Selective Luddism

Alan Garner​ ’s new book is a patchwork of memoirs and essays, taking its title from the offcuts of tapestry that weavers (like some of his forebears) would take home with them. His heyday has been a long one. Garner’s first book for children, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, has a place on the shelves and in the memories of generations of readers, while his tiny, exquisite novel Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. It has also been a very rooted life, not just in modern terms, but by the standards of any century. He was brought up in Alderley Edge in Cheshire and before he was a published writer bought part of a medieval hall house in Blackden, six miles away, with a £510 loan from the Order of Odd Fellows, buying the rest later for £150. When his growing family needed more space, and television versions of his books provided the means, he bought a timber-framed Tudor house (due to be demolished) for a pound, disassembled it and moved it eighteen miles to sit next to the hall. The cover of Powsels and Thrums shows an image by Garner’s wife, Griselda, of the two buildings, with one of Jodrell Bank’s telescopes in the next field.

Almost all of Garner’s books are set partly or wholly in this area. He has carried out excavations, unofficial but conscientious, on his own property – this part of Cheshire is the site of the oldest metal mining in England, with workings dating back to the early Bronze Age – and has published collections of folk tales. He maintains that there are no original stories; folk tales too are excavations, shafts going down into the past. He prefaces The Weirdstone of Brisingamen with ‘The Legend of Alderley’. A hundred and forty knights sleep under the hill, ready to wake when England is in mortal danger, all but one with a milk-white mare sleeping by his side. Then a local farmer taking his fine white mare to market meets a wizard … There’s a pleasing Cheshire usage that Garner uses throughout his books, plunder to mean ‘ponder’, and as far as he’s concerned this is a story that can never be fully plundered. In Powsels and Thrums he devotes a rather exhausting essay to its origin and meaning. He’s even convinced he knows the exact location of the iron gates that lead to the cave where the knights sleep.

At the start of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Colin and Susan are sent to Alderley Edge to stay with Gowther Mossock (himself a farmer) and his wife, Bess, their mother’s old nurse. Almost immediately they encounter supernatural beings, a shapeshifting witch and a wizard – the ‘crystal, shaped like a raindrop’ on Susan’s bracelet is a magical object sought after by the forces of good and evil in their struggle for dominion. If originality was a requirement, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen would be marked down for its strong whiff of Tolkien. The world-controlling jewellery goes round a wrist rather than a finger, and the weirdstone, known to the wizard, Cadellin, as Firefrost, exerts none of the Ring’s subtle power of addiction and spiritual corruption on its wearer. But Cadellin is obviously a Cheshire Gandalf. Tolkien spread his fantasy beings across vast stretches of Middle Earth, while Garner billets his pantheon (dwarves, trolls, elves, stromkarls) on a small corner of a county: Alderley is less than ten miles from Macclesfield and not much more from Manchester. The vengeful arrival of Nastrond, a variation on Sauron, is threatened but never materialises.

The children’s ages aren’t specified, though they’re old enough to be plied with cider by the Mossocks. Across his career Garner has shown an aversion to setting the scene, but in this case it may be a shrewd move. Young readers can impose their own preference, or let the protagonists be the same age without the technicality of twinhood. It’s revealed late in the book that Colin is the taller by an inch, which could mean anything. There’s the merest whisper of rivalry between them at one point, when Colin reflects that his sister was facing great danger ‘with a composure that claimed his respect even while it nettled his pride’.

The children are in Cheshire because their parents are abroad for six months. In the sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), the idea that Colin and Susan have a family elsewhere disappears. In the first book they send a postcard to their parents, but in this one they might have themselves been conjured into existence by a wizard. The critique of modernity is harsh in both books. ‘Smoke-sickness’ has turned elves into an endangered species, surviving in numbers only far in the north. Newly built houses have no soul (‘a broken rash of houses … like a ring of pink scum’). Some modern amenities (chip shops) earn grudging approval, most do not. Sightseers leave litter. ‘You found the world easier to master by hands alone,’ Cadellin preaches, ‘things became more than thoughts with you and you called it an Age of Reason.’ Those few acres of Cheshire are populated by any number of new creatures, not just palugs (a demonic breed of wildcat) but pointy-eared hominids covered with flat locks of hair, like scales. ‘“So it is bodaghs we have now!” said a disgusted voice. “Is there no end to the garbage of Bannawg?”’

