And so here we are: among the dark, blustery, not so cold days of between-Christmas-and-new-year. A time to say goodbye to 2021, the year everyone hoped would be better than 2020, and that wasn’t, really. The year many hoped would mean the end of the pandemic, though the one certainty of early 2022 is the Omicron variant.
This moment of the calendar – curiously inert for those whose work pauses at this time of the year – offers for many a precious kind of deep inactivity. This year, the British are not entering a prolonged and complete lockdown as we did when 2020 slipped into 2021, but still, in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, there are many restrictions on the extent to which people may gather together, and in England, those alert to the dangers are broadly following suit voluntarily. The time, in short, is one of retreat; for some, loneliness.
The temptation is to switch on the TV and to revel in the teeming joys of all that the bafflingly myriad streaming services have to offer. Christmas movies – all the way through the spectrum from Die Hard to Love Actually, according to taste – are available at the click of the remote. For some, it’s a time to finally binge-watch Succession; or to sit down in front of a classy adaptation of a family classic, like the BBC’s entertaining Around the World in 80 Days.
But solace comes in other ways too, ones that are easy to forget amid the seasonally guiltless possibilities of TV immersion. Company and comfort can come through reading, and, in particular, the reading of wintry, frosty books.
There are many stories that readers turn to again and again at this time of year, some of them at least supposedly for children. Philip Pullman’s modern classic Northern Lights has its culmination in the icy far north where the aurora borealis dances, ruled over by polar bears and witches. Susan Cooper’s 1973 story for young readers, The Dark Is Rising, is for some grown-ups an annual ritual, to be begun on the eve of the solstice, 20 December, when the story begins, and continued in real time until its end on Twelfth Night. The tale is set in the unmagical semi-rural locale of Windsor and Slough. But for young Will, who turns 11 on the shortest day, his life is about to become one of enchantment and danger. The world around him is to be submerged in the deepest, longed-for, but perilous snow. The forces of dark will do battle with the forces of light, and Will is to play his part.
Cooper, who as an undergraduate attended lectures by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, drew on Arthurian tales, and British and English folklore, to invest her chosen landscape with a rich stratigraphy of story. Her book also has a fond relationship with the 1935 children’s novel The Box of Delights by John Masefield – poet laureate and, briefly, a Guardian leader writer. It is another child’s story, drawing on British mythology, that takes place in deep snow – and in which those benign-seeming theological students out carolling might not be all that they seem.
The Box of Delights itself is a thrilling, magical mechanism that can take you anywhere you desire. It is a metaphor for the act of reading itself – the power of story to transport a person anywhere, out of isolation, into thrilling new worlds far away from the anxieties that attended the limping, wintry end of 2021 in Britain.
