Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

Source of book: Audiobook from the library.

Since we listen to a lot of audiobooks during our road trips, I decided a few years back to use the Newbery Award list (including honor selections) for ideas for books I was not personally familiar with. This has been particularly useful for books published after the mid 1980s, since most of the contemporary ones were written after I stopped checking out children’s books from the library, and started on adult selections instead. Thus, while my kids may well have read some (such as The Tale of Despereaux), there are others that might not have caught their eye.

The path to our choice of Over Sea, Under Stone was a bit circuitous. Susan Cooper won a Newbery in 1976 for The Grey King, so I put that on our list. However, after requesting it from the library, I discovered that it is actually the fourth book in a series. And, if you know me, I like to DO THINGS IN ORDER. (Feel free to snicker.) Fortunately, our library system has the entire series on audiobook, so it was easy to pivot to start properly with the first book. 

Over Sea, Under Stone was published in 1965, and the sequels weren’t written until years later. This book, therefore, can stand alone easily - and apparently it is different in character from the others. Specifically, while all of them can be loosely classified as fantasy, Over Sea, Under Stone is more of a straight-forward mystery, lacking swords and sorcery except for a few brief allusions to the semi-mythical past. From what I can tell, the later books have more true fantasy in them.

The book features a trio of siblings, Simon, Jane, and Barney, who come with their parents on vacation to stay at a fiction Cornwall beach town. The Grey House is owned by an absent sea captain, who is a friend of Great-Uncle Merry, who isn’t actually a relative, but an old family friend who is also a respected academic.

While at the house, the children discover a passage to the attic, and there find an old telescope case containing an ancient manuscript. With the help of Great-Uncle Merry, they determine that the manuscript refers to the time of King Arthur, and may lead to the location of an artifact that just might contain magical powers. But there are others seeking it - and they are rather nefarious and ruthless. As “Gumerry” explains it, there has always been an eternal struggle between the light and dark, and while the light never wins, it never completely loses either, and the two sides remain in conflict.

As for the rest of the story, it can be summed up as a chase to see which side can decode the clues and find the artifact first. There are plenty of twists and turns along the way, and enough excitement to entertain.

I had a few thoughts while listening to this book. First, the whole “Yay Britain, Hail King Arthur, Celts are cool, good versus evil, repel the invaders” was sure a hell of a lot more fun when this book was written - or even in my own childhood. These days, there is just a bit too much of Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon coming to mind. It sucks when something fun and wholesome and entertaining gets co-opted by racists and xenophobes. It really is a shame, because the Arthur legends are still relevant and full of fascinating inspiration for stories. (Mark Twain certainly put his own twist on them.) I am sure in 1965, a mere generation after World War II, the idea of the Brits fending off the German (Saxon) invaders was morally less complicated. Now, with the same language repurposed to stir up hate against immigrants, it is hard not to wince just a little.

That said, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic in this book. The Arthur legend is used in its more metaphorical sense - even as the book assumes that Arthur was a real person. And, as any good metaphorical legend about good and evil, it pretty clearly identifies evil with the lust for power, and good with the benefit of all mankind.

Another thing that was striking about the book was its rather advanced use of language. To a degree, I think we tend to take this for granted in books for children these days, but many of the books from the past that we consider “children’s books” were actually for adults, while the simplistic and moralistic books for kids largely haven’t remained popular. The vocabulary is pretty extensive in this book, and the children are thoroughly believable, compared to the often angelic sorts you see in books of a certain era. Because of these traits, I actually guessed that it was written in the 1980s, until I looked up the date.

There are a couple of interesting facts about the genesis of the book. First, Susan Cooper originally wrote it in response to a contest by Edith Nesbit’s publisher - the contest was to write a “family adventure” in her style. While Cooper didn’t enter the contest, she turned her initial effort into this book. Also of interest is that the places described in the book, while fictional in name, strongly resemble an actual place which was a favorite vacation destination of hers.

The kids definitely approved of Over Sea, Under Stone, so we will be continuing with the series.