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

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Lost his twin sister in mysterious circumstances - she went horse-riding by night, and only the horse was found; it is assumed she was thrown in the waters of a lake and drowned; Garner continued creating mythic fantasy out of the matter of Britain, building, reimagining and recreating tales from the Mabinogion and from a hundred other sources, and then he began writing novels intended for adults, stories hewn and chipped from the past. (The past is always with us in Garner. The stones have stories.)

Dark and Troubled Past: Colin. It is progressively revealed throughout the book that before he was thirteen, he was: The book is peppered with references and allusions to people, places, events and conversations in the first two books: often presented in the sort of hazy, distorted, dream-like way in which an adult will recall conversations and people from a childhood around thirty years prior to the "present day". Boneland is such a wonderful, spiritual and soul enhancing book. I could go on, but I'd better not. 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? 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.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: 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. Colin has grown up to be a brilliant, but extremely troubled, astrophysicist. Susan is not there. Colin is autistic, has problems with memory (he remembers everything after the age of 13, nothing before), cannot relate to other humans, is searching the sky for intelligent life, and hunting for his sister in the stars. As the book begins he is being released from a hospital after some kind of breakdown. 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).

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. A. I never "target". I write the story as it comes, for its own sake, no other. Who reads it is beyond my control.And yet I can’t, offhand, think of a review of any of Garner’s work, certainly not his more recent work, that risks anything more than faint puzzlement at the bits the critic doesn’t understand, although Penelope Lively did express some irritation over Garner’s use of language in Strandloper (1996) and was unpersuaded by the connections he sought to make between Cheshire and the cultures of indigenous Australians. Nowadays, I too have my reasons for doubt, although the words I am currently toying with are “cultural appropriation.” There is probably a case to be made at some point too for reading Garner’s work through Bakhtin’s theories, if someone hasn’t already, but that’s a job for another day. Okay, this is it, the book that I have been waiting thirty years for. After all this time I finally get to find out what happened to Colin and Susan, Cadellin Silverbrow, Fenodyree the dwarf and the evil Morrigan. At last, Alan Garner has given in to pleas made by legions of fans and written the final part of the Alderley trilogy… or has he? The new novel has its roots in a conversation Garner had in 2012 with his friend Bob Cywinski, a particle physicist. Cywinski had been quizzing Garner about where he got his ideas. “He’s dealing with questions arising from the observed universe, and I could not get across to him that I didn’t know where I got the ideas from, that they sort of emerged, and that bothered him.”

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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.McDonagh’s summary of the novel is briskly efficient—“ Treacle Walker is a rag-and-bone man who isn’t what he seems—a man who emerges occasionally from a marsh—and an unlovely boy called Joe, who’s obsessed with comics and sees things he shouldn’t.” None of this is actually untrue but neither does it really sum up the novel. It’s not even a review as such: Melanie McDonagh had fifty-odd words at her disposal to write a plot synopsis and offer a snap judgement, and she did just that. One cannot expect a considered opinion in those circumstances, and frankly, this novel is not going to be summarised in fifty words (though there were numerous people in private forums who seemed to think McDonagh ought to have done better—in fact, I think she understood her task very well and did her best with an impossible book). But Colin will have to remember what happened when he was twelve, if he wants to find his sister. And the Watcher will have to find the Woman. Otherwise the skies will fall, and there will be only winter, wanderers and moon… Meaningful Name: Colin is the modern version of the Irish hero's name Cú Chulainn. He invokes the Grey Wolf as a nature spirit. note or else the Watcher invokes Colin to come to him as the Grey Wolf... I’ve been reading Alan Garner’s work for more than forty years, and sporadically venturing an opinion in print (even here on Strange Horizons). He is one of “my” writers. Unsurprisingly, then, I read Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker almost the moment it was published, and almost my first response was “how on earth am I going to write about this?”—because I knew I would have to. Here we are, at what might reasonably be considered to be the twilight of Garner’s career; something ought to be said. The man is eighty-seven, after all, and to say I was surprised there was another novel to be had after the, in parts, magisterial Boneland (2012) is to wildly understate my reaction when it was first announced. Mind you, I was surprised when Where Shall We Run To? appeared in 2018—I had not been expecting an actual memoir of Garner’s childhood. Was that story not already familiar to anyone who had paid the slightest attention to his career over the years? As it turned out, there were more stories there, about Garner’s childhood companions, and a few later stories to boot. Lots of people seemed to like Where Shall We Run To?, but I wasn’t sure. What they saw as the considerable achievement of Garner putting himself into a child’s mind and telling the story from there, I personally found a little arch. There was a sense, though, that Garner was now tying off the ends. Indeed, I rather thought he had actually tied them off—but then came Treacle Walker. Drawing on local myth and legend, Garner continued the story of Colin and Susan in The Moon of Gomrath, in which the siblings light a fire on Alderley Edge and summon the Wild Hunt. The author has now completed the trilogy with Boneland, out from Fourth Estate in August, which sees an adult Colin searching for his lost sister.

Though Joe at first considers him “daft as a brush”, and smelly to boot, Treacle Walker – who comes to the threshold again and again, in fairytale fashion, waiting to be invited in – is a mythic figure, whose wanderings help to keep the world turning. (As ever with Garner, the mythic and universal are birthed from the specific and local: a friend of his, writing in the 2016 festschrift First Light, remembers their discussion of one Walker Treacle, “the healer tramp from Holywell Green, who could cure anything but jealousy”.) And Joe’s lazy eye, for which he must wear a patch, is a signifier of “the glamourie”. When his good eye is uncovered, he can see past surface reality and speak to the mummified iron age man Thin Amren, who sits up out of the bog near Joe’s house telling him to: “Move the dish clout and shut your glims.” Ursula K Le Guin has just reviewed the book for the Guardian, and like just about everything she writes, her review is compulsory reading. She points out why the book is difficult: "It treads on risky ground. Readers looking for more than mere adventure expect characters whose behaviour and reactions are humanly comprehensible.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ed. W.R.J. Barron. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974. Print.