There’s an underlying shift in the narrative towards Susan as the heroine, though before she can assume this role she must be woken from a spellbound sleep by Colin. This is the strongest episode in the book, or at least the one that thrilled me most on first reading. He must follow the old straight track revealed by the moon to pick the healing flower called the Mothar. As an adult I can understand that Garner had been reading Alfred Watkins’s 1925 book on the significance of ley lines (he credits it), and that the cinematic vividness of the scene depends on Colin’s making a last desperate lunge to grasp the flower before the track disappears. Only when he sees light shining up from the flower under his hand does he realise that he has succeeded. But I’d forgotten the purpose of his quest – the saving of his sister – since it isn’t persuasively embedded in a human relationship. The sibling bond has no substance.

The writing of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was hard going. Powsels and Thrums reproduces the opening sentence of a draft in which Colin and Susan are identified as ‘ten-year-old twins’, before the decision was taken to leave their status undefined. Ten certainly seems too young – it made sense, even before the Young Adult category came into being, for those embarking on a life-changing adventure to be on some sort of cusp themselves. By the time Alan Garner was writing a climactic passage in The Moon of Gomrath, conceived as the middle book of a trilogy, he had reached the limits of his patience with the characters (‘I had moved on. They had not’). He says that his hand, independent of his will, wrote a sabotaged ending in which the witch-crow known as the Morrigan ‘went up to the room where Colin was and wrung the little bugger’s neck’. After this fantasy desecration he was able to finish the book, but not to write another instalment.

This seems hard on Colin and Susan. A more inoffensive pair of characters would be hard to imagine, demanding no maintenance and receiving none – and if you don’t water your houseplants you have to accept their failure to thrive. If the books don’t measure up when reread after half a century, well, they’re not supposed to. Children’s books revisited in later life may disappoint, but they are immune to the embarrassment associated with outgrown toys. Even if their colours have faded, they expanded the world in a way toys can’t match. What holds good is the atmosphere, in sentences like ‘The light of the elves’ swords in the damp air made a nimbus which was reflected coldly in the leather of the rhododendron leaves.’ And it’s wonderful that the dwarf Fenodyree should open the rocks before the iron gates to Fundindelve not by cleaving them with sword or staff but by running his hand down the rough stone, ‘like a man stroking the flanks of a favourite horse’. The magic of names, both of entities and places, plays a major part: Fenodyree, Gaberlunzie, Atlendor, the morthbrood. The standard is high (according to Garner, the names are all borrowed or modified from folklore), although there are lapses: Argatron sounds like a robot, Mathramil a medication. Arthog and Slinkveal were all too clearly going to make their evil mother proud.

I remember being disappointed by Elidor (1965), which at least shows that I registered its great difference from the two earlier books. Not having read C.S. Lewis, I didn’t realise that he, rather than Tolkien, was now providing Garner with a template. The similarities aren’t disguised: four siblings find a portal to an imperilled magical kingdom, whose balance they must restore. The differences, which emerge only slowly, are just as striking, and drastically reduce the element of wish-fulfilment. This was presumably what I resisted. For one thing, the children’s single visit to Elidor takes up only 30 pages of the book’s 150. There’s an impatience with the basic mechanisms of narrative. In Elidor all four children must undertake a task, but only one succeeds. The attempts by the other three aren’t even described. It turns out that in their role as (exiled) champions of Elidor they must wield magical implements known as the Treasures, but these are issued with little ceremony. C.S. Lewis would have taken at least thirty pages to unite the children with the Treasures; Tolkien might have taken three hundred. In Elidor there’s a gap of only three pages between the news that the Treasures exist and the children acquiring them. It’s not much of a quest – barely a trip to the toy shop.

