Boneland: From the author of the 2022 Booker Shortlisted Treacle Walker

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The idea had to “brew nebulously” for some time, derailed after Garner’s work on an oral history project with Manchester University prompted the fragmentary childhood memoir Where Shall We Run To?, elements from which appear in Treacle Walker. Garner’s contribution to the oral work was his memory of his grandfather’s account of the legend of Alderley Edge, in which a farmer sells his white mare to an old man who turns out to be a wizard and leads him to a sleeping army of knights inside the hill – the basis for Weirdstone. “It was his truth, a part of him, which he passed on,” writes Garner. “Here is how he told it. And it is the manner of the telling that is important. The next day, they were walking together across Castle Hill, an iron age hill fort in Huddersfield. “Just inconsequentially, Bob told me about a historical character, a local tramp called Walter Helliwell, known as Treacle Walker. He was a healer, claiming to be able to cure all things except jealousy. And I looked at Bob and said, ‘You remember last night? Well, just make a note that on the afternoon of Sunday 15 July 2012, you’ve given me an idea, and you’ve given me a book.” Meanwhile, in the Future…: Colin and the Watcher are playing out the same issues of loss and trauma, in much the same geological place but separated by up to half a million years in time. Both are struggling to work out what is happening to them according to their conditioning and cultural preconceptions. Garner even hints that Recursion is happening and they are somehow directly linked. Matryoshka Objects in each other's minds linked by Recursion? That said, Meg clearly had some verifiable objective reality, as Colin's doctor knew her. Bert was, I think, just a bloke who she had pressed into her service while she needed him -- Colin meets him in his everyday life at the end.

Our Orcs Are Different: The svart-alfar, called into being for the novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. The name literally means dark Elves, but the underground creatures have far more in common with Orcs or Goblins. In the sucessor novel The Moon of Gomrath, the place of evil footsoldier is taken by the bodachs from far Albany: these are a more lizard-like sort of goblin, still humanoid and intelligent enough to forge metal and organise as war-bands. The concluding novel in the trilogy, Boneland, pays Homage to a well-founded theory that as newer sub-species of the human race arose, the predecessor races they co-existed with, and then suceeded over, inevitably became the goblins, dwarves and Elves of our legend. The Watcher is clearly of a different sub-species to the Homo Sapiens/Cro-Magnons who rescue him. Did the Cro-Magnons consider the Watcher and others of his kin to be cavern-dwelling dwarfs and goblins? Indeed, are the "svart-alfar" dawn humans who went deep underground, and whose evolution took a different direction? Again, nothing in Lowdon’s summary is actually wrong, per se, but neither does she seem to me to actually engage with the novel. Or, rather, I don’t think she particularly wants to engage with the novel. Ironically, however—or possibly unintentionally—she does hit on something significant when she describes the novel as “feeling curiously outdated,” but there is no chance for her to follow up on this. I’ll be doing that for her later. Garner, Alan. ‘Achilles in Altjira’. The Voice That Thunders: Essays and Lectures. London: The Harvill Press, 1997. 39-58. Print. Personally, as a huge fan for more than 30 years, I wanted a satisfying end to the trilogy, but more importantly, I wanted a book that I could share and enjoy with my 10 year old daughter, along with the first two Alderley Tales. Meg - her name invokes Arthurian witch Morgana leFay. Who trapped the wizard, Merlin, into eternal imprisonment in a cavern under the earth.EAlan Garner would not have known me when we were boys at Manchester Grammar School, but I knew him; he was the kind of 6 th Former all of us in the Lower School knew – National 100 yards Champion, lean as a whippet, always an eager smile. A flamboyant Osric in Hamlet who, I think, doubled up as the Ghost. On the night I went, Claudius accidentally dropped a ring, which clattered slowly across the stage. As I see him now, Osric swooped, bowed and returned the ring with a flourish and a couple of instant iambic pentameters; or if he didn’t, he fooled me and everyone else in the audience. Boneland is also an echo of " The Waste Land" of T. S. Eliot, a place of broken dreams and dissillusionment. I first read the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight after I had begun to write, and (this is important) I read it without coercion. The text was a discovery, and I wondered why there were so many footnotes. I didn’t need many of them, nor did my father (who had left school at fifteen), if I read certain pieces to him in our shared modern Cheshire dialect. Here was an English treasure, yet, because of my natural use of its language, I’d had my mouth washed out with carbolic soap by a well-meaning teacher when I was five years old. I had been guilty of the sin of ‘talking broad’ (Garner, 2006 11).

