 Alan Garner is a unique writer, skilfully crafting his text with painstaking care. His voice is without equal in modern England – a tongue married to a landscape and culture – that of my childhood – subtly expressing, through idiom and cadence, the richness
of local dialect and tradition, avoiding the patronising but full and true. Drawing on classical and other mythical sources, as well as exhaustive research, he weaves a fascinating range of
stories in a poetic style that captivates, drawing the reader deep within his world.
The following is a selection of his best writing, and includes a collection of essays and public lectures that demonstrate why he is thought one of the most entertaining and perplexing speakers. A talk he gave in Oxford in 1978 caused me to revise my entire view of what my life had been until then and to reassess my upbringing, though I little realized it at the time: like a time-bomb, his words on dialect and translation, drawing on his own experience as a first
generation educated, rang true to my own experience and made me question the basis of the social values I had unconsciously acquired at age 21.
Alan Garner lives and writes in Cheshire, near my home town. He was awarded the OBE in 2001.
Link to the unofficial Alan Garner homepage
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Works
Thursbitch
(or US
amazon.com)
A
perplexing Moebius strip of a novel that describes a rural England
of the 18th century with a still living pagan culture. John Turner
dies in a snowstorm in 1755. A woman's single footprint is
seen in the snow beside him, a fact recorded on the reverse
of a stone Garner later found there. The book is an attempt
at an explanation, but the language tells the story through
direct experience. Once the end is reached, the reader realizes
that the end is the beginning. A re-reading shows a very different
story. The effect is mesmerizing.
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Strandloper
William
Buckley was transported from Marton in Cheshire to New South
Wales around 1798, allegedly for sedition (copying lines from
Milton to learn to write). Believing he could return to England if only
he could walk far enough north to reach China, he escaped into
the desert of Australia and collapsed on the burial mound of
a great aboriginal shaman. Aborigines found him and believed
him to be the shaman's reincarnation. Totally strange to them,
and possessed from time to time with epilepsy, he became what
they believed, and lived as a shaman among them for 32 years.
Based on a true story – whose discovery is fascinatingly
narrated in The Voice That Thunders (below) – Strandloper
tells William's story through what William hears and perceives,
in a way that places the reader deep within an individual mind
and experience. Few books communicate so closely the otherness
of another human being, in a language as strange yet somehow
as convincing as the visions seen in a trance that approximates
to poetry.
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The Voice That Thunders : Essays and Lectures
This
is as close as one will get to autobiography from Garner. From
highly entertaining accounts of the perplexing role of the writer
in the modern world – as reflected in the letters he receives
from fans and from schoolchildren required to study him
–
to the dialectal linguistic roots of his own style of writing
and a brave and ingenuous account of his own battle with manic
depression, this collection is one of the most riveting I have
read by any modern writer.
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The Stone Book Quartet
– Winner of the Phoenix
Award (1996)
In
four short novellas the story of Garner's family from mid-19th
century to a Second World War childhood is related in a
language as carefully crafted as the church masonry of his
great grandfather. Highly poetic and atmospheric, the books capture
the spirit of place and age and the mystery of time and
consciousness.
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Red Shift
Three
stories, one plot, expressed in three different time-frames:
in Roman Britain, in the English Civil War, and on a modern
caravan site near the M6, timeless conflicts and age old passions
work out in inexorable fashion through the lives of people isolated
from one another in time yet tragically bound together in place
to work
out the same human mistakes. The parallel time-frames are brilliantly
resolved in the final section, where a single narrative seemingly
tells three different outcomes through the same words.
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The Owl Service
The
Mabinogion story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes takes on a modern setting
in this story of Anglo-Welsh tensions and supernatural events
on a Welsh hillside farmhouse. Classic rivalries are played
out between the children, who unknowingly reenact the story
of the man who fashioned himself a wife out of flowers, which
turn into owls. The social conflict is carefully kept
under while the human story is left to unfold with seemingly
tragic inevitability, thwarted only by the dawning realization
of the reality of what is happening. This novel is a careful
blend of realism and fantasy, rendering the mystic atmosphere
of a Wales now a generation behind us.
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Elidor
The
reader's deepest regret with this novel is that it ends so soon.
Enchantment surrounds a slum clearance site in modern Manchester,
where a blind fiddler leads a group of children into another
world of unicorns and magic on which hangs the fate of this world, only
to return them to their drab everyday lives, their swords and
shields turned to fence palings and dustbin lids. The novel
distills the essence of escapism into a powerful drug, leaving
one longing for more, with only the slightest effort. A
fragment of Elysium.
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The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
The book that started it all. Enough written elsewhere. This embodies the Legend of Alderley in a mythical and fantsastic setting. 2010 sees the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.
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