The magical beings in Elidor, so numerous in the previous books, are as stringently rationed as sweets in wartime. There’s really only Malebron, a sort of archangel both glorious and unbending (‘You will save this land! You will bring back light to Elidor!’). The naming magic is also in abeyance, with the four castles of the realm – Gorias, Findias, Falias, Murias – reminiscent of Latin verb forms learned by rote. When the children return to their own world, the Treasures become shadows of themselves: a railing instead of a spear, two laths nailed together imitating a sword, dull masonry not a golden stone, a cracked cup replacing an enchanted cauldron. This is a neat reversal of the normal process of children’s play that turns a brick into a racing car. Reassuringly, the Treasures retain their magical heft and presence when handled.

The forces that threaten the children don’t have names or even faces. They work from within, and though this is a familiar idea from 1950s science fiction such as Forbidden Planet or Quatermass and the Pit, it works very well: ‘The fear was in the children: a numbness that sapped the will. And soon they began to hear in the forest the pursuit that they themselves were making.’ Back home, they bury the Treasures in the garden, but the same indefinite forces try to locate the porous barrier between worlds. The birds in the garden avoid certain charged areas, shadows with no depth seek to gain access, static electricity builds up in the house and turns on appliances, even those not plugged in. This featureless menace would be even more effective if the children themselves were not so featureless. Once again their ages aren’t specified, though eventually Roland is revealed as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child himself, hadn’t learned about these cross-currents by observation he could have paid more attention to the Narnia books. Roland, having passed the test in Elidor, is the true believer, but most of the other children’s dialogue could be redistributed without making a difference. At the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the Pevensie children are made kings and queens of Narnia. At the end of Elidor the Watson children don’t even get the chance to pay a second visit to the world they have saved and which they have known only in decay. Such an austere approach to fantasy risks a fatal draining of life blood from the genre, particularly when the book’s depiction of the ordinary world is anaemic. Even so, it was the runner-up for the 1965 Carnegie Medal, which Garner’s next novel, The Owl Service, won two years later.

The title is oblique, referring to a set of dinner plates kept in the attic of a holiday home in Wales. Straying from his usual patch, Garner takes every care to inhabit the new landscape, down to details like the escape route used by local foxes to evade hunters: they climb up waterfalls where the cliffs act as protection and their scent is washed away. The emotional situation is sketched less clearly – readers would have more sense of where they were if the book started with some such sentence as ‘Alison’s mother, Margaret, had married Roger’s father, Clive, so this was a sort of family honeymoon.’ The phrase ‘family honeymoon’ does appear, but later on, at a point when most readers will have got their bearings. The main cast is completed by the housekeeper, Nancy, and her son, Gwyn.

The characters have different degrees of connection to the house and the surrounding countryside. Alison has memories of the many holidays she has spent there, while Gwyn, though this is his first visit, has a strong sense of belonging, partly because of the extensive local lore his mother has passed on. Roger is mainly interested in getting good photographs. Meanwhile a tragic love triangle from the Mabinogion is being played out, projected onto the young visitors. There’s a satisfying electrical analogy: voltage builds up in the valley and must be discharged. It’s a reservoir of psychic force. Gwyn speculates that the three of them are like the wires in a plug, live, neutral and earth, through which the current flows.

In the myth recorded in the Mabinogion, Blodeuwedd is a woman made of flowers by a wizard, then turned into an owl as punishment for betraying her husband. The young people in The Owl Service alternately pick fights and build up one another’s confidence. Gwyn wonders why Alison doesn’t aim higher in her plans for the future; Alison thinks Roger should take his photography more seriously and that Gwyn should take pride in his accent and not train himself out of it with the set of Received Pronunciation records he has saved up to buy. Gwyn’s mother is threatening to make him work at the Co-op if he doesn’t do what she says, so he can’t be less than fifteen, the school-leaving age in 1969, and the other two must be around the same age. In other words, they’re highly likely to be crackling with another sort of disturbance, the electrical storm of adolescence. But though the book’s landscape is embodied, its people are not. (This is literally true of Alison’s mother, Margaret, a petty tyrant who doesn’t appear in a single scene.) Among the three teenagers, class conflict doesn’t just complicate sexual tension but replaces it. The legend stipulates a fatal chemistry – ‘It is only together they are destroying each other’ – but they’re oddly immune to it. They hardly seem suited to be the wires through which the elemental energies flow in what would now be called a mild exercise in folk horror.

