Driving over farm tracks to his isolated
Cheshire home, Alan Garner suddenly
hauls his car off the path and bumps
over a field of stubble to the top of a
small rise. "It's clear enough so you can
see them both," he says pointing to the
horizon. "There's my first book and
there's my most recent." A domed hill in
the foreground, he explains, is the
western ridge of the valley of Thursbitch,
the setting and title of his latest novel,
which is published in paperback this month. The flatter hill
apparently beyond, but actually closer, is Alderley Edge, his
"bone country", and the predominant setting of his 1960 debut,
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.
In fact, virtually all Garner's writing features, in one way or
another, the land visible from this field. This microscopically
attentive study of the region comes with a deeply-felt
appreciation of its cultural history, which has won him many
admirers. But it is in combining this almost claustrophobic
sense of place with a prodigiously expansive handling of time
that has given his work its instantly identifiable tone.
And it is not just in Garner's work that the past, present and
future meld. His home, Toad Hole, was a medieval manor house
to which he has added a 500-year-old timber-framed Tudor
medicine house, removed and rebuilt beam by beam from a site
20 miles away. But long before the manor house existed, this
was a significant stone-age burial site - a jawbone turned up
under the kitchen floor and Mesolithic flints have been found in
the garden. Flattened musket rounds found also indicate an
English civil war skirmish on the same site and the sense of
cohabiting timescales is made complete by the startling sight of
the huge white bowls of the Jodrell Bank telescope just a few
yards away.
Garner and his wife, the educationalist and critic Griselda
Greaves, have been meticulous in maintaining and documenting
the site. Some years ago, he was assisting in the
archaeological excavation of a culvert in the garden, which found
evidence in the form of organic material that would indicate a
flooded, post-ice-age landscape of 7,000 or 8,000 years ago.
Garner commented to one of the diggers, "I've looked so far
back in time I've got whiplash." It is a sensation that many of his
readers will recognise.
The critic and writer Neil Philip, in the most comprehensive
study of Garner's work, A Fine Anger (1981), wrote that time
was Garner's most constant theme: "sequential, causal,
'historical' time is set against and enlarged by a 'mythological'
concept of time as elastic, cyclic, recoverable". Philip went on
to note that "myth is the crucible in which Garner's thinking
about time has been fired".
Garner has made potent use of universal, national, and most of
all, local myth and history. Francis Spufford, in his memoir of
childhood reading, The Child that Books Built (2002), praises
Garner's achievement in "reintroducing myth into the
bloodstream of daily life". He saw Garner as part of an amazing
generation of talent at work as the 1960s ended and in the
1970s, citing William Mayne, Peter Dickinson, Jill Paton Walsh,
Joan Aiken, Diana Wynne-Jones, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Leon
Garfield.
Throughout his career Garner has been the object of almost
universal critical respect and is still widely regarded as a
touchstone when discussing children's literature. AS Byatt
recently used him as a stick with which to beat JK Rowling. In
reading writers like Garner, Byatt wrote, "we feel we are being
put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when
supernatural and inhuman creatures - from whom we thought we
learned our sense of good and evil - inhabited a world we did not
feel we controlled".
Others have argued that it is misleading to describe Garner as a
fantasy author. Professor Richard Morris, director of the Institute
for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, is the
archaeologist in charge of the Garner site. He has known Garner
for 30 years, composed the music for a Garner libretto and they
are working together on a book about the house.
"He actually creates hardly any original material," says Morris.
"Most of the names are real people and most of these stories
have been lying around. What he does is to find things,
rearrange them and put them together. His creativity lies in
making connections which haven't previously been articulated.
Likewise as a finder and assembler, sometimes of the simplest
words, he is a genius. It is quite inappropriate to compare him
to, say CS Lewis or Tolkien because he doesn't deal in fantasy,
his is the real stuff of his part of England. The materials in his
stories are authentic, not fabricated. Maybe this is why his later
books have taken so long. He has had to prowl around to find
these connections."
