Welcome
to the Pile of Leaves Book Club. The walled garden is strung with little
rainbow lights. Pour yourself a glass of something and hunker down with
everybody else - friends and strangers, each clutching a copy of The Weirdstone
of Brisingamen, which we've all been reading this month.
Had everyone read Alan Garner's work before? Tom says, ‘I
came to Garner's novels via The Owl
Service which I can read and re-read still. I think my first shock of
reading "Yarawarawarawarawar!" in Chapter 1 and supposing Another
Being (a Welsh mythy sort of being?) had made an entrance into the story made
quite the impact on me. I don't recall how but I read Red Shift soon after and got the same shakey-hair-tingling feeling
of amazement when reading this kind of Harold Pinter meets Ray Bradbury meets
William Mayne with shades of Nicolas Roeg maybe story.’
Meanwhile, Rosie says, ‘I wasn't sure what to expect as The Owl Service didn't really do it for
me, with its very abrupt ending and quite unlikeable characters. However,
Weirdstone is much more captivating. ‘
And Alex says, ‘I grew up with several fantasy books – but
I think The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was
perhaps the one that felt most personal. I was born a decade after it was
written, and raised about ten miles from where it was set… So more than any
other story I knew, this one seemed to have an immediacy, one that was almost
familiar, only just out of reach in space and time.’ I think my Jon would share
that sentiment. He often says about the lady in the Legend bookshop in Alderley
saying: ‘You’re about the right age for this. And it all happens just up the
road.’
Perhaps because of the maps of Cheshire, included in most
editions, Tom ‘read with a kind of geographic bearing in mind much like Watership Down or, to use again
another Adams' novel, his amazing The
Plague Dogs.’ I think that geographic bearing is there, even if you don’t
have those lovely maps. It’s subtitled A
Tale of Alderley and Garner uses every aspect of the landscape, from physical
features to pub gossip, via local legend (commemorated in a giant mural on
Wilmslow Sainsbury’s).
Initially, the Southern protagonists jarred for me, like
they'd wandered in from another book. 'It has a very old fashioned feel about
it,' Rosie says, 'and I love it all the more for that. As a young girl, I
loved the adventures written by Enid Blyton and this reminds me of those but
with much more punch! A tale of children adventuring in the countryside
(loving the natural landscape just as the characters in Blyton) but where
magical things happen!' Maybe it was Susan’s name that made me think of CS
Lewis as well. In deliberate counterpoint to the no-place, myth megamix of
Narnia, Colin and Susan explore myth’s inseparability from region and history.
Alex says, ‘So many of the stories I loved seemed distant
from us: the mystic fringes of Wales ,
Scotland or Cornwall ;
England always somehow
meaning ‘South-East England ’ on the page or on
TV. But no legend was as powerfully evocative as that of King Arthur, and to
find that he was buried not at the other end of the country somewhere but in
our own North West
‘I like best the bits when the human world is still in
sight of the world of the fantastic,’ says Paul. ‘They co-exist in a really
strange way for parts of this novel. But when we go fully into the myth
and lose touch with Colin and Susan, I lose a little interest. It goes a
bit 'epic' for me, in places. I always preferred Lewis to Tolkien, though.’
‘Just as I felt on the edge of its world, it feels between
ours and somewhere else,’ says Alex,
‘and not just because of its plot, which is not about a great event but on the
fringes of it. Think of Selina Place, both a modern woman using the highest
technology in the novel – a car – and at the heart of a witch brood that’s also
a conspiracy of ordinary blokes you might meet down the pub. Think of Gowther,
reassuring, thoroughly normal… But, in the ’60s, still driving a horse and
cart, as if for all his ordinariness he's half in a time of legend and not
awake to the fact.’
‘I really like the human characters,’ Rosie says, ‘Gowther
with his steady and sure character, Colin for being tough but not so brave as
Susan, who says things such as "Cripes!". I mean, what is not
to love about it?’
