Last month, I reviewed Madeleine l'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' as the first in a series of children's books at least half a century old that were and might still be important to the genre. That was science fiction, though it incorporated elements of fantasy, and this month's choice, the debut novel by Alan Garner, an underknown but much praised British author, is fantasy with much horror. Genre-hopping isn't remotely new. Like 'A Wrinkle in Time', 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen' has sat in my library since I was a kid but I had never got round to reading. Also like 'A Wrinkle in Time', I'm very happy to have finally got to it.
It was originally published in 1960, which means that it arrived relatively soon after Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' and indeed it was picked up by Collins because they were looking for more fantasy to feed a clear audience for it. In some ways, it's very similar to Tolkien, with dwarves and goblins and a wizard who always knows more than anyone else. In other ways, though, it's very different because Tolkien set his stories in an entirely imagined world, Middle Earth, while Garner placed these creatures in the British countryside, around Alderley Edge in Cheshire, and the locations the characters visit in our time, are all real. In fact, to further anchor the story in our world, Garner built it from folklore and mythology which had been transmitted through many generations of his family in the oral tradition.
The grounding to the story is the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, who are said to be sleeping beneath the earth, kept alive and well by magic, waiting for the day when England would need their services again, at which point they will awake and ride forth to save the land. Garner doesn't explicitly tie his enchanted king and knights, each with a milk white mare, to Arthurian legend, keeping his story a little more abstracted, but it's fundamentally the same thing.
The trigger to the story is that Cadellin Silverbrow, the wizard who guards these future saviours in their slumber in the dwarven caves of Fundindelve, discovers that they're a milk white mare short, a hundred and forty knights but one fewer mares, so bargains with a farmer for one, paying in as much gold, silver and precious jewels he could carry. What he could carry happened to include the titular Weirdstone, the jewel containing the heart of the white magic used to seal the knights inside the earth, so after we fast forward considerably to the present day, it's considered to be lost.
Enter Susan and Colin, two young children who have been sent to Highmost Redmanhey, the farmhouse of Gowther and Bess Mossock, who had been their nurse when they were young. Their mother has gone abroad to be with their father for six months, reasons undetermined, so they'll stay with the Mossocks. Around Susan's wrist is a bracelet which contains a family heirloom passed down through generations. I won't give you two guesses as to what else that family heirloom might be, but it takes a while for Susan to figure it out, even after meeting Cadellin and visiting Fundindelve. While Cadellin fails to notice the Weirdstone around Susan's wrist and Susan, of course, is blissfully unaware of it, the darker denizens of the area, led by a shapeshifting witch named Selina Place, realise it quickly and the children are waylaid by a band of goblins, prompting Cadellin to step in and save them.
It's here that I should point out that this is both epic fantasy, because it's set against a timeless conflict between good and evil, and low fantasy, because it's set in our real world at a time when nobody really believes in magic any more, that sort of thing having long since been relegated to folklore. That felt like a breath of fresh air, because epic fantasy is far more usually merged with high fantasy, as in Tolkien. It makes sense that someone like Neil Gaiman, author of 'Neverwhere', would be a noted fan of Garner's, because with this book, he brought the epic fantasy of Tolkien into our own world, where we don't see it because it's hidden away behind our everyday lives.
It's also here that I should point out just how much horror there is in this book. One of its most obvious successes is the imagery that pervades the story, which transcends any attempts at characterisation. It would be unfair to suggest that these characters are cardboard cutouts by any means but they're often archetypes who serve very specific set purposes in a much bigger story, like actors in a play. Outside of that story, they're all less interesting.
And that imagery is often horrific in nature, whether it's typical representations of darkness, like crows or wolves; more subdued threats, like the morthbrood, Place's coven of witches who hunt them through the snowy landscape in the innocent guise of mere hikers, or more imaginative ones like the giant troll women known as the Mara. It's also sometimes abstract, like the powerfully claustrophobic sequence in which Susan and Colin, along with a pair of heroic dwarves, attempt to escape their pursuers through a set of narrow and winding tunnels that lead out of the mines. I acutely felt the danger of getting stuck at the age of fifty and change. This must have been terrifying to children. No wonder Muriel Gray called this book "a young person's introduction to horror".
I wonder if I started this as a kid but gave it up the way I remember giving up 'The Sword in the Stone', T. H. White's Arthurian saga which is also very much in scope for this project. I would have been more open to this after moving north at the age of eleven to rural Yorkshire, because it's very much a rural story in which free range kids roam the countryside and discover something that everyone else has forgotten is there. The eleven-year-old me who had only known a town without any landscape to speak of would have seen this as unrelatable. Another factor could have been the accents, because the farmers here speak in a thick Cheshire accent, which I recognise now, not being far from what I grew up around in Yorkshire but a million miles from what I knew in Essex.
However I saw this when I first picked it up, I thoroughly enjoyed it today. The biggest successes are the imagery, which is vivid and sometimes traumatising; the folklore, primarily plucked from Norse legend but with English and Welsh myths woven in too; and the way in which the Cheshire landscape becomes a character of its own. That's a particularly powerful element; imagine if you read 'The Lord of the Rings' and were able to visit Rivendell or the Shire or Mount Doom, not as movie sets but as the actual places where the events happened. Well, you'll find the locations in this book on a map, including the Wizard Inn, Radnor Wood and the Druid's Circle, and you can visit most of them.
Garner followed his 1960 debut with a 1963 sequel, 'The Moon of Gomrath', but put his intended trilogy aside until 2012, when he completed it with 'Boneland'. He shifted to other fantasy novels like 'Elidor' and 'The Owl Service', both written in the sixties. While these are generally seen as children's books, he rejected that assumption firmly, claiming to "have never written for children", and I could see this being seen just as easily as a folk horror novel for adults as a fantasy novel for kids. ~~ Hal C F Astell
For more titles by Alan Garner click here
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