For the 50th anniversary of Alan Garner’s debut novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in 2010, a series of events took place in the author’s native Cheshire: talks, a portrait by Andrew Tift, an exhibition in Chester’s Grosvenor museum. I was invited to walk with Garner over Alderley Edge, the setting for much of his fiction for children and adults. He took me, in the incantation repeated in his latest book, “from Thieves’ Hole, by Seven Firs and Goldenstone, to Stormy Point and Saddlebole”, showing the place where, as local legend relates, you can hear the clink of reins from the sleeping army below. I put my ear to the ground as commanded and – jingle jangle! The magus stood, hands in pockets, a sly yet innocent expression on his face. As my grandfather, born in Wigan, would say, he was “codding on”.
Garner lives in the place where generations of Garners have before him. The “powsels and thrums” of his weaver ancestors were fabric scraps, cutoffs, experiments, intriguing threads: a homely metaphor for this collection of poems, lectures, memoir fragments and essays. Certain notes recur from past work: tales of his grandfather, Joe Garner, who first told him the legend of the sleeping heroes of Alderley Edge and issued the gnomic advice: “If the other feller can do it, let him.” In other words, find the work that you, and only you, can do. We see again how Garner, living by the Jodrell Bank telescope, is both rooted in the land and gazing at the stars: the brief poem Nova just as cosmic as his astounding novel Red Shift. The little contains universes.
This rich collection underlines the homogeneity of his life’s work: how themes and processes jostle against each other again and again – deep history, ancestry, cosmology, archaeology, anthropology, myth and legend. Mind-bending, but all of a piece: how The Stone Book Quartet fits with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen; Australian aboriginal tale Strandloper with the Booker-shortlisted Treacle Walker and Thursbitch (a thrilling essay, The Valley of the Demon, reveals the latter’s inspiration).
Garnerworld might be a narrow plot, but he’s dug it deep, in every sense. In The Carr he records hard graft to tame his land – the hewing of a vicious alder in boggy ground that threatens to swallow him up – in language as precise as it is poetic. Elsewhere, the neolithic hand axe he finds (his house is built on a barrow) sends him looking up to the stars again, at light reaching him from before the stone was shaped.
The Bull on the Tongue is a vital reflection on creativity in which Garner puts forward a counterintuitive but persuasive argument on the constraints of imaginative writing. “The visionary-based mind can’t be as prolific as the observational,” he argues. Conveying the nebulous, the liminal, that which lurks behind the veil of everyday life, entails discretion, and demands that the writer trust that readers can follow wild, intuitive leaps. Old Men’s Trousers and The Making Strange of Things races from Russian interpreters, the difference between creole and pidgin and the peculiarities of the Basque language, to Garner’s magnificent dismissal of academic approaches to his work: “philately may be the harmless affair of consenting philatelists, but it is not the concern of the postman”.
There are touches of humour, too. When a Jungian psychologist, overawed by meeting him at a conference, explains that it is because Garner has “looked into the white-hot crucible of creativity”, he muses that “my family appears to be fireproof”: being an artist doesn’t exempt you from domestic chores.
Advice is practical as well as profound. He explains that he won’t use the same “colourful or powerful word twice in a novel”. The same rule should apply to journalism, but I’m going to reuse such a word nonetheless. Garner is a magus. Read him.
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