Alan Garner

Garner, Alan (1934– ), outstanding British novelist. Born in Cheshire, in a family of artisans, Garner was educated at Oxford, where he studied classics. In his first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), he made use of a local legend from his birthplace, Alderley Edge, as well as motifs from Norse and Celtic folklore, including the Arthurian cycle. The child characters are quite ineffective, no more than lenses through which the colourful world of magic is described. What fascinated Garner in the legend was the idea of how it might influence contemporary life. This novel, like all his others, is about the ‘here and now’ rather than about magical countries or a remote past. The philosophical dilemma arising when Garner tries to retell a medieval legend in today's England can be summarized in his own words as: ‘What if …?’ This phrase is the key to Garner's work. What if the events of the legend are true? What would the consequences be, and what would happen if two ordinary children from today's England were to get involved in the strange world of the legend? And in his later novels: what would happen if magical objects were brought from another world into our own? How high is the price for meddling in the affairs of a magic realm? What would happen if modern young people were to get caught up in the tragic pattern of an ancient fairy tale?

Garner is one of the few writers who has managed to unite magical secondary worlds with a real landscape which can be found on a map. The magical world of Garner's books is projected onto the real world, and the boundary between the two is practically non‐existent. In The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), there is a clear sense of Garner's obsession with his native district and its numerous grave‐mounds, standing stones, and churches oriented according to sunrise on the vernal equinox. These details are woven so subtly into the story that they often hamper the reader in following the plot. Like many beginning authors, Garner was too eager to put everything he knew into one and the same book. His first two novels, which were supposed to become a trilogy, have all the components of a successful adventure: mysteries, secret passages, pursuits, caves, false clues, as well as easily recognizable fairy‐tale elements: magic amulets, good and evil wizards, dwarfs, and knights.

Elidor (1965), which has some elements from the legends of Childe Roland, begins in a church ruin on the outskirts of Manchester, where four siblings are enticed to enter a magical realm—the only magical realm in Garner's work that lies beyond the ordinary British landscape. The connections between the worlds are places of ruin and devastation where the boundary has been destroyed or weakened. Characteristically, the street where one of the passages emerges is called Boundary Lane. The children's treacherous guide, Malebron, a duplicitous magician, is prepared to sacrifice anything for the good of his country. After a very short stay in Elidor the children return to their own world carrying the four treasures of Elidor: a precious stone, a sword, a spear, and a cauldron, traditional magical objects of Celtic folklore. In the dull and uneventful reality of present‐day Manchester, the treasures are transformed into a worthless cobble, splintered laths, a length of iron railing, and a broken cup. Nevertheless, even in this dilapidated form, they remain a bridge into mysterious Elidor, which, unlike the multicoloured world of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, is rather vaguely depicted. Instead, the book is centred on the serious moral problems facing the main character. Because of Roland's fatal mistake, the front door of the house can serve as a passage from Elidor into the security of the real world. The threat of evil forces is felt as much stronger than if they had remained in the alternative world. In Elidor, the magical realm is like a shadow, a dreamworld, and the old church ruin the magical passage, the sound of the fiddle the Summons Call, and the four treasures the key to this realm. Garner is interested in reality and the way reality is affected by the intrusion of magic, in the form of Elidor's dark warriors and unicorn. This connection between worlds becomes the cornerstone of his later work.

It is easy to imagine Elidor existing not only in another spatial, but also in another temporal dimension. This is the link between Garner's first books, Elidor, and Red Shift (1973), a novel about the continuity of time and the simultaneous existence of all times. Although there is no direct reference to magic in Red Shift, there is a very strong sense of mythical thought, and the Stone Age axe portrayed in the story may be viewed as a magical amulet connecting the three historical layers of the plot.

The Owl Service (1967) is the only novel by Garner which does not have a direct connection to his native district and instead takes place in Wales. It is based on one of the stories from The Mabinogion while at the same time it examines the pain and anxiety of modern teenagers. This pain, described already in Elidor, reaches its peak in Red Shift; thus fairy‐tale patterns are used by Garner exclusively as narrative devices for investigating his own time. For The Owl Service Garner was awarded the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Award.

The Stone Book Quartet (1976–8) has been praised as Garner's best work and regarded as his final conquest of realism. Superficially, these are indeed realistic stories about several generations of the Garner family, but it would be a mistake to view the Quartet as everyday realism. Everything that is typical of Garner as an artist, including his interest in the mystical and the inexplicable, and the legends, rites, and landscapes of his childhood, is present in these four stories and plays a most significant role. Here as well, the real and the magical landscapes are intertwined.

Besides original novels, Garner has also published a vast number of collections of retold fairy tales, always with his own characteristic tone and linguistic flavour, as can be seen in The Guizer (1976), Alan Garner's Fairytales of Gold (1980), The Lad of the Gad (1980), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984), and A Bag of Moonshine (1986).

Garner's most recent novel, Strandloper (1996), marketed for an adult audience, attempts to combine patterns from Australian Aboriginal and local Cheshire mythology.

Bibliography

• ‘Alan Garner’, spec. issue of Labrys, 7 (1981).
• Gillies, Carolyn, ‘Possession and Structure in the Novels of Alan Garner’, Children's Literature in Education, 18 (1985).
• Nikolajeva, Maria, ‘The Insignificance of Time’, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 14 (1989).
• Philip, Neil, A Fine Anger (1981).

— Maria Nikolajeva