Yet this universal connection is felt as deeply local. This place is the sacred place. More mythmaker than fantasist, Garner names his chosen, actual landscape minutely, feature by feature, stone by stone, relishing the old place-names and the grand vocabulary of geology, weaving the words into a litany of confirmation, the endless repetition that keeps the end from coming, the rhythmic dance on the world's edge that maintains the world. Alderley Edge is the scene of a timeless ritual that must be re-enacted over and over by ignorant and ephemeral mortals. Personal tragedy and redemption are subsumed in the cosmic vision.Over 50 years ago Alan Garner wrote The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, two books of magic and myth, featuring the children Colin and Susan. They encounter a wizard who guards sleepers beneath the hills – Arthur and his knights, perhaps – sleepers who will wake to save us in our time of greatest need. The children encounter elves and dwarfs, goblins and killer cats, battle the evil shape-shifting Morrigan, and make their way through a patchwork of mythic events and battles, culminating, at the end of The Moon of Gomrath, with a Herne-like Hunter and his men riding their horses to meet the nine sisters of the Pleiades, leaving Susan, who needed to be with them, behind, wanting to go the stars, and Colin only to watch. A. I don't plan. Images appear, unbidden, which suggest areas of research. The research develops its own pattern, and when there's no more research to be done I "soak and wait", as Arthur Koestler expressed it. Then, subjectively, the story starts of its own accord, and I write as it unfolds. But it's probably complete in my unconscious, as a result of the soaking and the waiting, before I can be aware of what's happening. This could explain why I get the last sentence or paragraph of the book before I know what the story is. The history of creativity is littered with examples of the artist, or scientist, or mathematician "seeing" the answer and then having to spend years in discovering the question. This is neither a children’s book, nor a traditional continuation of the tale he left hanging at the end of The Moon of Gomrath. Instead, this is a convoluted chronicle of shamanistic magic, coupled with the rambling exploration of psychosis suffered by Professor Colin Whisterfield (Colin from the original books). Colin is now a world renowned astrophysicist, who struggles to remember what happened prior to his thirteenth birthday, leading to a number of sessions with mysterious psychiatrist, Meg (who may or may not be the Morrigan). There are well-drawn characters in those books, but they are not Colin or Susan. And the landscape of Alderley Edge is the strongest character.) The child twins Colin and Susan were semi-characterless actors in a fantasy tale. Colin is both severely disturbed radio-astronomer and the man chosen from his generation to "look after the Edge" – and how to reconcile these roles in a character in a modern novel? How are the pyschic sufferings of a man so anachronistically fated and so emotionally crippled to be made comprehensible?"

A. In principle, I have no objection. But whereas an e-book is simply the text and nothing more, to hold a physical book, the product of many skills, is a complex experience, involving touch and smell and memory. I value the fact that there are books in my library that have passed through other hands, been read by other eyes, spanning more than 400 years; and they still work. I can't imagine a reader being able to form a personal relationship with an e-book. Carl Jung: Meg explores Colin's case by playing with Jungian concepts: she speculates that a wizard, goblins, dwarfs and elven nature-spirits dwelling beneath the earth are archetypes straight out of the collective unconsciousness. Witches represent the dark destroying shadow-side and Susan is an aspect of Colin himself, his Eternal Feminine side, his Anima. Colin therefore has to decipher the message and find out what insights into his personality that they are trying to communicate to him.Precocious 12 yr old (there were many): Mr Garner, wouldn’t you say that you are very much influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien? Writing a continuation of Colin and Susan’s story fifty years on, Garner asks: “What happens to children who have been exposed to another dimension and are left to grow up in what we call the real world?” ( Bronze Age Man 2014). Boneland opens with this exchange: Justine Jordan’s review, also in the Guardian, is rather different. It’s a long review, twice as long as Preston’s, and it’s clear that Jordan really does understand Garner’s recent publishing history: she confidently lays out the links between Treacle Walker and other recent publications by and about Garner, including Where Shall We Run To? and the 2016 Festschrift, First Light, in which the real Treacle Walker is first mentioned. More than that, she recognises how Treacle Walker resonates with so many of Garner’s other novels, and links it in particular to Elidor (1965), that problematic third novel. It’s one of those layered texts which test your ways of reading. Colin’s encounters with Meg, or with colleagues at Jodrell Bank, invite a headlong ride; you can hardly keep up with the pace. The ‘Watcher’ strand is so tightly interwoven, so surprising in its choice of individual words, so allusive to previous passages, that it needs a kind of reflective, circular reading and rereading demanded by the images and echoes of a poem or a novel such as Heart of Darkness.