There are two exceptions to this, both before the halfway point of the novel. In one scene the encroaching presence amplifies Alison’s rage when Gwyn kicks a book out of her hands, so that the impulse comes from inside her rather than being projected from outside. The book flutters like a wounded bird then comes for him, disintegrating, after which other materials sustain the assault – first gravel, and then ‘a heap of grass clippings exploded on his back, moist and sour, and pine cones showered his head. He blundered across to the wood, and the clippings fell away, but now twigs and leaves and pebbles and dead branches from the trees spun at him.’ This resembles the sort of poltergeist manifestation traditionally associated with girls on the brink of sexual maturity. Later Alison describes her sensations: ‘It’s this feeling I’m going to burst – it’s losing your temper and being frightened, only more. My body gets tighter and tighter and – and then it’s as if my skin’s suddenly holes like that chicken wire [in the hut where they’re talking], and it all shoots out.’ But are these symptoms of possession or of puberty?

The Owl Service retreats from this near hormonal intensity, preferring a more abstract menace, and Alison is a rather insipid character to bear the weight of the legend. It’s made clear early on that she owns the house, her late father having ‘turned it over’ to her to avoid death duties. In a detective story this might be crucial to the plot – Alison can’t own it in real terms until she turns 21. Here it’s oddly intrusive, depriving Garner of the chance to give her some spirit. A teenager who knuckles under to her mother’s bullying for fear that the house she loves will be sold deserves sympathy. A teenager who toes the line for fear of being made to leave the choir, or forfeiting her subscription to the tennis club, hardly seems worthy of a visitation from Blodeuwedd, whether she comes as an owl or as flowers.

The ages​ of Garner’s characters creep upwards from book to book, but there’s no sense of their lagging behind their author (as he said of Colin and Susan), more that he lags behind them, as if dragging his feet so as not to confront sexual maturity. In his next novel, Red Shift (1973), this isn’t a matter of target audience, since the book is aimed at older readers, though it’s a daunting read for any age group. The age of the central character, Tom, has to be deduced, and from the way he expresses himself in conversation with his girlfriend, Jan, you would never guess that he’s still a schoolboy:

Each of these shops is full of every aspect of one part of existence. Woolworth’s is a tool shed; Boots, a bathroom; the British Home Stores, a wardrobe. And we walk through it all, but we can’t clean our teeth, or mend a fuse, or change our socks. You’d starve in this supermarket. It’s all so real, we’re shadows.

Precocious in some ways, Tom is a late developer in others. Despite the couple’s lyrical declarations of love, he is estranged from its physical expression, for a rather unlikely reason revealed late in the book. His parents’ lovemaking on ‘Saturdays and Mess Nights’ in the caravan where they all live traumatised him from the age of eight – ‘you’ve no idea how much a caravan moves.’ Later he starts to make up for lost time, which Jan enjoys less, though in a book with so little exposition or description it isn’t easy to be sure: ‘Now you’re all one thing, and I don’t know what to do. Wherever we go I can’t go again. No talk, no fun, just grab. Why?’

In Powsels and Thrums Alan Garner reproduces a 2013 lecture in which he expressed pride in the stylistic breakthrough of Red Shift, which he attributes to the impact of cinematic conventions and above all to the greater realism in dialogue made possible by the tape recorder. He reproduces a clumsy passage from a writer with whom he feels some affinity, Thomas Hardy, and then this excerpt from Red Shift:

‘I love you,’ said Jan.

‘I’m coming to terms with it.’

‘ – love you.’

‘But there’s a gap.’

‘Where?’