So in several ways it’s a novel of multiple dimensions –
and what we witness is an ‘awakening’ to the fact of that. There’s something
wonderfully uncanny about witches disguised as hikers, pretending to study
their maps – perhaps related to that childhood anxiety of adults who mean you
harm. Don’t go off in the stranger’s car! (Though you can rely on wizards and
policemen to be all that they should…)
On visiting the Edge, Rosie and I wondered what little
Alan got up to there as a child. ‘Throughout my childhood,' says Alex, 'I
loved, but also somehow felt threatened by, winding my way through tiny caves
and passages. I was a very thin and gawky boy, and found a strange satisfaction
in twisting my way through places that I couldn’t really twist through. I
suspect all that, something I enjoyed but dreaded, was a child’s way of dealing
with that extraordinarily long, unforgiving account of Colin trying to make it
through the dwarves’ improbably horrible tunnels.’
‘I feel cornered and achieve a sense of claustrophobia
just thinking about them tunneling underground in The Weirdstone,’ says Tom
quickly.
‘It felt like quite a long section of the book, which
actually did a good job,’ says Rosie. ‘Imagine if you were stuck
underground in the dark with dwindling food and no way out... it would feel
like you were trapped in there for days or months even when in reality it was
only a few minutes or an hour or so. Superbly written.’
Paul agrees: ‘The scene where Colin swims on his back in a
flooded cave, with only his mouth above water and breathing a slim pocket of
air - that's really horrible and frightening.’
Perhaps it's about the attraction of going deeper – and
the fear of not being able to get back - which we see less with regard to
unknowable magic power (though perhaps something like that has happened to
Grimnir). Our protagonists' courage in the grip of that immediate, sensuous and
threatening landscape is what ultimately engages us.
‘I loved the "real" element,’ says Rosie, ‘How
Susan was a little braver than Colin, how Colin struggled to fit through the
caves because he was an inch taller!’
Did anyone re-reading find things they had missed before?
'Many of the people and images are still as powerful as
ever,' says Alex, 'But I can also feel things to kick against; torn between
agreeing with the condemnation of pollution, and thinking that if elves shut us
off from magic and then slag us off when we find other ways to live, aren’t
they just insufferably up themselves?'
'I loved finding - on this reading - a gay myth I
never noticed before, somehow,' says Paul. 'On page 162, where Durathror tells
Colin '...it is hard to lose the companionship of elves. And if one has
been dearer to you than your own kin, a more than brother right from the
earliest memory, the loss is nigh unbearable. When Atlendor took his people
northwards I thought to renounce my heritage, and go with him, but he would not
have me come ... I exchanged the power of going unseen for the power of flight,
and Gondemar, my father, cast me out in his anger. So have I wandered all these
years, barred from my people and from the elves.'
And, Alex continues, 'The most distinctive, most jarring
thing structurally about Alan Garner’s writing, found here and throughout his
children’s books: no coda, no resolution, the book simply stops – I’ve never
known if that abruptness was a deliberate choice, an unpolished craft, or a
sign of an author exhausting himself. To me, they feel like they finish before
their time ... yet it’s that very incompleteness – a sense of certainty about
the big things, and merciless uncertainty about ordinary life – that’s a
strangely powerful signature, telling us that, no, people don’t live happily
ever after, or if they do, it’s no business of ours.'
I think, all in all, our group would echo Rosie - they
loved this book, for all its odd features and switches in tone. (Do you agree?)
I hope they - and you - will join me in reading the sequel, The Moon of Gomrath. I'll shift the
deadline back on this one, life being what it is. Please send any thoughts on
this second book of our Brisingathon to leafynick@gmail.com by September 10th.
And have a lovely Bank Holiday weekend!
PS: Thank you to
everyone who sent in comments - and apologies if I had to trim them for the
purposes of the blog. Alex, in particular, please publish all your thoughts in
a blog review at some point - and I'll save some of your thoughts for our group
blog on Boneland (out next week, folks!)
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