Celebrated author of mythical and fantasy stories Alan Garner turns 90 today, a week after the publication of his 28th book, the essay collection Powsels and Thrums. Though best known for his children’s novels, his fiction for adults has brought him acclaim, too, with a Booker prize shortlisting for his 2021 novel Treacle Walker. If you haven’t yet dipped your toe into the glorious world of Garner, Erica Wagner, the editor of First Light: A Celebration of Alan Garner, suggests some good ways in.
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The entry point
There are two great places to start with Garner. Either begin at the beginning, with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Garner’s first novel, published for children in 1960. It is an adventure in which Colin and Susan arrive in the author’s native Cheshire – Alderley Edge, to be precise – and are pulled into the folklore of its landscape, deep below the earth. Stephen Fry has written that it was this book which awoke him to “the inner life of the earth and the inner life of the imagination” when he read it aged 11. Or, to start from a different direction, choose The Stone Book Quartet. Drawn from the Garner family’s own history, these four slender volumes interlock craft, art and myth in the ground of the Edge.
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If you think his books are ‘for children’
A brief reminder that some of our greatest works (Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) have been published “for children”. Young readers are the best readers. Try the subtlety of Red Shift (1973), its setting moving between three different historical periods and its momentum drawn from the ancient ballad Tam Lin. Or there’s Elidor (1965), much of which is set in urban Manchester. Garner was inspired to write the book when he visited the city’s “slum clearances” with photographer Roger Hill; yes, it’s the story of four children on a magical quest, but it’s also an interrogation of how our very real surroundings have the power to transform us.
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The masterpiece
Treacle Walker, published in 2021 in Garner’s 87th year, finally vaulted him on to the Booker prize shortlist, and deservedly so. It was a relief to see finally Garner granted mainstream success by this slim yet epic tale. Young Joe is a sickly lad (as his creator once was) and wears a patch to correct a lazy eye. Into this life comes Treacle Walker, a rag-and-bone man – and later, Thin Amren, who rises from an iron age bog. Into this mix Garner throws Dandy-style comic-book characters such as “Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit”. Garner’s obsession with time is beautifully realised in a tender story that offers joy to the new reader and Garnerphile alike.
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The one we never thought we’d see
Alan Garner had long indicated he’d never write a memoir, but then Where Shall We Run To? appeared in 2018. Slender – as all this author’s books are – it is a sequence of recollections from his childhood during the second world war. What is so remarkable about these pieces is his ability to stay absolutely present with his young self. There is no retrospective: there is the unimpeded vision of a boy who doesn’t know what’s coming next.
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Don’t be put off by
Boneland. It is one of the longest-awaited sequels ever: published in 2012, it is the third volume in the trilogy which began with The Weirdstone and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). It is also a book “for adults”, while those were books “for children”. Colin is now a grown man, an astrophysicist and a shaman; the book is an interlocking puzzle-box that demands a great deal even for the initiate. “Garner can count on the trust and admiration of many of his readers to see him through it, but my trust and admiration, though great, weren’t always sufficient,” wrote the great Ursula K Le Guin.
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The one that will inspire you to write
Powsels and Thrums is Garner’s second collection of essays (though this wonderful book also includes poetry and fiction, too). The first, The Voice That Thunders (1997) is rightly recognised as a classic of its kind. “This book is made from various attempts to record the excitement that has attended a life,” Garner states in a brief introduction. Many of the essays that follow were delivered as lectures, and they have the clarity of oral literature. There is autobiography here, but also much about Garner’s imaginative process – which is sure to call up the creative spirit in the reader.
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If you only read one, it should be
So hard to choose. But I’m going to go for The Owl Service (1967). Visiting his wife Griselda’s family, Garner encountered a set of plates designed by Christopher Dresser in the 1880s: at each plate’s rim, owls transform into flowers. This was just one of the sparks that led to this extraordinary novel, which draws on the tale of Blodeuwedd in the Mabinogion. But it is very much its own story, as modern as it is ancient, confronting class, the pull of adolescent love, and conjuring an overwhelming spirit of place. In 1968, Garner won the Guardian award and the Carnegie Medal for this novel, the first author to win both awards for the same book. “Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallisation of experience, and, far from being escapist, fantasy is an intensification of reality,” Garner has written – a truth expressed with extraordinary power and precision in The Owl Service.
• Powsels and Thrums by Alan Garner is published by HarperCollins (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