‘I know things, and feel things, but the wrong way round. That’s me: all the right answers at none of the right times. I see and can’t understand. I need to adjust my spectrum, pull myself away from the blue end. I could do with a red shift. Galaxies and Rectors have them. Why not me?’

Anyone who has listened back to tape-recorded dialogue knows that what it reveals is redundancy and rambling. It’s baffling that Garner should offer up this stylised exchange, complete with a fusty joke about academic dress (the red gowns worn by rectors), as a masterclass in truthful speech. His new abrupt manner barred the way for many readers. The short sentences and clipped dialogue suggest a brisk pace but the gnomic style insists on stopping points.

There are three strands to Red Shift, taking place in different time periods, with an ancient stone axe featuring in all of them, an object charged not just with history but its own force. The hardest strand to follow is the oldest chronologically. Who, confronted by a group of undescribed characters with names like Macey, Buzzard, Magoo, Logan and Face using jargon such as ‘bearing one-three-zero, estimated eleven clicks’, ‘goofball’ and ‘chickenshit’, would guess that this was a Roman legion, the Ninth? If the idea, given the date of publication, was to establish a parallel between the Roman invasion of Britain and the Vietnam War, both examples of asymmetrical campaigns, then it doesn’t justify itself. The third section, leading up to a notorious massacre of the English Civil War, is easier to follow, though the mixture of indirection and brusque violence remains disorienting: ‘There was not much commotion, and hardly any noise. Margery fell into wet grass, but the man above her was pulled away, and another face grinned: the face of a soldier, with streaks on his chin, grey from holding lead shot in his mouth.’ If this account of rape was any more elliptical it might not even register as such. There are wonderful glints throughout the book, but glints aren’t enough.

Garner’s imagination is strong and individual, though there are convergences with his contemporaries. Close in age was Dennis Potter, born 1935, who also had a rooted working-class childhood (in the Forest of Dean) from which education both emancipated and threatened to estrange him. At a stretch you could see Potter’s collisions between restricted lives and the wish-fulfilment of popular songs as a more turbulent version of Garner’s preoccupation with multiple realities in a single space. Both writers obsessively rework their material. In an interview from 1986, at the time of The Singing Detective, Potter said that in his work he was always ploughing the same field, and knew better than anyone when the blade of his plough scraped against a stone – but there were also times when it sliced into a bag of long-buried coins.

Nigel Kneale, though somewhat older (born 1922), was closer kin. The idea that traumatic events can somehow imprint themselves on time, so that a haunting may come from the future rather than the past, was the basis of Kneale’s television play The Road, broadcast in 1963, but accidentally wiped. Another Kneale television play, broadcast the year before Red Shift was published (it survives), has a title – The Stone Tape – that would fit Garner’s novel, with its axe that functions as a recording device or perhaps a transmitter. In Powsels and Thrums Garner describes making a visit to Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank (whose first name Kneale borrowed for his fictional scientist Quatermass) and bringing a stone axe of his own, describing it as a ‘telescope’, presumably meaning that it brought the distant past nearer. Lovell gave him a pass to the observatory.

Readers who had loved his first two books pestered Garner for a sequel. If Boneland (2012) was his response, as he claims, it shows that his animus against his own early work and its fans is still going strong. Yes, the protagonist is called Colin, but since the original Colin lacked distinguishing characteristics no restrictions are involved. This Colin works at Jodrell Bank, where his boss says things less suggestive of Lovell than of scientists in B-movies, such as: ‘My dear boy, you have it in you to go beyond the Singularity. Your vision could take us to our next understanding.’ Colin lives not in a building saturated in history but in a Bergli hut ordered from Switzerland. He rides a bicycle and grows his own vegetables. Medical opinion summarises him as ‘an immature uncooperative hysterical depressive Asperger’s’. He can’t remember anything from before the age of thirteen, though his memory for subsequent events is not only photographic but can be accessed by date and time of day. His missing twin sister speaks to him, though no one else can hear her. A brain scan reveals anomalies that might be explained by a lightning strike long ago.

