The Whispering Knights

First published in 1971, The Whispering Knights has something in common with The Time of the Ghost; in both books, a group of children unintentionally summon up a malevolent, ancient feminine force (Morgan in The Whispering Knights, Monigan in Time of the Ghost) and have to deal with the consequences, though Time of the Ghost is a more sophisticated, young adult version, while The Whispering Knights is very much a children's story.

The Whispering Knights also reminded me of Alan Garner's early works, particularly The Moon of Gomrath, as one of the children is captured and imprisoned by Morgan in her big sinister house and needs to be rescued (she is called 'the Morrigan' in Garner's book). It's interesting to speculate about the possibility of these three wonderful writers reading each other's work and being influenced, or having ideas for stories sparked. In order of publication, it goes Garner, Lively, Wynne Jones, but I have no idea whether any of them saw the books of the others. Sometimes story ideas seem to float in the zeitgeist; it's not unusual for roughly contemporaneous novels to share similar plots or settings, or to draw on common source material, as seems to have happened here.

The Whispering Knights is the most straightforward of the three and the most easily resolved; the children have the help of the wonderful Miss Hepplewhite, an equally ancient force for good, and the Whispering Knights themselves, a stone circle which comes to life in the final climatic battle. A good introduction to some big mythological ideas.