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Alan Garner's first two novels -- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963) -- can be fairly easily described, though not dismissed, as children's fantasy: elves and dwarves, the alternately radiant or rain-bound English countryside, magical spells, and the traditional reader's idea of good writing. By the time of Elidor, though, in 1965, the remarkable shift and growth that reaches fruition in The Owl Service (1967) is almost everywhere apparent. Whereas Weirdstone and Moon took place in a rather romantic rural England, into which it was relatively straightforward for Garner to weave a house which appears only under moonlight or a sleeping host of "pure" knights in a magically protected cavern, Elidor is set primarily in urban and suburban Manchester, with wrecking balls, demolished neighborhoods, and students who ride to school on the train, and we immediately recognize this world and the people who inhabit it not as fairy tale types but as the common reality of late twentieth century industrialized societies and the "regular" people who live in them. The challenge Garner seems to have set himself in the writing of Elidor was two-fold: first, to rid his style of its "good" writing and revivify it with "true" writing, the sharply observed and carefully recorded delineation of "reality"; and second, to determine if he could write so well, so truly, that he could convince his reader to suspend his disbelief not because Garner was writing in a form in which suspension of disbelief is the reader's common practice, but rather because Garner's workaday scenes are so vivid and exact that the reader carries his acceptance of that world over to the other.
 Garner does not, to be sure, wholly succeed. The "you are there" veracity of Manchester and the four siblings wasting their last day in the city prior to their move to the suburbs doesn't fully survive the crossing to Elidor, though the flaw lies not so much in the magical land itself or in the events that transpire there but in Garner's language. The pointed, clipped, even cryptic dialogue and narration of Elidor's opening pages -- in which Garner casts the reader as one stumbling onto a conversation already in progress -- gives way, once the children find themselves in Elidor to the much more conventional and even sometimes florid language of his earlier books. It is almost as though Garner felt that the magical kingdom had to be written about in magical words. For example, when Roland, the young earthly protagonist, meets Maleborn, a king in Elidor, we learn that "the locks of (Maleborn's) hair swept backwards as if in a wind," the sort of poetic writing Garner will soon dispense with entirely. Maleborn himself says such things as, "Now that you have come, I need not skulk in beggar's rags again."
Garner would not make this tonal mistake again. As soon as his protagonists return from Elidor to their ordinary England, Garner's style tightens, and the high-flown rhetoric of Malebornis replaced by real people talking, like the funny and memorable dialogue of the electrical engineer Roland encounters back home -- "I've not seen owt like it: I have not. It's a right bobby-dazzler." The book rockets forward on its grounding in reality. When characters, objects and events in Elidor begin to bleed through into suburbia, Garner handles it in a manner as direct as his creation of the children's speech, creating an effect more closely related to the superb supernatural fiction of M.R. James than the procedures of most fantasy, and the fantasy presents itself almost poltergeistly -- snowy television reception, buzzing electric razor, inexplicable knocks on the door.
When The Owl Service appeared two years later, Garner's transformation was complete. Weirdstone and Owl are so different as to be the work of two different men. What links them is an obviously deep love for the British countryside (Owl Service takes place in Wales); a strong narrative hand; and an exploration of the ways in which a myth might be shown to be reality. Owl Service's quality was immediately recognized in England, and the book was awarded both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award for children's fiction.
Ah! there's the rub. "Children's fiction." But Owl Service bears virtually no resemblance to anything you are likely to be thinking of. Indeed one could more justifiably and convincingly compare it to a story like "The Lottery" than to Weirdstone. It is a "children's book" only because the central characters are teenagers. More accurately it is a small masterpiece in a late Modernist mode. Because I have written about Owl Service elsewhere (see "In Dissent" in the Features category at www.webdelsol.com), I will not delay over it here, adding further only that the fantasy elements are, for all practical purposes, gone now: The Owl Service is a tale of a myth reanimating itself.