In all this he’s as much a revisiting of Tom from Red Shift as a continuation of Colin. There’s even a stone axe in Boneland, this one half a million years old. The quibbles about motorways and celestial bodies – the M42 runs from Bromsgrove to near Ashby-de-la-Zouch while M45 identifies the Pleiades – were also there in the earlier book, where Tom tells Jan they are somewhere between the M6 going to Birmingham and M33 ‘going nowhere’: M33 denotes the Triangulum Galaxy. Colin is being helped by a motorbike-riding psychiatrist called Meg Massey, though she may actually be a manifestation of the Morrigan, the shapeshifting witch-crow from the first two books. She doesn’t speak like a psychiatrist, calling him ‘darling’, ‘dear heart’ and even ‘chuckles’, but then hospital nurses call him ‘diddums’, so perhaps he brings out the mother hen in them. Colin rephrases the comparison Garner made to Lovell when he says: ‘The axe is the first step to the telescope.’ It’s also the first step to industrialisation, but selective Luddism allows the observatory to remain in a poetic category. Massey sees the bowl of the telescope as a goblet, a chalice, even the Grail. Colin classifies it as ‘a Questing tool’. As with Red Shift there are sections on another plane of reality, which are a real slog, though occasionally a brilliantly cadenced description brings a passage alive: ‘Each hill had a hood, a huge hackle of mist, and the cold clear rain that shed from the clouds was ice when it hit.’ The way the strands of the story fit together is even more mysterious than it was in Red Shift.

Twice in the last decade​ , Garner has unearthed real treasure in the form of two marvellous little books, one non-fiction, the other a novel. The first was the 2018 memoir Where Shall We Run To?, full of joy and excitement despite its misleadingly ominous title. Alan’s father, returning from the pub with friends, would sometimes wake him up to sing for them. He was too shy to sing in plain sight and so performed from behind the blanket hung inside the front door as a draught curtain: ‘It was good when I sang behind the blanket because of the smell and the tickle of the doormat on my feet and the sound of the wind in the porch and through the letterbox.’ It’s unlikely that the adult Garner would agree that ‘I was tall because I kept getting ill and had to stay in bed’, but it belongs in the book because it’s what he thought at the time. When he and his friends make hand grenades from coke there aren’t inverted commas around ‘hand grenades’ because there was no difference in the boys’ minds between what they made and what they had seen soldiers and the Home Guard use for practice.

Empathy and interest are narrowly focused. A boy called Brian ‘had two rods that went down from his boot to an iron ring, and we all wanted to have one ourselves because it stopped him being bullied. If anyone tried he crunched their feet so they couldn’t walk.’ Events that happen at a distance can’t really be absorbed. Alan likes American troops better than British ones partly because they laugh and are generous with chewing gum but also because they sound better when they march. British soldiers ‘wore black boots with nails in them which made a crashing noise when they walked’, while ‘the Yanks’ boots were brown and soft and made a swishing noise when they marched.’ Later information can’t be accommodated in the memory picture: ‘The Yanks went. Their ship was sunk, and they drowned. From the porch, I kept watch.’ Abstract ideas, however consequential, don’t fully register. When he hears a neighbour say, ‘Well, Alan, you won’t want to speak to us any more,’ he knows the words but doesn’t connect them with the fact that he has just won a scholarship. All he can say is that he feels something go that doesn’t come back.

Garner noted the exact time (seven minutes past three on 15 July 2012) he was told about a tramp nicknamed Treacle Walker, who claimed to be able to cure all ills but jealousy. There’s a lot of overlap between the memoir and Treacle Walker, magnificent and effortlessly strange as it is. The protagonist is Joseph Coppock, a boy living on his own, knowing the time only when Noony the train passes by. Then it’s midday. There’s no other rail traffic, and Noony always passes in the same direction, but this is what Joe knows so he doesn’t consider it odd. He isn’t an orphan in any meaningful sense, since he never mentions or misses a parent. He has ‘been poorly’ and has a lazy eye, but no one looks after him. Treacle Walker himself is reconfigured as a smelly rag and bone man. The line about curing all ills but jealousy makes it into the text but has no purchase. Appetites have no status in this world (Joe doesn’t eat or drink) apart perhaps from curiosity. Joe is pre-sexual and can be said to exist in a world without gender, given that there are no female beings. Another character is a version of Lindow Man, the Iron Age body found in a Cheshire peat bog in 1984, though ‘character’ isn’t the right word for these vivid presences. It’s illogical that in this world where there is only play (though some of the play is frightening) a boy should go for an eye test, but worth it for a supremely magical moment. When ‘the man’ asks him to cover one eye and read from the board, he performs satisfactorily, but when he tries with the other eye the letters he reads are invisible to anyone else and spell out three sentences in Latin. This is perhaps the most concise expression of the two-realities-in-one-space theme, two eyes in a single skull seeing entirely different things.

