Alan Garner: C or D?

*A good writer but an idiot critic. She once claimed that you could tell that a book was great if you could remember the names of three characters in it!

There's other stuff going on in them too, obviously. I read the 'grownup' (i mean, the 'kids' trilogy is all about death and religion) ones recently and liked them a whole lot, although I think in terms of narrative and also for uh sense of wonder, or whatever the term SF hedz use is, the 'kids' three might be better. it's been a while and i need to reread them.

(And Garner I haven't read since junior school so him I need to look up)

(does anyone in this bitch like Joan Aiken?)

i just found and started rereading red shift: the first scene is so teeth-grindingly horrible — in a good-writing way i guess — that i think i never properly engaged with it as a teen; anyway there's scads of it i had totally forgotten

'The Owl Service' - the superb tv version of which I DO remember banging on abt on some ILE thread or other - is still my fave: I have a nice hardback ex-library copy from Cleeve Park School (wherever that is), w/ a cool 60s dustcover and some v. pretty endpapers. (The H/C of 'Red Shift also has a gd spooky cov and mystical alphabetical endpapers.)

well, from my very dim childhood memories i'm gonna say classic (it stuck in my brain this long)

I think I would have done - did you not have a 'pregnancy project' in primary school?

Hey, so there's a new sequel to Weirdstone of Brismagen/Moon of Gomrath out. Who knew. Anyone read it?

Backlisted podcast informs me he has a new one out! Had totally assumed he was dead I have to admit.

I've been listneing to ti as an audiobook. It's suitably weird.

bit lazy of me here but my book-copy of the owl service is hidden away in an unpacked box and the 1970 TV show (which i'm rewatching) is a bit undecodable on this particular point that is bothering me, so i am throwing it open to ilx

Blodeuwedd is Nancy is Alison (red circuit)
Gronw is Bertram is Roger (green circuit)
Lleu is Huw is Gwyn (black circuit)

margaret is always offstage in book and TV series, and her class digust is very much the motor of the hateful energy -- but does she also have an analogy in the mabinogian myth? (does this matter?)

Had a quick re-read: I think you'd have to squint pretty hard to see a clear Margaret equivalent in the myth - Blodeuwedd doesn't have a mother (she's made from flowers and meadowsweet and whatnot); you could argue that class disgust and gender relations work to set the story going in the way that rape, war and patriarchy do in the myth I suppose.

Seems to me that the myth is imprinted on the place and will take up whoever's there, no matter how revolting their clumping Englishness is in context, but the book doesn't seem to try to extend that past those three roles, it's just needs the three of them and the valley.

yes i think that's right -- i think despite her "off-stageness" in the TV version she feels more present, because of the nature of the medium and maybe of some of the editing choices (she's up those stairs, she's about to use thesebinoculars etc… ) so i feeling "wait does she also have a preset role?" -- but if she does it's only as another part of the possessed furniture and landscape focusing the energies into the triangle

i found this 1970s essay on-line, which somewhat pedantically explores how the stories we know (about the triangles we know) actually fit the pattern, arguing that they kind of don't (e.g. gwyn's and alison's mutual but basically innocent teenage interest is hardly blodeuwedd's and gronw's actual sexual affair etc) except it also somewhat halfbaconlyheartedly tries to fold in the triangle of margaret clive and the "birmingham belle"?

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien , C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Volume 4 Number 4, 6-15-1977, also available here

I ended up reading his recentish one. Very unique experience as it seemed both a) aimed at children but b) exploring a world of 1970's rurality and vintage comics no current child would have any relation to. Uncompromising I guess in that it refuses to acknowledge the aging of its target audience.

treacle walker? it’s on my shelf to read. strandloper was a bit of a curate’s egg.

not read owl service since 20s but mark’s post made me want to have a skim.

i enjoyed treacle walker but i did have to read it twice (i concur with daniel's summary)

boneland as the third in the brisingamen/gomrath trilogy is an ever stranger fit, tho there i think the same uncompromisingness is by contrast insisting on the aging of the (original) readership -- it's a grimly intense and strange book, approaching the same characters and events 50 years on

I'm a 1980s child and can barely connect to Garner's world!

I really recommend the Robert Powell audiobook of Treacle Walker. I find Garner so difficult that reading the books can be a choppy experience as I keep having to stop and think and decode. With Powell reading, it's easier to surrender to the vibe rather than (mostly fruitlessly) try to figure things out. And it's a bit less ponderous.

I've got 3 of the 4 stone book quartet readings on vinyl that Garner did for Argo in the 70s. Just missing the Aimer Gate which seems to be the priciest unfortunately. Should get round to listening to them one of these days...