Thursbitch, his meshing of the stories of John Turner, local
packman who trafficked goods in and out of Cheshire and froze
to death in the valley in 1755, and contemporary walkers Ian and
Sal, was started in 1972. His previous book, Strandloper (1996),
about Cheshire bricklayer William Buckley who was transported
to Australia and lived as a holy man among aboriginal people for
33 years before returning home, took 12 years to complete. The
closing scene, in which the returned Buckley "dances",
bushman-style, over the topography of Cheshire, is deeply
moving. "I'm a sniper," says Garner. "I will sit in the bush for as
long as it takes to get that shot away. If I had to write a
paragraph in 15 minutes or be hung, then I would be hung. But if
anybody or anything gets in the way of the writing it's like saying
to someone who is pregnant and the waters have broken that
there is a good film on television. I have been fairly good at
prioritising since I was a child. I think my single-mindedness is
innate."
Garner was born in Cheshire on October 17 1934. His 70th
birthday tomorrow will be a cause of private celebration but, he
says, "I live in such a remarkable environment, both architectural
and archaeological, that 70 years doesn't really figure. I just
don't inhabit that type of timescale." He was brought up in and
around the village of Alderley Edge and his early childhood was
blighted by illness. Twice his parents were told that he would not
survive.
It was during a period in an isolation hospital suffering from
meningitis, combined with whooping cough and measles, that
Garner recalls teaching himself to read. "I think Edgar Rice
Burroughs must have had a similar experience," he says.
"Tarzan is described as seeing the letters on a page as little
bugs and then realising that the little bugs fitted together. That
was so close to my own experience. I then became a literary
gourmand. I just stuffed myself with books."
At infant school a teacher tried to "cure" his left-handedness by
strapping his arm across his chest. "It was catastrophic. Instead
of becoming ambidextrous like most left-handers do, I couldn't
use either hand and it caused a severe speech impediment." He
also remembers having his mouth washed out with soap by a
teacher for speaking "broad" in the Cheshire dialect used by his
family.
He admits to being "an oddball" at school and discovered he
was a natural athlete who would later be an international
standard junior sprinter by "getting out of the school gates
before the others. But I don't blame the other children. I wasn't
there most of the time and when I did turn up I was getting twice
as many marks as them. I once remember making the whole
room boil when I was about eight and spent a lesson drawing a
section through a volcano in multicoloured chalks. In the end my
teacher would ask me only to put up my hand if I didn't know the
answer."
Harold Smith, who became an upholstery teacher, was a
primary-school contemporary and remembers the young Garner
as "a bit precocious. There were about six or eight of us who
were a little gang and he was always the ideas man behind
things. He had ideas that no one else had and was quite
charismatic and a bit of an exhibitionist, although as he got
older he became more of a loner."
Garner won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School and
says he suffered from the "classic grammar-school syndrome
that has perhaps been over-documented. It was like a portcullis
coming down. A friend's mother told me I wouldn't want to speak
to them any more. And while my family was initially pleased,
they didn't realise that getting an education is not like getting a
car. The child expands and the family cannot cope."
Garner's father was a house painter from a family of local
craftsmen. He describes his mother's side of the family as full of
"cranks and anomalies and sparky people. My maternal
grandfather was both the original and the destructive mind. In the
early 1900s he was a senior reporter on the Yorkshire Post,
which was no mean feat. He ended up as a nightwatchman at
the Hovis factory in Macclesfield." Garner, who suffers from
manic depression - "actually a psychosis and better called
bi-polar disorder" - suspects his grandfather was similarly
afflicted.
As the first member of his family to receive a formal secondary
education, he says the phrase that sticks in his mind with the
greatest anguish was members of the family saying "you are
only trying to make me look a fool". "I learned the hard way that
there wasn't much point in rushing home and becoming excited
about irregular verbs. But my [paternal] grandfather, who was a
triple smith - blacksmith, whitesmith and locksmith - never said
this. He gave me the wonderful advice, 'if the other fellow can do
it, let him'. What he was saying was 'find out what is in you and
don't let other people say otherwise', and that has been the
single conscious driving force in my life. It haunts me and
justifies me."