In Where Shall We Run To? Garner identifies the only colourful things in the wartime world as his comics and the clothes Gypsies wore. Both find their way into Treacle Walker. The comic strip Garner liked best was ‘Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit’ in The Knock-Out, who makes an appearance in the novel, fleeing Whizzy the Wicked Wizard and his horde of Brit Bashers as he always did. In childhood Garner was fascinated by Gypsies, who he thought ‘smelled more like cats than people’. He lends that aroma to Treacle Walker, and also, indirectly, their language. When Joe is finally able to get Treacle Walker’s horse to obey him, it’s by using Romany words (‘Kosko gry!’). Instructed by Treacle Walker, Joe ‘donkey stones’ the door of the house, so nothing and nobody can enter without being invited. Garner’s mother would do the same with a donkey stone bought from a rag and bone man, but just to clean the front step. The obvious association is with vampire folklore, but there are also personal connections, just as ‘Noony’ was the nickname in Blackden for the train from Manchester to Crewe that came through at midday. As a child Garner noticed a squiggle low down on the brickwork of the porch after the Gypsies had visited, and connected it with the fact that though the women called in, the men passed by. After that he put the squiggle there himself, and got the same result.

Is Treacle Walker meant for children or adults, for both or for neither? Any attempt to pin it down seems to diminish its grandeur in miniature. In the same way an earlier group of novellas from the 1970s, The Stone Book Quartet, dealing with Garner’s family history, is slighted by classification in libraries as a children’s book. Being written in clean simple sentences, it fits on those shelves better than Red Shift would, but it also shows a more nuanced understanding of technological and social change than anything in Powsels and Thrums. Garner’s great-great-grandfather was a mason whose brother, living and working in the same house, was an independent weaver, so that in the 1820s one was prospering at the expense of the other. The mason built big houses for the merchants whose mills were turning out cheap cloth.

Garner’s whole career has been a balancing act, holding on to the rigorous standards of his education (he left Oxford before taking his degree, but at one point planned to become an academic) while hewing close to the area where he was brought up. This is both lucky and admirable, and only begins to grate when he proposes that there are places imbued with a sense of rightness – like his home – and others that are spiritually dark (such as the Cheshire valley of Thursbitch, about which he wrote a novel) or soulless: ‘I defy you to be at ease in a multi-storey carpark.’ Of course he doesn’t need a multi-storey car park for the Land Rover he mentions at one point, and not many people would rate one highly in terms of atmosphere, but he comes close to proposing his own good fortune as a model for other people’s lives.

Even when Garner started writing, it was hard to keep modernity at bay. It must have been unusual as late as 1960 for a dairy farmer like Gowther Mossock to get about in a horse and cart. Susan and Colin survive the ice spell known as fimbulwinter thanks to cloaks given them by Angharad Goldenhand, cloaks made of red muspel hair, woven from the beards of giants and lined with satyrs’ wool, but an earlier stage of their adventures requires a homelier material. Forced to swim through underground tunnels to escape their pursuers, the children must somehow protect the batteries of their torch. Fenodyree suggests that they improvise a waterproof covering using the sandwich bags they’re carrying. The most likely material for a 1950s housewife to use for wrapping sandwiches would be waxed paper, which would hardly protect batteries under these conditions. Might Bess Mossock have been an early adopter of the plastic bag?