It would be hard to say what is more remarkable about this phase of Garner's career, the astonishing progress of his writing from Weirdstone to Owl Service, or the astonishing speed with which it took place. Six years would pass before his next novel, Red Shift, appeared, and Garner had again made a substantial leap. If Owl Service is 70-75% dialogue, Red Shift must come close to 80-85%. In Owl Service, the conceit upon which the plot hangs is the re-enactment of a myth; in Red Shift the conceit is that the lives individuals lead in different times resemble each other, a conceit much more limited, much more "earthy", and -- given Garner's manner of presentation -- as much a matter of the reader's interpretation as of authorial intent. In Red Shift Garner dismantles even the slight reliance upon an omniscient and commentative narrator which Owl Service exhibited and turns everything but the narration of "facts" over to the reader. Garner does not even suggest links; he simply tells tales, three of them, breaking each into pieces and interleaving it with the others. In the opening tale, the one which therefore the reader tends to consider the "main" one, Garner gives us a teenaged couple in contemporary England, the daughter of educated professionals and the son of caravaners, what Americans might call trailer park trash. In the second, he gives us a band of young men in late Roman Britain, one of whom loves and tends to (and is tended by) a captured semi-slave woman; in the third, a young couple in a small village during the English Civil War. The three couples' tales are linked by the young men's mental instabilities (or epilepsy), a Stone Age axhead which each owns at some point, the love they share and the ways in which that love can be sullied by the other people in their lives. Each of the three young women is sexually misused at least once, and each resigns herself to it and moves on. Each of the young men is "handicapped" in some way -- Tom, the modern, by the stifling and crippling effects of his home life; the others by the effects of their epilepsy.
What makes Red Shift remarkable of course is not that Garner can make three tales echo each other, but rather the linguistic and narrative skill he applies to creating those tales.
"Shall I tell you?"
"What?"
"Shall I?"
"Tell me what?" said Jan.
"What do you want to know?"
Jan picked up a fistful of earth and trickled it down the neck of his shirt.
"Hey!"
"Stop fooling, then."
So go the opening lines of the book, a scene-setting as lean as that of any play, dialogue which sounds right to the ear. The initial incident -- other than Tom's launching into a bit of astronomical data, the context of which will provide eventually the source for the title -- is Tom and Jan's sighting of the "For Sale" sign in front of Jan's family's home. Henceforth, then, the context of the couple's relationship is the threat to it -- can it survive the distance between them? The threat will seem minor compared to those facing the couples in the other two tales, but perhaps that is Garner's way of suggesting the dimunition of modern life: in the past, violent death might appear at any moment; now, living in different towns is a terrible imposition. Or, conversely, perhaps the "inconvenient" separations and alienations of modern life are as deadly as the wars and outrages of the past.
When we jump from Tom and Jan to Roman Britain, we are thrust without preparation into the middle of action in progress and Garner provides the sparest of narrative commentary to help us : "The hard terror was in him. He saw the birches carved, bent to shapes that were not trees but men, animals, and the hardness and the terror were blue and silver on the edge of vision. He opened his cloak, and Logan saw him strike at the guard with something smooth held between his hands."
There are more questions than answers here: who is he? who is Logan? who is the guard? is vision "seeing" or "having a vision"? As the episode continues we begin to get a sense for what is happening, but almost everything is conveyed indirectly. The characters have modern-sounding names -- Logan, Macey, Magoo, Face -- and use terms like "dead guys," "goofball" and "ballocks." But they also talk about "the Cats," "the Ninth" and "the Mothers"; sanctuary, consecration; and they find human heads set up as offerings around a spring. Even Owl Service, near its climactic conclusion, featured a conversation in which the overarching theme of the novel -- the re-enactment of the myth -- is explained to some extent by an adult character to one of the teenagers. Here there is nothing of the sort, only in the final pages, a weird dialogue in which Tom seems to be feeling, or seeing, or even being, 17th-century Thomas and 2nd-century Macey, but as to what it all "means," Garner is no more forthcoming than a brushstroke.
At that point, librarians, teachers and children's books reviewers all over the U.K. must have thought that Garner was utterly gone into an uncompromising and very finely wrought vision of what literature ought to be. But his next move can hardly have been more unexpected: he published, from 1976 to 1978, the four parts of The Stone Book Quartet, each individually issued in a small book with etchingsby Michael Foreman, ranging in length from about 6000 to 10,000 words. The reliance on conversation to carry the greatest part of the tale was gone, replaced by an almost generous helping of narrative, but narrative no less impeccably fashioned.
