Two Alan Garner Novels
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darkling_talesReaders of my post about The Owl Service will be aware that Alan Garner is a jolly good author. Recently I tried two more of his books: 1981's Red Shift and his latest novel, the much more recent Thursbitch. (Both links are to reviews, the second one by the mighty M John Harrison!)
Red Shift is a short but complex novel about the trials of adolescence and is made up of three entwining plot strands, each taking place at a different time in history but set around the same place, the Cheshire peaks and particularly Mow Cop. The present-day strand is a story of a long-distance love affair between two teenagers, Tom and Jan. The other two strands are of an altogether bloodier nature, being respectively concerned with a lost regiment of Roman soldiers (five in number and dwindling all the time) and the inhabitants of a village near Mow Cop who are battening down the hatches to await an attack by Irish troops during the English Civil War. Eventually all three sets of characters converge around Mow Cop, though not at the same time obviously.
As you can imagine, the psychogeography of the Cheshire landscape, and especially the Pennines, gets a lot of attention in this book. The three plot strands end up being interlinked by the young couples' discovery of old artefacts belonging to the previous incumbents of Mow Cop, and there is some good description of the places Jan and Tom haunt as they scour the countryside around Crewe looking for somewhere to tryst in seclusion and quiet. However, Garner pays more attention to the psychological interaction between characters, especially Jan and Tom, who have a rather fractious relationship that is both typical of adolescent romance and also quite singular, mainly due to Tom, who is clever and a bit strange and given to terrible class anxiety (he shares a caravan with his parents; Jan is the neglected daughter of famous doctors.) And there's a thin sparkling seam of astrophysics woven in too, as the title implies.
Red Shift is a very short book - barely a hundred pages - and a surprising amount of it is dialogue, fast-moving and choppy, as Jan and Tom explore the fault lines of their relationship in tense verbal to-and-fros that occasionally explode into something more dramatic! In the sections set in the past, there are a lot of old English expressions, which can make it a bit hard to follow, and indeed Garner's writing is almost maddeningly terse and cryptic sometimes. I'm afraid I'm still not entirely sure what Tom's massive Dark Secret revealed to Jan at the end of the novel, is actually meant to be, though I have a few theories! In this Garner reminds me quite a lot of John Gordon, one of my favourite authors of supernatural and YA fiction.
The same is true of Thursbitch, which if anything is even harder to get a handle on than Red Shift - much of the olde-worlde dialogue is barely comprehensible to the modern reader. Again, there are two plot strands, one in the past and one in the present. One is about a packman - the 16th-century equivalent of a travelling salesman - called John Turner who lives in a little village near Mow Cop. Far from the reach of the Church, the whole village sometimes engages in pagan rituals and it devolves to John to perform a fertility rite involving the summoning of a white bull and the consumption of heroic quantities of magic mushrooms. We also see John wrestling with himself and with the conflicting pulls of town and country, home and abroad, paganism and organised religion. He is mobile where everyone around him is settled, and that makes him interesting. The other strand concerns a couple of friends, a male and a female geologist, who are now exploring the land Turner lived on centuries later with an expert eye. We don't know much about this couple at first but their background fills in bit by bit until we're presented with quite a tragic, but also quietly uplifting, picture of human mortality and the love people feel for nature. Again, Thursbitch is a concise book, heavy on short, sharp bursts of dialogue and with very little exposition in the traditional sense. I did think it was a bit easier to grasp the covert themes than it was in Red Shift however.
Unlike The Owl Service (which remains my favourite Garner book) I wouldn't recommend either Red Shift or Thursbitch to everyone. There is no exciting supernatural plot like in The Owl Service and to really enjoy them you'd need an abiding love of nature and an interest in the pagan history of our isle to see you through these at times rather challenging novels. But they do reward the careful reader with a unique vision of a special part of Britain and some trenchant psychological and social insights. Where Thursbitch is concerned, I recommend you buy the hardback second-hand as it is very nicely made with a pretty jacket, and should only be a couple of quid via the Fantastic Fiction website! While you wait for it to arrive, you can look at some pictures of the featured countryside here on the unofficial Alan Garner website - quite apart from anything else, it'll really help you make sense of some of the descriptions of weirdly-shaped rocks and gives you a better picture of the lie of the land!
