A convalescent young boy is visited by a mythical wanderer in a deeply evocative exploration of storytelling and time
No writer’s body of work is more densely connected yet sparely wrought than Alan Garner’s – connected not just to himself and the land, through stories of a long-rooted Cheshire family who “knew their place”, but to myth and folklore, flowing through the children’s fantasies that made his name. In the 1970s, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet were boundary markers between his children’s and adult books (though Garner wouldn’t recognise a distinction). Over the following decades he honed his clipped, enigmatic style, and, with the exception of Strandloper, a foray into Indigenous Australian dreamtime, stayed in the environs of his beloved Alderley Edge, digging and deepening. In 2012, half a century after the first two volumes, Boneland was an unexpected conclusion to his Weirdstone trilogy; the source material transfigured into an adult novel about loss, pain, knowledge and madness that reached not only across the chasm of a human lifetime, but back millennia into the stone age. Garner is now 87; in 2018, a fragmentary memoir, Where Shall We Run to?, conjured his early years with an extraordinary immediacy, as though stepping again into the river of childhood.
Few people expected another novel – and yet, like all his books, Treacle Walker feels as inevitable as it does surprising. Garner’s work has always been hard to classify, here more than ever: this tiny fable, hewn from elements of children’s story, myth, alchemical texts, old rhymes and cartoons, has an implacable directness, as though still channelling the childlike viewpoint of his memoir.
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