A bottle of cold tea; bread and a half onion. That was Father's baggin. Mary emptied her apron of stones from the field and wrapped the baggin in a cloth.
So begins the first part, The Stone Book. Most of us, I trust, have no prior knowledge of what a baggin is, but here at least it clearly consists of something like a sack lunch.
The hottest part of the day was on. Mother lay in bed under the rafters and the thatch, where the sun could send only blue light. She had picked stones in the field until she was too tired and had to rest.
The scene begins forming itself. One begins to surmise the English setting, its rural nature, its position in the past, but what Garner gives us are specific details -- mundane, delivered in non-heroic and "flat" language, but with journalistic care.
Old William was weaving in the end room. He had to weave enough cuts of silk for two markets, and his shuttle and loom rattled all the time, in the day and the night.
Ah! far enough back that a man might still make a living on his own loom, at home.
He wasn't old, but he was called Old William because he was deaf and hadn't married. He was Father's brother.
These aren't necessarily essential sentences, but they do serve swiftly to add flavor and set the tone. When Mary goes into the room, she doesn't speak -- she "move(s) her lips to shape" her question, "Do you want any baggin?" Old William's answer, "A wet of a bottle of tea," isn't spoken either. "The loom was too loud. Mary and Old William could talk when everybody else was making a noise."
How much freight that sentence carries! How much knowledge the uncle and niece have of each other, how much affection they bear, how warm and full the family (and village?) life must be.
As the story develops we follow Mary into two very important scenes with her father, a stonemason: one atop the church steeple which he is finishing off, the other into one of the local mines where Mary is given her experience of something the men in her family have, until now, passed down from father to son. She goes, following her father's directions since he is now too large to make the journey, from the mine into an adjoining cavern, deep in through constrictive passages, to where ancient cave paintings are hidden by the difficulty of reaching them. After this, he makes her her stone book -- the only book illiterate Mary can read -- containing a fossilized frond, which he decorates to resemble a prayer book. But already he has planted within her his questions, the questions of geology -- how to reconcile fossilized life and wave patterns frozen in stone far under the earth, far from the sea, with the parson's teachings about a Noachian deluge and an earth only several thousand years old.
In Granny Reardun, we meet Joseph, Mary's son, on the last day of his schooling, when he must confront his grandfather with the fact that he doesn't want to follow him into stonemasonry but would rather apprentice himself to the smith. Mary is almost absent from Granny Reardun, though she lives nearby raising Joseph's infant brother Charlie, and Joseph -- the "granny-reared one" -- lives with his grandparents, making Mary's father central to both of these parts of the quartet. But it is Joseph himself who becomes the central character of the series. Some of the most charming pages of the entire series come in Granny Reardun, as Joseph works with his grandfather and a neighbor to build a wall alongside the road. While they work, the old men -- clearly not teetotalers -- sing temperance hymns about "Hydra monster rum", accompanied part of the time by Joseph's playing of the cornet. Pointedly, some of the stones for the wall come from the dismantling of a nearby house. If Garner's political sensibilities were not openly enough displayed in Robert's anti-clericalism in The Stone Book, the issue is addressed again here, in the quiet but resigned outrage of the local populace that the Allman family is put out of its home and the house disassembled so that the parson's wife can have the garden wall she wants.
The interplay of the local community is most clearly seen in The Aimer Gate, in which Joseph's son Robert, his brother Charlie -- a soldier on leave -- and their neighbor Faddock Allman, who lost his legs in the Boer War, work togetherwith others in the harvesting of two cornfields too slanted to be done by machine. One of Robert's jobs, which he clearly relishes, is ferrying Faddock to and fro in Wicked Winnie, his wagon, and bringing rocks from the fields to Faddock to break up for road surfacing. Some of the rocks Robert uncovers are the remains of the foundation of the Allman house the parson had destroyed. Garner's ability to write splendid descriptive and narrative prose is unquestioned. He relates part of the harvesting so--
It was a slow swing, scythes and men like a big clock, back and to, back and to, against the hill they walked. They walked and swung, hips forward letting the weighting cut. It was as if they were walking in a yellow water before them. Each blade came up in time with each blade, at Ozzie's march, for if they ever got out of time the blades would cut flesh and bone.
