Myth meets modern science in a late masterwork brimming with ideas and imagination
Alan Garner’s novels are usually separated into his wildly successful books aimed at children – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor, The Owl Service and The Moon of Gomrath – and his adult writing – The Stone Book Quartet, Thursbitch and Strandloper, which are more difficult and quixotic, at least thematically (Garner is always an author of supremely clear and readable prose). I was speaking at an event with Ruth Ozeki and Karen Joy Fowler recently and, having mentioned Garner in my talk, was surprised that neither of them had read – or even heard of – him. They asked me where to begin and I suggested the wonderful, time-collapsing Red Shift, largely because I feel like it contains the best of each of Garner’s worlds: the magic of his children’s fiction and the emotional and philosophical complexity of his adult work.
Garner’s latest novel, Treacle Walker, also belongs in this hybrid space. It, too, is concerned with time. Indeed, it seems as though the subject of time is the theme that underpins much of his later work – how we experience it, how we might refigure or alter our relation to it. “Time is ignorance,” reads the book’s epigraph, from Carlo Rovelli, and the novel is essentially a response to this idea, seeking to ask how we would experience the world if we were able to step out of the straitjacket of time. Garner lives in a medieval medicine house on a site that has been inhabited for 10,000 years and is a stone’s throw from the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire. It should perhaps not surprise us that, again, he takes time as his subject.
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner is published by Fourth Estate (£10). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply