Boneland: From the author of the 2022 Booker Shortlisted Treacle Walker

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Possibly as a way of reminding us things should never be taken entirely seriously, to alert us to the Cosmic Joker being active, there is an allusion to a very-well known song about mental stability by Genesis. Garner also writes from British, specifically English, folklore and traditional themes.

Ursula K Le Guin has just reviewed the book for the Guardian, and like just about everything she writes, her review is compulsory reading. She points out why the book is difficult: "It treads on risky ground. Readers looking for more than mere adventure expect characters whose behaviour and reactions are humanly comprehensible. Boneland is also an echo of " The Waste Land" of T. S. Eliot, a place of broken dreams and dissillusionment. My main issue is that the characters of Susan and Colin remain so empty and lifeless. Halfway through the book I still have no idea about who they are, how they roll, what's going on inside them, how they look like, how their personalities are. My initial reaction was: 'Wow, this is some piece of badly written fiction!'" Well, for what it's worth, I've read Boneland four times now, and shall read it again soon, not because it was hard work (which it wasn't) but because I wanted to. Each reading is like a flower opening to reveal more petals. Garner says that the focus of his research for the book was "the universal myth of the sleeping hero". [1] He has written his own experience of psychotherapy into the novel. "Go to the pain", he was told by his therapist, "go to where it hurts the most, and say whatever it tells you." [2] An important item towards the end of the book is a Lower Palaeolithic hand axe. Garner keeps such an axe in his study, [3] although his is from the Acheulean culture while the one in the book is from the even older Abbevillian culture.

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Anyway, that's all by the by. We've done that bit (although of course, further opinions are very welcome) and, more to the point, we have something new and exciting and intriguingly difficult to discuss: Boneland. Garner describes the experience of reading the North-West Midlands dialect of Sir Gawain for the first time as a rehabilitation of his ‘natural speech’, following the imposed Standard Received English at Manchester Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford:

Genre Shift: The emphasis moves from outright fantasy to a more nuanced psychological drama with overtones of science fiction. A. In principle, I have no objection. But whereas an e-book is simply the text and nothing more, to hold a physical book, the product of many skills, is a complex experience, involving touch and smell and memory. I value the fact that there are books in my library that have passed through other hands, been read by other eyes, spanning more than 400 years; and they still work. I can't imagine a reader being able to form a personal relationship with an e-book. The next day, they were walking together across Castle Hill, an iron age hill fort in Huddersfield. “Just inconsequentially, Bob told me about a historical character, a local tramp called Walter Helliwell, known as Treacle Walker. He was a healer, claiming to be able to cure all things except jealousy. And I looked at Bob and said, ‘You remember last night? Well, just make a note that on the afternoon of Sunday 15 July 2012, you’ve given me an idea, and you’ve given me a book.”

As Homage to one who fished in the same stream and also lived in the tradition of the English storyteller, giving old stories new slants, there is a blatant reference to Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel of things beginning in stone eggs, Thud! Garner even represents the noise of flint-knapping as " Tak, Tak, Tak, Tak, Tak..."

Meg (who's loving and protective in her relations with Colin) seems to be the mother aspect of the triple Moon goddess, along with Susan (the maiden) and the Morrigan (the crone -- note that the Celtic Morrigan was sometimes depicted as a trinity). The Moon of Gomrath was already hinting at this kind of relationship in the bracelets worn by Angharad Goldenhand, Susan and the Morrigan. This might mean that Meg is Angharad -- but on the other hand Colin's view that Susan has ridden away to the mythical (not the astronomical) Pleiades would seem to be correct, so she and the illusory Susan may be his personal construction of the goddess trinity rather than an external truth. The idea had to “brew nebulously” for some time, derailed after Garner’s work on an oral history project with Manchester University prompted the fragmentary childhood memoir Where Shall We Run To?, elements from which appear in Treacle Walker. Garner’s contribution to the oral work was his memory of his grandfather’s account of the legend of Alderley Edge, in which a farmer sells his white mare to an old man who turns out to be a wizard and leads him to a sleeping army of knights inside the hill – the basis for Weirdstone. “It was his truth, a part of him, which he passed on,” writes Garner. “Here is how he told it. And it is the manner of the telling that is important.And the biggest, most obvious, elephant-in-the-room Shout-Out of all: to Neil Gaiman's essay on what happens when the child protaganist of a fantasy novel grows up having suffered loss and change and dislocation - The Problem Of Susan. Gaiman is writing about Susan Pevensie in C. S. Lewis' Narnia. But Susan Whisterfield entered a less forgiving and certainly non-Christian "Narnia".... Precocious 12 yr old (there were many): Mr Garner, wouldn’t you say that you are very much influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien? It’s one of those layered texts which test your ways of reading. Colin’s encounters with Meg, or with colleagues at Jodrell Bank, invite a headlong ride; you can hardly keep up with the pace. The ‘Watcher’ strand is so tightly interwoven, so surprising in its choice of individual words, so allusive to previous passages, that it needs a kind of reflective, circular reading and rereading demanded by the images and echoes of a poem or a novel such as Heart of Darkness.