Taran, I Love You, From Eilonwy" (these are the lead characters in the Prydain books), and leaves them under the table or chair for me to find. So much adorability and so much obnoxiousness all wrapped up in a single pink package; she's an exhausting and neverending source of amazement.

She's also, well, complex. Over a year ago, I wrote about the leaps she sometimes makes that catch us off guard. I had a bit of that feeling again a couple of weeks ago, when she admitted to me unprompted that she "used to hate Harper when she was first born, really hate her, but I don't hate her any more." I asked her to elaborate, and she went into detail about how in the first few months she "had to pretend" she loved Harper when she really didn't, but that now she didn't have to pretend because she really does love her. What startled me was not the vehemence of her feeling, which was both normal and fairly obvious, but rather her ability to (a) recognize the feeling within herself and call it by its true name, (b) recognize that her feelings had evolved over the subsequent year, and (c) express all of this to me without any fear that I would reprove her for it, even though she had felt the need to "pretend" at the time. This particular combination of self-reflectiveness (especially looking back over such a long period of time) and self-confidence is something I don't think I came to until I was in my mid-20s. I know girls generally become emotionally mature more quickly than boys, but dang, five?

This brings me back to the books we've been reading. On the one hand, they're mostly classic tales of good and evil, light and dark, that fit neatly into the pattern burned into her brain by Star Wars. Except, when you look at them closely, they're really not. The Prydain series has a number of characters whose motives are decidedly mixed; the villain in The Black Cauldron, for example, winds up being the hero. The fourth book, Taran Wanderer, concerns itself mainly with Taran trying to figure out who he wants to be and what it means to live a good life; it's a tale not of heroic deeds but of disappointments and quiet triumphs. The Dark Is Rising series has an Obi-Wan Kenobi-type figure who is as much threatening as he is wise and helpful. The powers that the "unusual" children suddenly acquire are frightening to them and frequently regretted; their gifts make them outcasts. We see friends raging at each other; siblings being jealous of one another; adults who let the children and each other down. Another Esme favorite, The Spiderwick Chronicles, follows the adventures of a girl and two twin brothers who discover that the faerie world is literally infesting their house; it's got another "good vs. evil" scheme, but one of the brothers gets expelled from school over his uncontrollable explosions of anger, and it is the anger and distrust he feels towards his own father, when finally controlled and focused, that ultimately saves him, his sibilings, and his mother from death at the hands of a monster.

What all these stories have in common is that leading characters are forced at key points to closely examine how their emotions and motives drive their own sometimes reprehensible behavior. The greater struggle is never against the "evil" thing that needs to be defeated but rather the inner monsters--fear, despair, rage--that threaten to undermine whatever good the heroes may have hoped to achieve.

I can't help wondering if Esme's choice (and it's always her choice) of reading-aloud material may actually be having the effect on her that literature is supposed to have, but usually doesn't, on the rest of us. Watching her internalize these stories so deeply, in such fruitful ways, thrills me no end. But once again, I wonder what I'm missing. Was it something we read that gave her the idea to use the audio book as a decoy this morning so she could get her TV fix? If her understanding of a difficult story is imperfect, could it do more harm than good? I was expecting to be at this point when Esme was ten or twelve, not five. But here we are. What brave new world could have such a creature in it?