| Alan Garner | |
|---|---|
Garner in 2011 |
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| Born | Alan Garner 17 October 1934 Congleton, Cheshire, England |
| Occupation | Author, Folklorist |
| Nationality | English |
| Genres | Fantasy, low fantasy, folklore |
| Notable work(s) | The Weirdstone of Brisingamen The Moon of Gomrath Elidor The Owl Service |
| Spouse(s) | Griselda Garner |
Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his work in children's fantasy and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.
Born into a working class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore into its plot. It was followed by a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), although Garner never produced the envisioned third part of the trilogy. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973).
Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work.
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"I had to get aback [to familial ways of doing things], by using skills that had been denied to my ancestors; but I had nothing that they would have called worthwhile. My ability was in language and languages. I had to use that, somehow. And writing was a manual craft. But what did I know that I could write about? I knew the land."
Garner was born in the front room of his grandmother's house in Congleton, Cheshire, on 17 October 1934.[2] He grew up not far away, on Alderley Edge, a well-to-do rural Cheshire village that had effectively become a suburb of Manchester.[2] Growing up in a "a rural working-class family",[3] Garner's ancestry had been connected to Alderley Edge since at least the 16th century, with Alan tracing his lineage back to the death of William Garner in 1592.[4] The Garner family had passed on "a genuine oral tradition", teaching their children the folk tales about The Edge, which included a description of a king and his army of knights that slept under it, guarded by a wizard,[3] and in the mid 19th century, Alan's great-great grandfather Robert had carved the face of a bearded wizard onto the rock of a cliff next to a well that was known in local folklore as the Wizard's Well.[5] Living in this rural environment, Robert Garner and his other relatives had all been craftsmen, with each successive generation trying to "improve on, or do something different from, the previous generation."[6]
Alan's own grandfather, Joseph Garner, "could read, but didn't and so was virtually unlettered", but instead taught his grandson the various folk tales about The Edge,[3] with Alan later remarking that as a result he was "aware of [the Edge's] magic" as a child, when he would often play there with his friends.[7] The story of the king and the wizard living under the hill played an important part in the young Alan's life, becoming "deeply embedded in my psyche" and heavily influencing his later novels.[3]
Garner faced several life-threatening childhood illnesses.[2] He meanwhile went to a local village school, where he found that despite being praised for his intelligence, he was punished for speaking in his native Cheshire dialect.[2] Moving on, he went on to attend Manchester Grammar School,[2] before proceeding to study Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. Garner was the first member of his family to receive anything more than a basic education, although he noted that this resulted in him being removed from his "cultural background" and led to something of a schism with other members of his family, who "could not cope with me, and I could not cope with" them.[3]
In 1957, Garner purchased Toad Hall, a Late Mediaeval building in Blackden, seven miles away from Alderley Edge. In the late 19th century the Hall had been divided into two agricultural labourers' cottages, but Garner obtained both for a total of £670, and proceeded to convert it back into a single home.[8]
It was at Toad Hall that Garner set about writing his first novel, which would be titled The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley. Set in Alderley Edge, it revolved around two children, Susan and Collin, who are sent to live in the area with their mother's old nurse maid, Bess, and her husband, Gowther Mossock. Setting about to explore the Edge, they discover a race of malevolent creatures, the svart alfar, who dwell in the Edge's abandoned mines and who seem intent on capturing them, until they are rescued by the wizard Cadellin who reveals that the forces of darkness are amassing at the Edge in search of the titular "weirdstone of Brisingamen". Whilst engaged in writing in his spare time, Garner attempted to gain employment as a teacher, but soon gave that up, believing that "I couldn't write and teach; the energies were too similar", and so began working as a general labourer for four years, remaining unemployed for much of that time.[3]
Garner sent his debut novel to the publishing company Collins, where it was picked up by the company's head, Sir William Collins, who was on the look out for new fantasy novels following on from the recent commercial and critical success of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).[9] Garner, who would go on to become a personal friend of Collins, would later relate that "Billy Collins saw a title with funny-looking words in it on the stockpile, and he decided to publish it."[10] Following its release in 1960, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen proved to be a "resounding success... both critically and commercially", later being described as "a tour de force of the imagination, a novel that showed almost every writer who came afterwards what it was possible to achieve in novels ostensibly published for children."[11]
"As I turned toward writing, which is partially intellectual in its function, but is primarily intuitive and emotional in its execution, I turned towards that which was numinous and emotional in me, and that was the legend of King Arthur Asleep Under the Hill. It stood for all that I'd had to give up in order to understand what I'd had to give up. And so my first two books, which are very poor on characterization because I was somehow numbed in that area, are very strong on imagery and landscape, because the landscape I had inherited along with the legend."
With his first book published, Garner abandoned his work as a labourer and gained a job as a freelance television reporter, living a "hand to mouth" lifestyle on a "shoestring" budget.[3] He also worked on a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which would be known as The Moon of Gomrath.
The Moon of Gomrath also revolves around the adventures of Colin and Susan, with the latter being possessed by a malevolent creature called the Brollachan who has recently entered the world. With the help of the wizard Cadellin, the Brollachan is exorcised, but Susan's soul also leaves her body, being sent to another dimension, leading Colin to find a way to bring it back.
In a later interview given in 1989, Garner admitted that he had left scope for a third book following the adventures of Collin and Susan, envisioning a trilogy, but that he had intentionally decided not to write it, instead moving on to write something different.[3]
Set in contemporary Manchester, Elidor told the story of four children who enter into a broken down Victorian church, only to find a portal to the magical realm of Elidor. Here, they are entrusted by King Malebron to help rescue four treasures which have been stolen by the forces of evil who are attempting to take control of Elidor. Successfully doing so, the children return home to Manchester with the treasures, but are pursued by the evil forces who need them to seal their victory.