Behind each man the corn swarf lay like silk in the light of poppies. And the women gathered the swarf by armfuls, spun bants of straw and tied in armfuls into sheaves, stacked sheaves into kivvers. Six sheaves stood to a kivver, and the kivvers must stand till the church bells had rung over them three times. Three weeks to harvest: but first was the getting.
Joseph is a somewhat severe figure in Aimer Gate, weighed down -- as Charlie suggests -- by using all his smithing skills simply to make horseshoes for the "war effort" -- World War I -- but his intellectual curiosity and something of the personality differences between him and his son are both revealed in an episode in the church tower, as Joseph performs his weekly winding and setting of the clock and tries to explain the clock's windings to the not entirely interested Robert. (And yet another indication of the tightness and care with which this entire series is written is given here, in the balancing off of the scything, "like a big clock," and the winding and adjusting of the actual clock in the tower, a tower which, of course, Joseph's grandfather and Robert's namesake built.) Uncle Charlie, equally severe in his attentions to his dress and the maintenance of his rifle, is otherwise looser and more carefree, given to calling Robert "Dick-Richard" and Faddock "Starie Chelevek."
In Tom Fobble's Day, which ends the quartet, World War II is raging, but Joseph's grandson William and his school friends see it primarily as a source of collectibles -- shrapnel and undetonated incendiaries from the air raids. As Mary was barely a shadow in Granny Reardun, so in Tom Fobble's Day Robert's place is taken by Joseph, now an old man, occasionally sharp-tongued but gentle at heart. Wicked Winnie is echoed in William's snow sledge, first a ramshackle one the boy has made for himself, then a sturdy and perfectly-balanced vehicle fashioned by Joseph on his last day of smithing. The sledding field is the same one Uncle Charlie and the other men once harvested, the same one the boy Joseph saw the Allmans uprooted from. Another link to the past is the pipe William finds in a clod of dirt amongst the potatoes: Joseph's grandfather the stonemason had buried it in the yard in The Stone Book, after it fell from his mouth and didn't break.
The title refers to a custom by which children can "Tom Fobble" or take another child's marbles on Tom Fobble's Day, which follows Easter. Here, yet another Allman, Stewart, Tom Fobbles Williams' sledge and, in riding it, shatters it. Stewart has misused the custom -- for the only Easter which has come is last year's, and a sledge is not after all a marble -- but his misuse provides an analogical setting for William's greater loss, with which the book ends, the death of his grandfather. Joseph has just retired, still apparently a strong man, and should have had years of joy ahead of him -- but Death, as poor a sport as Stewart, has Tom Fobbled him. Again, Garner does not draw this comparison himself -- he leaves it for the reader to make the connection, which is centered on the making of the replacement sledge by which he ceases his career as a smith.
Garner's work in The Stone Book Quartet is, no less than so much of Hardy's fiction, a work of loving preservation: a memorial to lifestyles gone and to the resigned labor of the "salt of the earth". Like Hardy, Garner is not concerned to burnish the truth or to polish over the flaws, the humanity, of his characters, but rather to present them as they were. He shares with Hardy as well an affection for the dialectical and regional words which modern cultures are losing by the fistfuls. Even the rather more traditional approach to narration and character which Garner employs in the quartet reflects, again like Hardy, a concern for that which carries on, for the continuity from generation to generation, especially within a locale with long historical roots. And when The Stone Book Quartet is yoked to Red Shift, with only a few years between their publication, it becomes clear that Garner's talent is not simply enormous but also enormously broad.
Since The Stone Book Quartet Garner has published, along with many retellings of folktales, only one additional novel, Strandloper (1996), his first work of fiction avowedly for adults (though everything from The Owl Service forward is as much for adults as for children). Strandloper occupies a territory most similar to The Owl Service: it is much leaner than the quartet but not quite as unyielding as Red Shift. I have discussed it in more depth in the same column mentioned above and will add here only that it is a masterpiece of its type, taking Modernism forward -- as do The Owl Service and Red Shift -- from journalistic to cinematic modes of compositional thought. I do not hesitate to close by saying that, among living novelists, Garner may very well be without peer.
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While reading and rereading Garner prior to writing this essay, I also read the material on Garner contained in Contemporary Authors, the Dictionary of Literary Biography and Supernatural Fiction Writers, ideas or information from which may have influenced my thinking.
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