The grey king

Overall, the Dark Is Rising series hasn't really lived up to my expectations. It's good children's fantasy, but not great. This fourth book, though, is the best so far. Will, this time in Wales instead of Cornwall, continues his quest for magical objects to be used by the Light to battle the rising Dark. Unlike the second book ("The Dark Is Rising"), here Cooper manages to balance the two aspects of Will's character, both as a boy and an Old One. And the farms and countryside of Wales are vividly described, the other characters clear and believable. Perhaps because this book doesn't have a lot of other magical characters running around in it, the plot makes much better sense and the characters' motives seem more clearly thought out. I enjoyed this book; it makes me more anxious to read the last one in the series.

I read this book when it was first published - I was 7 years old. Now, at the age of 39, it's still just as magical as it was then. After I finish re-reading it after 33 years, I am hoping to share it with my 11 year old son. Hopefully, he will find it as wonderful as I did and STILL DO!

The Light again have a prophecy they must try and understand, to again find another of the items of power they need to defeat the Dark.

On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,
Must the youngest open the oldest hills
Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.
There fire shall fly from the raven boy,
And the silver eyes that see the wind,
And the Light shall have the harp of gold.

By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie,
On Cadfan's Way where the kestrels call;
Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall,
Yet singing the golden harp shall guide
To break their sleep and bid them ride.

When light from the lost land shall return,
Six Sleepers shall ride, six Signs shall burn,
And where the midsummer tree grows tall
By Pendragon's sword the Dark shall fall.

They have a problem, in that Will Stanton has fallen prey to illness, and a very serious one. He has been months recuperating, and sent to stay with acquaintances in Wales.

Making friends with a strange boy named Bran, the two, and the dog Cadval must wend their way through the mysterious misty hills of Wales, past monsters, human agents of the Dark and the Brenin Llwyd to complete their quest.

As a side note, this book will teach you some basic Welsh pronunciation tips.

The book starts out where Will, an average person, becomes a warrior. The grey King is when something bad happens and he starts a fire preventing them from getting the golden harp. The fire gets closer so they run up some stairs into Bird Rock and all this weird stuff happens. Then Will wishes that he was out of Bird Rock and they appear at the bottom of the steps. The fire is gone so they get the harp and a vortex appears underneath them and Bran, Will's friend plays the harp and it goes away. I did not really get the book after that but at the end this black smoke surrounds everybody.

I gave the book 3 stars. It is the fourth book in a series so if you read the first 3 books first it will make more sense.

"...Those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun...at the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else...At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe."
- a mortal speaking as a free agent to an Old One of the Light, herein

And of all the books in the series, THE GREY KING perhaps illustrates that detatchment of the Light from mortal charity more clearly than any book before it since THE DARK IS RISING, with the hard choices it presented to the Old Ones between their duty to the Light and their private obligations to those they loved. Here, however, the choices made are by mortals, from a man who traded away his allegiance in the hope of becoming a great poet to a woman who left her only child among strangers, one of them a man forever marked in turn by her choices.

In each book of this series, either a previously unknown quantity among the major protagonists of the overall story is introduced to the reader, or familiar protagonists from different volumes work together for the first time. In each case, this serves not only to help join together the mundane waking world with the deeper reality of the battleground between the Light and the Dark, but to re-ground readers in the story so far, thus allowing each volume to function as an independent story as well as part of the greater whole.

In THE GREY KING, the Drews do not appear, and an even greater absence casts a shadow on the story - only the youngest of the Old Ones is an active participant, facing the Brenin Llwyd, the Grey King, the greatest Lord of the Dark whose reasons for binding himself to one small part of Wales are beginning to become horribly apparent. And Will Stanton must achieve this quest independently, having only the clues provided by the outcome of an earlier quest and such mortals as he can trust, who live on or near the farm in Wales where Will has been sent to recover from a serious illness. Several of these mortals are unusually perceptive and have their own roles to play in the quest, which this time is not to gain a tool of power for its own sake as a weapon or a defence, but as a stepping stone to more mysterious ends.

At first I was disappointed to find that Alex Jennings (who narrates the other four volumes' unabridged audio editions) wasn't the reader for THE GREY KING, but I decided to take a chance and get Richard Mitchley's recording of this book, trusting that there was a reason for the change, especially when Jennings was tapped for the next (and final) book in sequence.

I now understand the publishers' decision; THE GREY KING needed a narrator who could speak Welsh (not one of Jennings' strengths). I like Mitchley (particularly as Bran Davies) while still enjoying Jennings on the pre-existing characters. Sigh - if only they'd jointly narrated the last two books so I could've had it both ways...