The Owl Service was set in Wales, and used as its basis a story in the Mediaeval Welsh epic, the Mabinogion.
The Stone Book (which received the Phoenix Award in 1996) is poetic in style and inspiration. Garner pays particular attention to language, and strives to render the cadence of the Cheshire tongue in modern English. This he explains by the sense of anger he felt on reading "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight": the footnotes would not have been needed by his father. This and other aspects of his writing are the subject of Neil Philip's A Fine Anger, (Collins, 1981), which offers a detailed analysis of his work.
In a 1989 interview, Garner noted that whilst writing The Stone Book Quartet had been "exhausting", it had been "the most rewarding of everything" he'd done to date.[3]
1996 saw the publication of Garner's novel Strandloper.
His collection of essays and public talks, The Voice That Thunders, contains much autobiographical material (including an account of his life with bipolar disorder), as well as critical reflection upon folklore and language, literature and education, the nature of myth and time. Garner is an accomplished public speaker.
Garner's next novel, Thursbitch, was published in 2003.
Garner's latest novel, Boneland, is set for release in 2012.
"I have four filing cabinets of correspondence from readers, and over the years the message is clear and unwavering. Readers under the age of eighteen read what I write with more passion, understanding, and clarity of perception than do adults. Adults bog down, claim that I'm difficult, obscurantist, wilful, and sometimes simply trying to confuse. I'm not; I'm just trying to get the simple story simply told... I didn't consciously set out to write for children, but somehow I connect with them. I think that's something to do with my psychopathology, and I'm not equipped to evaluate it."
Although Garner's early work is often labelled as "children's literature", Garner himself rejects such a description, informing one interviewer that "I certainly have never written for children" but that instead he has always written purely for himself.[3] Neil Philip, in his critical study of Garner's work (1981), commented that up till that point, "Everything Alan Garner has published has been published for children",[12] although he went on to relate that "It may be that Garner's is a case" where the division between children's and adult's literature is "meaningless" and that his fiction is instead "enjoyed by a type of person, no matter what their age."[13]
The English author and academic Charles Butler noted that Garner was attentive to the "geological, archaeological and cultural history of his settings, and careful to integrate his fiction with the physical reality beyond the page."[14] As a part of this, Garner had included maps of Alderley Edge in both The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath.[15] Garner has spent much time investigating the areas that he deals with in his books; writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1968, Garner commented that in preparation for writing his book Elidor:
In the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published by HarperCollins in 2010, several notable British fantasy novelists praised Garner and his work. Susan Cooper related that "The power and range of Alan Garner's astounding talent has grown with every book he's written", whilst David Almond called him one of Britain's "greatest writers" whose works "really matter".[17] Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, went further when he remarked that:
Another British fantasy author, Neil Gaiman, claimed that "Garner's fiction is something special" in that it was "smart and challenging, based in the here and the now, in which real English places emerged from the shadows of folklore, and in which people found themselves walking, living and battling their way through the dreams and patterns of myth."[19] Praise also came from Nick Lake, the editorial director of HarperCollins Children's Books, who proclaimed that "Garner is, quite simply, one of the greatest and most influential writers this country has ever produced."[20]
He was appointed OBE for services to literature in the 2001 New Year's Honours list.
| Title | Year | Publisher | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Weirdstone of Brisingamen | 1960 | Collins | |
| The Moon of Gomrath | 1963 | Collins | |
| Elidor | 1965 | Collins | |
| The Owl Service | 1967 | Collins | |
| Red Shift | 1973 | Collins | |
| Strandloper | 1996 | Harvil | |
| Thursbitch | 2003 | ||
| Boneland | 2012 |
| Title | Year | Publisher | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Guizer: A Book of Fools | 1975 | Hamilton | |
| The Stone Book Quartet | 1979 | Collins | |
| The Lad of the Gad | 1980 | Collins | |
| Fairytales of Gold | 1980 | Collins | |
| Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales | 1984 | Collins | |
| A Bag of Moonshine | 1986 | Collins | |
| Once Upon a Time | 1993 | ||
| Collected Folk Tales | 2011 | Harper Collins |
| Title | Year | Publishing information | ISBN | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Holly from the Bongs: A Nativity Play | 1966 | Collins | A play. | |
| The Old Man of Mow | 1967 | Collins | A novella, illustrated with photographs by Roger Hill. | |
| The Secret Commonwealth | 1969 | The Hamish Hamilton Book of Goblins (ed. Alan Garner) | ||
| The Breadhorse | 1975 | Collins | A poem. | |
| The Stone Book | 1976 | Collins | Republished in The Stone Book Quartet. | |
| Tom Fobble's Day | 1977 | Collins | Republished in The Stone Book Quartet. | |
| Granny Reardun | 1977 | Collins | Republished in The Stone Book Quartet. | |
| The Aimer Gate | 1978 | Collins | Republished in The Stone Book Quartet. | |
| Jack and the Beanstalk | 1992 | Collins | ||
| The Little Red Hen | 1997 | Dorling | ||
| The Well of the Wind | 1998 | Dorling | 978-0-7894-2519-5. | |
| Grey Wolf, Prince Jack and the Firebird | 1998 |
Garner here reveals the commercial pressure placed upon him during the decade-long drought (at the height of the neoliberal tide) which preceded Strandloper to 'forsake "literature", and become instead a "popular" writer, cashing in on my established name by producing sequels to, and making series of, the earlier books'.[23] Garner feared that 'making series...would render sterile the existing work, the life that produced it, and bring about my artistic and spiritual death'[24] – on analogy perhaps with Conan Doyle's dictum that 'the ruin of every novelist who has come up has been effected by driving him into a groove'[25] and felt unable to comply.