Red Shift is a short but complex novel about the trials of adolescence and is made up of three entwining plot strands, each taking place at a different time in history but set around the same place, the Cheshire peaks and particularly Mow Cop. The present-day strand is a story of a long-distance love affair between two teenagers, Tom and Jan. The other two strands are of an altogether bloodier nature, being respectively concerned with a lost regiment of Roman soldiers (five in number and dwindling all the time) and the inhabitants of a village near Mow Cop who are battening down the hatches to await an attack by Irish troops during the English Civil War. Eventually all three sets of characters converge around Mow Cop, though not at the same time obviously.
As you can imagine, the psychogeography of the Cheshire landscape, and especially the Pennines, gets a lot of attention in this book. The three plot strands end up being interlinked by the young couples' discovery of old artefacts belonging to the previous incumbents of Mow Cop, and there is some good description of the places Jan and Tom haunt as they scour the countryside around Crewe looking for somewhere to tryst in seclusion and quiet. However, Garner pays more attention to the psychological interaction between characters, especially Jan and Tom, who have a rather fractious relationship that is both typical of adolescent romance and also quite singular, mainly due to Tom, who is clever and a bit strange and given to terrible class anxiety (he shares a caravan with his parents; Jan is the neglected daughter of famous doctors.) And there's a thin sparkling seam of astrophysics woven in too, as the title implies.
Red Shift is a very short book - barely a hundred pages - and a surprising amount of it is dialogue, fast-moving and choppy, as Jan and Tom explore the fault lines of their relationship in tense verbal to-and-fros that occasionally explode into something more dramatic! In the sections set in the past, there are a lot of old English expressions, which can make it a bit hard to follow, and indeed Garner's writing is almost maddeningly terse and cryptic sometimes. I'm afraid I'm still not entirely sure what Tom's massive Dark Secret revealed to Jan at the end of the novel, is actually meant to be, though I have a few theories! In this Garner reminds me quite a lot of John Gordon, one of my favourite authors of supernatural and YA fiction.
The same is true of Thursbitch, which if anything is even harder to get a handle on than Red Shift - much of the olde-worlde dialogue is barely comprehensible to the modern reader. Again, there are two plot strands, one in the past and one in the present. One is about a packman - the 16th-century equivalent of a travelling salesman - called John Turner who lives in a little village near Mow Cop. Far from the reach of the Church, the whole village sometimes engages in pagan rituals and it devolves to John to perform a fertility rite involving the summoning of a white bull and the consumption of heroic quantities of magic mushrooms. We also see John wrestling with himself and with the conflicting pulls of town and country, home and abroad, paganism and organised religion. He is mobile where everyone around him is settled, and that makes him interesting. The other strand concerns a couple of friends, a male and a female geologist, who are now exploring the land Turner lived on centuries later with an expert eye. We don't know much about this couple at first but their background fills in bit by bit until we're presented with quite a tragic, but also quietly uplifting, picture of human mortality and the love people feel for nature. Again, Thursbitch is a concise book, heavy on short, sharp bursts of dialogue and with very little exposition in the traditional sense. I did think it was a bit easier to grasp the covert themes than it was in Red Shift however.
Unlike The Owl Service (which remains my favourite Garner book) I wouldn't recommend either Red Shift or Thursbitch to everyone. There is no exciting supernatural plot like in The Owl Service and to really enjoy them you'd need an abiding love of nature and an interest in the pagan history of our isle to see you through these at times rather challenging novels. But they do reward the careful reader with a unique vision of a special part of Britain and some trenchant psychological and social insights. Where Thursbitch is concerned, I recommend you buy the hardback second-hand as it is very nicely made with a pretty jacket, and should only be a couple of quid via the Fantastic Fiction website! While you wait for it to arrive, you can look at some pictures of the featured countryside here on the unofficial Alan Garner website - quite apart from anything else, it'll really help you make sense of some of the descriptions of weirdly-shaped rocks and gives you a better picture of the lie of the land!
