(no subject)

[skygiants]

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!

Comments

[luzula]

*snorts at the quotes about Tolkien and Lewis*

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

[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.)

[davidgillon]

This is timely as I was just reading the Guardian's interview with Garner this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/dec/14/we-shared-a-quick-sense-of-humor-novelist-alan-garner-on-alan-turing-and-experiencing-time-slips-in-the-pennines

[conuly]

Well... okay, but there is something to be said for a deeply critical analysis of Dawn Treader, starting with the very first line. Like, imagine being named Eustace or Clarence and reading that page.

[frith_in_thorns]

"Garner seems to have been an absolute misanthrope."

He's not dead! He's still alive and I belive just turned 90.

My absolute favourite book of his is The Moon of Gomrath - possibly because it is by far the most straightforward plot and therefore felt like the best story to me as a child XD But also The Weirdstone of Brisingaman is great and the cave section gave an entire generation of British children claustrophobia.

Have fun with Penelope Lively! Tom's Midnight Garden is of course the classic, but the others are also all very good and usually more weird.

[raven]

What I find really fascinating about that selection is that I read the list of authors you mention and my heart just sank in some kind of decades-old muscle memory. For me, Lively, Garner, DWJ and to some extent Cooper but less so, are the "boring" authors. The ones that were in the classroom library, at school (as opposed to the main or Carnegie library); that you'd read eventually because there was nothing else, but were dull, and there were stacks of them, and they were all about people nothing like you, having a boring time. I do like Green Knowe, but there's another one of the type. Tom's Midnight Garden, another one. Then there's Nina Bawden, Michelle Magorian, to some extent Judith Kerr. Countryside white-posh-kid fantasy and/or WW2. CS Lewis is both. Which is all a bit of a disservice to them now, but it highlights for me at this remove of time how utterly homogenous British children's books were in those decades, and what a sea change has taken place since then. I like that some of these authors have had a new lease of life - like eg. Robert MacFarlane adapting Susan Cooper - but I wouldn't be heartbroken if the countryside posh-kid genre itself died quietly.

[osprey_archer]

My favorite take on "There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it," is the person who said "Strong words from a man named Clive Staples Lewis."

[osprey_archer]

OH GOD THE CAVE SECTION.

I read it just recently and it gave ME claustrophobia.

[conuly]

Well, he called himself Jack.

[osprey_archer]

To be fair, if the book had not actually called out the fact that it was retelling The Mabinogian, I never would have guessed... In fact I'm pretty sure that even though he DID namecheck The Mabinogian, when I read this as a child I never quite put together the fact that this was a retelling. Just thought that Garner was weird about china, I guess! Flowers that look like owls, she wants to be flowers, Roger mocking Gwyn's records (Improve a Prole! God Roger why are you the worst), it all stuck vaguely in my mind for years unattached to a title or author until I started to reread the book and went OH I have read this before. It has all happened before. OH.

I regret to inform you that this may be Garner's least abrupt ending. Actually gets, like, maybe a couple of paragraphs to breathe?

[nextian]

Very funny to me that he responded to “I should make my themes less obvious” by escalating to eg putting the ending in cipher (Red Shift).

[coffeeandink]

Also to creating a Tam Lin retelling so obscure I didn't realize it was one until someone else pointed it out.

[starlady]

The cave section absolutely did not register with me as a child but I reread Weirdstone a few years ago and found it totally terrible, actually!

[rachelmanija]

Thanks for the link. That book sounds marvelous.

[rachelmanija]

That's hilarious.

[rachelmanija]

I don't care for the rest of the book but that section is a work of nightmarish genius. I would rather die than crawl through it.

[rachelmanija]

Those quotes are hilarious.

My favorite Alan Garner book is Red Shift. It's difficult but very worthwhile if you're in the mood.

[sovay]

Thanks for the link. That book sounds marvelous.

You're welcome. It came out the day after my birthday, but only in the UK. ashlyme has shared some of the poems with me, and told me about the Turing chapter.

[cyphomandra]

We had the cave section read to us AT SCHOOL (although I’d read it beforehand) and it is so deeply engraved on my reading memory even reading a bunch of stuff about the Thai cave rescue couldn’t displace it.

[cyphomandra]

I really like Maureen Kincaid Speller’s writings about Alan Garner. Particularly this piece, about her shifting relationship with his work over time and about Garner’s possessiveness over things & places, and how this cuts more ways than one - http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/first-light-a-celebration-of-alan-garner-edited-by-erica-wagner-and-the-beauty-things-by-mark-edmonds-and-alan-garner/

[chestnut_pod]

You know, those are very pretty plates, honestly!

I read The Owl Service and The Grey King in close order this year, and they were an excellent pair. Malevolent Welsh valleys ftw.

[chestnut_pod]

I think I must have been on oof the ones to read The Owl Service in your circle recently! I really admired the spareness of it and how much of it was communicated purely through dialogue -- which in its turn was both extremely spare and artistic and somehow very realistic. Did you think it all turned out well in the end? That was not my impression at all! I can't quite remember the exact sequence of events, but I was definitely left feeling that all was not well.

[kore]

Hating Tolkien and Lewis! Impressive.

[flemmings]

As with Michael Moorcock, I wonder how much of that is based on loathing for Oxbridge culture and/or having attended a red brick university. Not that, in Lewis' case at least, the loathing wasn't justified. Sneering at red brick lecturers is not a good look.

[sovay]

I read The Owl Service and The Grey King in close order this year, and they were an excellent pair. Malevolent Welsh valleys ftw.

I never thought about the exact location of The Owl Service until I re-read it at the end of the summer and got curious about its references to the Bryn and the distance from Aberystwyth and as soon as I looked on the internet, found it well-attested that the originals of the house and the village were Bryn Hall in Llanymawddwy, which was nice to know but not connected to anything else in my head until last week when I was re-reading The Grey King and the mention of Dinas Mawddwy flashed out at me, so I hit up a map and even allowing for Cooper's disclaimer that she has futzed slightly with the geography of her valley, Tal-y-llyn to Llanymawddwy really is just about half an hour by car and that partly because of the way the roads go. This appears to be convergent evolution on the part of Cooper's childhood and Garner's holiday in North Wales and I think it's great.