At Manchester Grammar School - where a children's library is
now named after him - Garner was an exceptional athlete, but
when a national coach told him he could be the first British
sprinter to reach an Olympic semi-final, he immediately gave up.
"If there were 15 other people who could do what I was doing,
what was the point? It was back to my grandfather again and I
was quite happy to let the other fellow do it. Although I must say
it was worth being a good athlete just to get through basic
training when I did national service. I was fine when it crucified
most people."
Garner did not write at school although a pastiche of The Waste
Land - "I thought it was a con because any poem that needs
notes has not been properly worked. Perhaps I'd be a little less
dismissive now, but I don't withdraw all of it" - made it into the
school magazine. He was a gifted linguist and at one time had a
reading knowledge of 12 languages. "For a time I could absorb
any language like a sponge but I still don't understand why I had
to learn so many. Was I unconsciously rejecting my real
language?" asks Garner, who has increasingly incorporated his
local dialect into his books and says that even as a young man
he never consciously despised or rebelled against his roots. "It
just so happened that every step forward was away from there."
After school Garner did national service as a second lieutenant
in the Royal Artillery before taking up a place at Magdalen
College, Oxford, where he read Classics. Although he was
active in drama societies he still wasn't writing. "There were lots
of people saying they were going to write and they just
embarrassed me." Former Conservative minister Kenneth, now
Lord, Baker was assistant stage manager for a production of
Antony and Cleopatra in which Garner played Antony, his wife to
be Ann Cook was Cleopatra and Dudley Moore played
Enobarbus. "Alan was a very good actor and nice man," recalls
Baker. "I remember him having this personal theory about the
dark lady of Shakespeare' s sonnets coming from Cheshire. He
was very dogged defending it against all comers. And he wrote a
diary in Egyptian hieroglyphics."
In Oxford Garner once found himself in the same room as
Tolkien and CS Lewis, with whom he would later be compared.
"I heard Tolkien say that modern English is not a vehicle
capable of writing prose," he remembers. He says he arrived at
Oxford "assuming" he was on an escalator that would lead to a
chair in Greek but soon lost all enthusiasm. "I didn't know what I
wanted to do, but I knew it wasn't what I was doing. Then I
remembered this essay about the artist as the last free spirit
and, with a total lack of logic, thought as I was good at
languages I could therefore write." A "Damascus-road moment"
came when sitting on a tree stump at home looking at a wall
built by his great-great-grandfather. "And I knew I had to do
something that was as well done as that wall. As a writer I had
to be true to that wall. When I went back to Oxford it had
become a cold and irrelevant place for me."
Despite his determination to leave, Garner expected his tutor to
persuade him to stay. "But instead he said I was an obsessional
perfectionist to the point of self-destruction and if I didn't get a
double first I would destroy myself and do nothing with my life.
And if I tried to get my double first and write a book I would do
neither. So we had a gentleman's agreement and he said, and
this is verbatim because there are some things you just don't
forget, 'go down now and discover whether you have an original
mind. If you find out that you have not, you may come back to
this place and spend the rest of your life reading the works of
those who have'."
Garner left Oxford aged 22 in 1956 but returns later this month
for an Alan Garner Day staged by the Bodleian Library to mark
its official receipt of his papers. Richard Ovenden, Keeper of
Special Col lections & Western Manuscripts at the library, says:
"We probably have the greatest collection of children's literature
and Alan Garner's papers are a wonderful addition." Ovenden
praises the comprehensiveness of his papers. "He obviously
thinks in an archival way which is apt for someone so interested
in how the past affects the present. And he is enormously
enthusiastic about his collection being available for study.
Sometimes literary figures can be more concerned about their
manuscripts as valuable assets rather than research materials,
but that is not the case with Alan."
