The day when I found a 'Guardian' post that I could only agree wholeheartedly with:
I first read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising the summer I turned 13, the year the Berlin Wall came down. I read it by torchlight under the bedclothes, not because of parental curfew or power cut, but because that seemed the safest place to read what was, unmistakably, the eeriest novel I’d ever met.It's a sign of Christmas! And Reader, you will know that this is one of my all time top classics.
This winter, I hope The Dark Is Rising will find new audiences around the world. For, working with the actor, director and theatre-maker Simon McBurney, and supported by Complicité (the theatre company that Simon co-founded) I’ve spent the past year adapting The Dark Is Rising as an audio drama. It will be broadcast first on BBC World Service in 12 episodes, beginning on 20 December, with an episode following each day, such that the broadcasts correspond to the “real time” of the novel’s own unfolding across the solstice, Christmas and New Year’s Eve.This will be, I suspect, the first time I've ever tuned in to the BBC World Service! And I have high hopes for this.
Well, perhaps it'll be an ok translation to screen, but I dont hold out much hope of the woke wankers being kept away. The Dark is Rising series was always about a sugary infallible goody side and an irredeemably bad side with no actual history, nuance or character failings, unlike Tolkien for instance. I doubt if theyll be able to resist trannies and diversity to ruin it and bore us to tears.
ReplyDelete"The Dark is Rising series was always about a sugary infallible goody side and an irredeemably bad side ..."
ReplyDeleteOh, no! No, it's not like that at all. It's a lot darker, and - apart from the first in the series - Merriman is a rather frightening figure for a child.