The Grey King is possibly my favourite book of the sequence, and definitely one of my favourite books of all time. The things I noticed in this read through -- my full review, more of an overview of all the times I've read it, is here -- were mostly about the Welshness of it, and about the complexities of Will's relationship with the Light and humanity, and how exactly Bran is related to the Light.

John Rowlands' little speech about the coldness at the heart of the Light always strikes me -- it's a moral ambiguity that isn't always present (e.g. in Harry Potter). Several times we see that Will isn't really human, and we have to question how justified his goals are. Is the Light any better placed to dictate what humanity will do than the Dark? Although, thinking about it, what the Dark will do to humanity is rarely really articulated: it remains a formless fear, and the more potent for that, I think, as the reader brings their own understanding to that.

Once you've read the whole sequence, you do know that the Light is right, I think, because of how they handle their victory -- though at the same time, that coldness at the heart never goes away -- but you never see anything from the point of view of the Dark... I've read rewrites of The Lord of the Rings where Sauron was not evil. It'd be interesting to read a rewrite of The Dark is Rising, in that sense! How could one talk up the Dark and make it sound like the better choice... Clearly some people choose to be of the Dark: Merriman tells Will that the Lords of the Dark choose it, they aren't born into it as those of the Light are. That would be very interesting to know: what makes people choose to become Lords of the Dark? There is the painter, in Greenwitch, who is very lonely, very unhappy, an outcast... I think perhaps he's the clearest elaboration on this, though there is something about it in Silver on the Tree, too -- people so blinded by ideas that they lose all sense of right and wrong.

In any case, the other thing that really gets me about these books is they make my heart ache for Wales. Now I'm home in Wales, that's a slightly different experience, but I really don't know of any other book that invokes the feeling of Wales for me so strongly. Or I didn't, before, anyway: now I've read more Welsh writing, I'm starting to see that in other books. But The Dark is Rising is still the strongest.