skygiants | (no subject)

I've never read any Alan Garner, but last month I decided it was finally time to change that -- in part because of a couple people talking about him in and around my circles and in part because I had also picked up a scholarly study for another project, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. (I still have not actually read any Penelope Lively; that's next on my list to fix.)

Anyway, I decided to start with The Owl Service because it was the one I had heard discussed the most as particularly haunting and also relevant to the Welsh fantasy that I read a bunch of in my misspent youth. And indeed! what a haunting book it is, for a story whose basic premise is 'we found some strange dinner plates and everyone got very weird about them!'

So the plot: Alison and Roger are upper-class British stepsiblings vacationing with their parents in an isolated Welsh valley, in a house that once belonged to Alison's dead father; Gwyn, the resentful housekeeper's differently resentful son, is also there. The kids find some strange dinner plates with pictures of flowers, or maybe owls, on them. Everybody gets very weird about it. This all may have something to do with the story of Blodeuwedd, from the Mabinogian, made out of flowers, and turned into an owl, and the two men who loved her, who killed each other about it; this may all have been happening in the valley, over and over again, for generations upon generations. There may not be a way out, any more than there may be a way out for Gwyn, who feels completely trapped by his mother and the valley and desperately longs for a different life, or a way out for Alison and Roger, who can't and don't recognize the smallness of their own scope of vision. The book is shaped by its foundational myth, and also by absolutely virulent classism and colonialism and the boxes that parents put their children in, and these things are all interconnected with each other. Alison's mother never shows up on-page but she haunts the book just as much as Blodeuwedd. At one point Alison gives Gwyn an owl box made out of shells that says "A Present From the Land of Song," and, on the underside, "A Keltikraft Souvenir. Made In England."

It all turns out right in the end, rather abruptly. You sort of don't expect it to and it sort of feels like Garner maybe didn't expect it to either. It's a book I'll be thinking about a long time.

It does not however surprise me either to learn from Four British Fantasists that Garner seems to have been an absolute misanthrope. My two favorite quotes of his:

In my opinion, and in that of better critics, [J.R.R. Tolkien] could not write fiction or verse. To compare his achievement to that of the Gawain poet is an assault on language.

and

Take C.S. Lewis' allegories. They are some of the vilest ever written. They are fascist in style and method. If you want to see what I mean read the first page of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Although I may happen to agree with the opinions, Lewis sneers at people. People who behave in the way he describes I may find objectionable. But he says they are. Also I think his books are very badly written and morally repugnant.

I of course love both Tolkien and Lewis but this is so so funny ... Alan Garner, holding two guns, firing wildly in all directions. I have to respect it. Speak your truth, sir.

While I'm talking about it I did enjoy and do recommend Four British Fantasists, which as I have said above made me immediately want to read a bunch of Penelope Lively and also which I found useful and informative about the kinds of discussions that were being had in and around British children's literature in the 1970s and 80s. I do think the book sort of had the least to say about Diana Wynne Jones in whom I am of course the most interested -- not that it was less interested in her, per se but she was least like the other three, the most iconoclastic, and so I think it was hardest to draw her into the broader discussion.

The things in the book I have found myself thinking about most, both in terms of conversations about DWJ and more broadly, are a.) the conversations about place and land who has a 'right' to it and what kinds of stories you want to tell about it and b.) the conversation about how to navigate the use of an underlying myth when writing for children; do you just retell it? do you use it as a touchstone for yourself without necessarily making it plain? In The Owl Service, Garner eventually just has to dump The Mabinogian in there in the text to make sure we understand that it's a riff, and later apparently felt that this was clumsy and veered further and further away from that. Well, I can't fully disagree, 'the wind blew away all my pages of The Mabinogian' is not subtle, but on the other hand I love meta-narrative and I do think it's fair play for an author to give us the text they're riffing on and then let us see them play the changes. Many ways to do it!

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From:

luzula

*snorts at the quotes about Tolkien and Lewis*

J R R Tolkien could not write fiction! That is certainly an opinion.

From:

skygiants

to each their own tastes!!

From:

sovay

And indeed! what a haunting book it is, for a story whose basic premise is 'we found some strange dinner plates and everyone got very weird about them!'

Alan Garner did in fact find some strange dinner plates and get very weird about them.

Last week was when I finally looked at a map and realized that The Owl Service and The Grey King take place about half an hour's drive from one another. It isn't actually why they constellate in my head, but I think it's amazing.

(I have still not read Garner's latest nonfiction, but I was just reading an interview about it last night.)

From:

rachelmanija

Thanks for the link. That book sounds marvelous.

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