Garner returned to Cheshire and in September 1956 began work
on what would become The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, his
magical story of holidaying children Colin and Susan coming
into contact with the legend of the wizard of Alderley Edge. By
this time he had married his first wife, Ann Cook, whom he had
met in Oxford. They had three children; Ellen, Adam and
Katharine. In 1961 Garner met Griselda. They married in 1972
and have a son, Joseph, and daughter, Elizabeth, who published
her first novel, Nightdancing, last year. "Instinctively we have
never discussed anything about writing and Elizabeth has still
not read Thursbitch ," Garner says.
Soon after returning from Oxford, Garner saw a for sale sign
outside his current home, then divided into two cottages. The
price of £510 was beyond his reach, but his father, who had
been contributing to a penny-a-week saving scheme,
unexpectedly and without much comment, loaned him the
money. Such is the architectural and archaeological value of the
site that the Garners have established an educational trust to
take over the property after their deaths.
Richard Morris says that "their management of the site has
been highly sensitive and almost unique in that virtually every
artefact that has come from the garden, no matter how
apparently trivial, has been retained. And by not modernising the
house they have ensured that it is there to speak to the future.
They should get some sort of recognition because it is a
conservation dream and the trust is an enormously generous
gesture." Garner says, "It is now so valuable that it would have
to be sold for death duties, and the only people who could afford
it are the people I've been protecting it from all these years."
Linked to the work at the house is a multi-disciplinary project led
by Manchester University focusing on Alderley Edge. "There are
20 disciplines," says Garner, "but the oral archive is the jewel in
the crown and I'm proud that that couldn't have got off the ground
without me. That is something the other fellow just couldn't have
done."
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was published in 1960 to
immediate acclaim, with the local bookshop selling 500
hardback copies in the first week. The 1963 sequel, The Moon of
Gomrath, was also well received. Despite his status and
success, throughout his career Garner has had a reputation for
tetchiness about his work being called "children's literature".
There are picture books such The Little Red Hen (1997) - his
biggest public lending rights earner - that clearly fall into this
category. But when he left Oxford to write he did not anticipate
producing something so attractive to younger readers as The
Weirdstone of Brisingamen . "I do not write for children," he
once explained in an essay, "but for myself. Adolescents read
my books. By adolescence, I mean an arbitrary age somewhere
between 10 and 18. This group of people is the most important
of all."
Neil Philip suggests that it is Garner's "unwillingness to make
any statement before he is ready to do so, before he has
reduced his ideas to their simplest, their essential form," that
makes his work appealing to this group.
In the early 60s Garner combined writing with some part-time
television presenting and in 1965 published Elidor, in which three
children are drawn back into a dying world through the portal of a
dilapidated Manchester house. It consolidated his commercial
and critical reputation and in 1967 The Owl Service, the only
non-Cheshire based novel, which drew on Welsh folk-tales of the
Mabinogion, won the Carnegie Medal and Guardian children's
book award.
However, during the filming of The Owl Service for television in
1969, Garner suffered a mental collapse. "In the process of
film-making, time is fragmented and the autobiographical bits of
the story, of which I am never aware at the time of writing, felt as
if they had cut loose like a detached retina. Something from
1949 would be crashing into something from 1952 and then
crashing into 1960. I had no temporal awareness and in the
middle of a conversation with someone I'd suddenly not know
who they were and become concerned that I'd be late for school
unless I stopped talking."
Several sessions with a psychiatrist got him back to work but
there were periodic episodes over the years until, in 1980, he
says, "it was as if the lights were turned down and I lost all
sense of worth". He remembers listening to Benjamin Britten's
Serenade for tenor and horn. "I had to leave the room because I
thought it would kill me. For two years I spent 12 hours a day
lying on the settle in the kitchen, and the other 12 hours in bed.
How my family survived I do not know. The only people who
connected with me were Joseph and Elizabeth, who were
infants, and they acted like animals and stroked the back of my
neck. After two years it went quicker than any aspirin could shift
a headache and I thought what on earth was all that about?"
