Book Review: Silver on the Tree

Title: Silver on the Tree

Author: Susan Cooper

Date: 1977

Publisher: Atheneum

ISBN: 0-689-50088-2

Length: 269 pages

Quote: “The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in...the hands of the children of all men on this earth.”

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. If you're reading for suspense, the takeaway is that although the last chapter ought to feel like a climax to which the first twenty chapters have led up, and it doesn't, each chapter is a good, nonviolent story meant to pique young readers' interest in British folklore (which is rarely nonviolent). Go and read the book now.

In 1977 I looked for books with landscapes. I did a lot of reading in the backs of boring classrooms that looked alike, and if a book could give me a mental picture of something more interesting, I was pleased.

Silver on the Tree was my kind of book—in 1977. It has beautiful Welsh landscapes, interwoven with shimmering fragments of ancient poetry, legends, and mythology. Modern poetry is here too. Symbolism is thick. In 1977 I enjoyed reading a novel that would keep me tracking down clues to its symbolism for a few weeks.

Still, I thought I must have missed something in the actual plot. So I read Silver on the Tree again in college. And again, as a foster mother. And again, as a teacher. And again, as an aunt. And again, as a bookseller checking for mold inside the pages. And after thirty years I have to say that I still think Silver on the Tree fails to meet the standard it’s set for itself.

It’s about a conflict between the Light and the Dark. In a general way these cosmic forces are identified with good and evil, but it’s explained that they’re not meant to be good and evil, or literal light and darkness. They are alien forces that, in this book, withdraw from the earth.

Things identified with the Dark are usually unpleasant, but not always: the list includes bullies, bigots, weasels, a lake monster, a careless shipbuilder, a woman who seems bland and friendly, and the chief antagonist, who (you’ll have to remind yourself), in spite of the jacket picture and his character, was invented before Darth Vader. 

Things identified with the Light are most of the other human characters in the book. They’re said to include a vast assembly of people around the world, but the ones in the book are a fairly narrow sampling of British types. Some of them, though inhabiting human bodies, have superhuman memories and abilities; the careless reader might classify them as “gods,” but that would be a misinterpretation of British mythology: they are longaevi, the more ancient kind of faeries, superheroes and supervillains, members of a mortal and fallible alien species who live longer than humans and can do things humans can’t. Their English name is “Old Ones,” although some of them have been reborn in young bodies; the one on whom the book, and its previous volumes, focus is only about twelve years old (in his current human shape).

His companions include King Arthur, seen only in glimpses, and Merlin, seen close up in a human shape that might be only seventy years old, and the legitimate son of Arthur and Guinevere who has been sent forward in time and is also in his early teens, and the demigoddess Jana who seems to be in between human shapes, and Taliesin and Gwyddno Garanhir and Owen Glendower and various other legendary characters, and three ordinary, contemporary middle school kids (siblings), and various valuable objects they carry...they all seem meant to be pleasant.

At a certain magical time, the Old Ones know in their mysterious way, a magical silver flower will bloom on a magical tree, and if they do everything right they’ll be able to cut the blossom, banish the Dark from our world, and go somewhere else. In order to make it happen the children have to meet various tests, presumably of character and intelligence; the Dark is allowed to scare them and distract them but not directly do them physical harm. This nonviolence is unusual in British mythology. For adults who’ve waded through all the gory battles first it might have been a refreshing change. Silver on the Tree is the climactic volume of a five-volume series in an established twentieth century sub-genre of fantastic fiction, in which, despite the shadowy presence of the legendary heroes, the story is really about the personal growth processes of teenagers.

That’s the trouble with this book. The three human children are old enough to have real coming-of-age adventure stories, like Alan Garner’s characters, but their adventures are more of a guided tour than a real test or quest. They remind me of those old, insipid “Sister and Brother Go to [European country]” pseudo-novels of my childhood, where the characters see sights, learn words, listen to stories, and come home feeling that they’ve really learned something. Because the author is Susan Cooper rather than a committee of word-counting teachers, the sights Jane, Simon, and Barney see really come alive...but at the end of the book we’re told that the children won’t even remember their adventures, except as dreams.

Real Celtic folklore had a few active heroines, but not enough to satisfy most modern readers. In many old stories, as in this new series, the heroines only barely have roles. Jane does have to resist a psychic attack, but this turns out to consist of not being grossed out by a lake monster who can't touch her. Jana has spent the whole series being "the Old Lady," and that's about all, though she did seem to inspire an old human lady to throw a party in The Dark Is Rising. But it's not as if even the male characters in this series had to be terribly brave, or even athletic. 

The two “Old Ones” in child form, Bran and Will, have more powers and more active adventures. Still, although they move around more than the other kids, their challenges are easy: Bran has to look at himself in a mirror, and as a team they have to talk to a depressed adult...their success ought to be leading up to a serious challenge, but it's not. Because they're so young they get the choice of floating off into mystical space with their own elders, or staying on Earth and growing up to be ordinary men. The choice doesn't take a lot of time or thought.

In the end, the story Silver on the Tree tells us is a story-behind-the-story: Cooper had a contract to write five novels about five children whose fantastic adventures would echo and build on British mythology—Will in England (first), Bran in Wales, and the other three (who are siblings) in Cornwall. Each volume contained a different mix of fantasy and reality. Each set up a real challenge for its child character(s); The Grey King, in which Bran loses his dog and forgives his human foster father for not being his real father, won a Newbery Medal. Cooper had promised to tie all the stories together in the fifth book, and, for whatever reason, hadn’t thought of an adequate plot within the time allotted. So she wrote a superbly detailed dream sequence and told readers that the game was over, and if we weren’t convinced that a conflict between human good and evil had been won with the help of the alien Light, tough. As in more recent series like Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events, it can be hard to write a final volume that's as good as the first volume.

Cooper has since written other books, but none of them sold as well as this series.

Anyway, even if it's only a dream sequence, even if they seem to be leading up to a climax that never comes, the individual scenes are beautifully written. Each one works as a short story. The book is worth reading, if only for sharing the pleasure of the characters' dreams.