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

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Reading Garner is, for some people, like a treasure hunt. They eagerly chase the breadcrumb-trail of names and places and historical events. I’ve done it myself in the past—and, to be honest, I’m fighting hard to resist doing it now—and in a way it’s not surprising that people do. It’s very much a mark of Garner’s work that it is so deeply embedded in the landscape and history of Cheshire (and Garner has stated more than once that he prefers the company of historians and archaeologists to that of literary people). In fact I would go so far as to say it is one of the most complex, multi-layered books I have come across. The characters are well drawn – Meg, the too-good-to-be-true therapist and Bert, the salt of the earth taxi driver, linger in the memory long after the book is done. The Watcher, who provides the novels alternate point of view, gazing out from the caves of prehistory, gives us an affecting and powerful look at a mind ten thousand years away, and a way of looking at the world that is not ours, or Colin's. As the Watcher story intersects with Colin's story, the Weirdstone novels also conclude (although they conclude in negative space, as if we are seeing the after effects of events in a book unwritten) and Colin's story concludes with them. Indeed, having noted that Thin Amren has become untethered, one might begin to think that much of the novel itself is untethered. Bits of it simply do not fit together. Joe’s house is a puzzle. Apart from Joe, no one is there. He does not mention his parents—perhaps they are both out at work—and no one seems to be looking after him. I actually found this less surprising than some people seem to have done; if we remember Lowdon’s reference to the book feeling curiously dated, in Garner’s day it wouldn’t have that uncommon to leave convalescent children unattended while their mother maybe went next door to the neighbour or went to the local shops. But when Joe attends his eye test he seems to be there on his own, which is more unusual. At the same time I was oddly reminded of Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams (1958), in which a convalescent girl draws a house which she can enter when she’s asleep. The mood of that book is not dissimilar. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. W.R.J. Barron. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974. Print.

But one can’t help wondering how long it will be before Joe’s youthful vigour is ground down by the demands of Treacle Walker’s job, and he takes to plodding along as Treacle Walker seems to have done. I can’t help feeling that here, at the end, rationality still trumps instinct, and the old wild magic of intuition is rejected in favour of the more reliable but less interesting magic of Newtonian science. Even quantum mechanics cannot save Joe from the literally quotidian routine of the day. This seems an oddly downbeat ending, yet it is entirely characteristic of Garner’s work, because this is what happens every time. Garner may valorise the old magic but inevitably he, or his characters, rejects it, as though there is no permanent place for it in the world, because it is too unpredictable. Not even death, or a flirtation with quantum mechanics, offers respite. 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.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? Well, for what it's worth, I've read Boneland four times now, and shall read it again soon, not because it was hard work (which it wasn't) but because I wanted to. Each reading is like a flower opening to reveal more petals. Alan Garner has always feared unexpectedly dying before he finishes the book he’s working on. It means that this most beloved of writers – whose works feel chiselled from the Cheshire landscape of his home, and whose devoted fans range from Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman to Margaret Atwood – keeps joking that he’s written his last book.

All of which is a perfectly workable reading of this novel, except for one thing: there is the vagueness engendered by a mind scattered by the transition from life to death, and there is also just plain untidy writing. As I have noted several times, a number of commentators have justified the narrative bric-a-brac of Treacle Walker as representing the summation of a long and storied career. Why wouldn’t the author revisit old themes? Why not, indeed? Some have suggested that Garner is having fun with what has gone before. And that is also a possibility.Meg Massey. The name Megan means 'pearl'. Pearl was a Middle-English poem written by a person that some claim was also the Gawain And The Gren Knight poet. The most commonly suggested candidate for authorship is John Massey of Cotton, Cheshire note Now Combermere, Nantwich: quite a way to the west of Alderley Edge. A pearl is a gemstone nurtured in deep water which has lunar associations.

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