He was, eventually, diagnosed with manic depression and
prescribed lithium although he now takes no medication.
"Lithium is a pretty brutal poison and you have to get it spot on.
And nearly all writers, who are vastly over-represented among
sufferers, who have been treated with it, eventually refuse to take
it because nothing seems to matter, whether good or ill. They
seem to need the lows and the highs in order to write."
Garner's 1973 novel, Red Shift, was a major departure. It took
six years to write and intricately meshed three present-tense
narrative threads set among Romans in Britain, the English civil
war and contemporary Cheshire. The TLS called it "probably the
most difficult book ever published on a children's list"; another
reviewer claimed it was a "bad attack of gimmicky
self-indulgence brought on by over-praise". But the book was
also hailed as a masterpiece and, 20 years on, is seen as the
precursor to both Strandloper and Thursbitch .
Linda Davies was Garner's publisher at the time. "He was
already a big noise when I joined and part of my job was to keep
Alan Garner on the list," she recalls. "There was a big debate
whether to publish Red Shift as a children's book because our
salespeople didn't understand it at all, but I was stunned that a
children's book could provide something so flexible and
intriguing."
Garner subsequently agreed to produce next a recognisable
children's book but the four-volume Stone Book Quartet,
published from 1976-80, was not quite what his publisher was
expecting. Science fiction author Brian Aldiss called his
reworking of the craft tradition in his father's family and the
generational rites of passage it spawned as "beyond all
making". Garner's prose is reduced to a deeply satisfying
simplicity that nevertheless yields almost endlessly layered
readings and Garner identifies the quartet as the work he has
been happiest with.
"The thing that keeps me writing is that the next time I will get
what I saw and then I can stop," he says. "Good for me is
having the smallest possible gap between what I could have
written and what I ended up with. I've never got what I wanted but
the Stone Book Quartet came very close. There are parts of
Thursbitch that I don't know where they came from, but it
somehow resolves parts of my own life in a way that I don't
understand."
Both Strandloper and Thursbitch, like Red Shift before them,
have been described as "difficult" reads. Neil Philip says: "The
opening page of Strandloper is almost incomprehensible and
you have to be willing to trust the flow of words. It seems like a
deliberate attempt to shake off people who aren't willing to put in
the effort. But if he could make it easier he probably would."
Philip goes on to explain that in many ways the books work
more like poetry than as novels. "There is the greatest possible
range of meaning in the fewest possible words. What Alan is
really interested in is folding his language in on itself to make a
collapsible universe where everything is dense with meaning."
As to whether there is any overriding theme or purpose to what
he writes, Garner says that, consciously, his purpose is to
"finish the book and be quit of it, because it is stimulating,
exhausting, wholly demanding and relentless, and not a little
frightening". But one image he comes up with is that of a goods
train, with each book a wagon. "The theme, whatever that may
turn out to be when there are no more wagons to attach, is that
all are being moved in the same direction by the engine (me or
what drives me), along the same track; and the whole can be
seen by only the observer standing and watching from the side
as it goes by. The engine can't see with accuracy, but is aware
of the mass of the whole."
Alan Garner
Education: Alderley Edge School; 1945-52 Manchester
Grammar School; '54-56 Magdalen College, Oxford.
Married: 1956 Ann Cook (one son, two daughters) divorced; '72
Griselda Greaves (one son, one daughter).
Some books: 1960 The Weirdstone of Brisingamen ; '63 The
Moon of Gomrath; '65 Elidor; '67 The Owl Service; '73 Red Shift;
'75 The Guizer; '76-80 The Stone Book Quartet ('77 Tom
Fobble's Day, Granny Reardun; '78 The Aimer Gate; '80 The Lad
of the Gad); '96 Strandloper; 2003 Thursbitch.
Libretti: 1971 The Bellybag (music by Richard Morris); '72
Potter Thompson (music by Gordon Crosse).
Edited: 1969 The Hamish Hamilton Book of Goblins; '84 Alan
Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales.
Honours: OBE 2001.
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