Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  “Even at the age of eleven, I knew these characters, or something like them.”

  Garner’s world, however, is not some place you get to through a looking glass or a wardrobe: it’s here, all around you – or at least it’s all around you if you happen to be in a certain part of Cheshire. Selena Place, the evil witch, first turns up in a car, offering the children a lift, and you only twig she’s one of them when she starts muttering in Latin. The svarts erupt into daylight at exactly the same place on the Edge where on another day the children see picnicking tourists with a portable radio. But once into that other world, there’s no going back: ‘You are in our world now,’ Fenodyree says to Gowther, ‘and without us you will not regain your own, even though it lies at your feet.’ And it’s a world of galloping paranoia: the jolly Cheshire neighbour you have known all your life may be a spy for the morthbrood.

  The terrific pace of the novel stems from the structure: most of it is a chase. The evil creatures are after Colin and Susan because she is the innocent possessor of the Weirdstone, which came down to her as an heir-loom through a theft uncounted generations ago, and she wears it set in a bracelet. As I’ve remembered, the most powerful scenes are underground, in the labyrinthine copper mines. The children, later joined by the dwarfs, spy on the svarts and also battle with them, but what makes these scenes so vivid is nothing supernatural – it’s the horrible ordeal they undergo trying to find an exit from the mines. They have lemonade, sandwiches and lamps, but supplies and batteries could run out while they are still going in and out of dead ends, round in circles, and through passages that get more and more insanely difficult and dangerous. No stalactites or stalagmites, no glow worms, but a certain grim beauty in the colour of water-stained copper ‘from the palest turquoise to the deepest sea-green’ and caverns so vast that ‘at the centre… the children could imagine themselves to be trudging along a sandy beach on a windless and starless night.’

  “The terrific pace of the novel stems from the structure: most of it is a chase.”

  They cross a mineshaft on a rotten, narrow plank. They jump from one side of a shaft to another. They climb or slide down shafts with sheer sides. They swim through flooded tunnels on their backs, their noses just emerging from the water and bumping on the roof. They swim through one tunnel that is completely flooded, without any idea how far they must go before they reach air. The most horrible tunnel to me is nine inches high and silted up: ‘They lay full length, walls, floor and roof fitting them like a second skin. Their heads were turned to one side, for in any other position the roof pressed their mouths into the sand and they could not breathe. The only way to advance was to pull with the fingertips and to push with the toes…’ By the time they finally break out onto the hillside, I’m ready to scream like a newborn.

  You might think it hard to keep the momentum going, but what Garner does is to replace claustro-phobia with agoraphobia. The chase continues, and now the fugitives are crossing open fields in snow, trying to hide from the morthbrood spies, who are everywhere. The climax comes when the children and dwarves are waiting in vain for Cadellin and surrounded by the baddies, and although it’s not quite the end of the world, as I’d remembered, it might as well be: at this point things happen almost too fast, and the great wolf, the emissary of Nastrond, descends like a giant cloud from the north to swallow them all… and finally ‘There was joy, and many tears.’

  Hills End by Australian writer Ivan Southall tells of seven children and their teacher who are trapped inside a cave while a fierce cyclonic storm destroys their town. As they deal with their loss and struggle to continue living, I read of the survival of the spirit as much as the species.

  I wondered how I would fare if my parents were killed. Both had been the only survivors of their large families, all killed in the Holocaust. They cried whenever I asked them to tell me their stories, and I soon learned that my questions were not welcome. I stopped asking. It was better to read and to imagine what I would do, the fiction introducing the experiences I could never learn from my parents.

  Hills End was a survival manual but it pointed me to something else – a small shaft of feeling that being alone might even be a kind of liberation and a blessed relief from the observation and judgement of my parents, and the burdens they carried.

  Ramona Koval

  I wonder what has happened to that smiling young fellow on the back cover. Is he still living at Toad Hall? I never read any of his other books as a child, because I never found out about them; but I’m aware now that he’s a celebrated writer for children in England, seen as a successor to E. Nesbit and C. S. Lewis and as a predecessor to writers such as Philip Pullman.

  Well, he’s eighty-four, still with wife Griselda, has five children, has received an OBE and is the author of eight novels, eight short-story collections and nine other books: the latest, out in 2018, is Where Shall We Run To?, a memoir about his wartime childhood. And he’s still in Toad Hall, a medieval house on top of a 4000-year-old burial mound. He also lives in the neighbouring Old Medicine House, a sixteenth-century apothecary’s shop he and Griselda transported to the site, and they have founded a trust to preserve the site and educate young people about the past. Weirdly, the whole complex sits next door to a spectacular twentieth-century triumph of technology, the Jodrell Bank Observatory.

  I don’t know how many people there are who, given the choice, return to the landscape of their childhood and live there for the next sixty-one years. It might have something to do with Garner’s forced exile. As he describes in his memoir, he left his family home on a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, then on to Oxford. The price he paid for his education was rejection: his family and friends, his whole community, ostracised him. His mother was shocked when he began to develop his own mind, he told The Guardian’s Alex Preston: ‘The all-embracing loving mother became the destroying harpy. That destroying harpy existed until her death.’

  The pain is still with him; perhaps his return to Alderley Edge and the way he has used it in his fiction is a continuing attempt to heal that rift.

  Although he’s written for adults, Garner is best known as a writer of fantasy stories for children, and despite wide acclaim, it turns out that Pullman, that indefatigable champion of children’s books, doesn’t think he’s celebrated enough. ‘Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful,’ he wrote for the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. ‘Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street-names. But that’s the way with us: our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires.’

  “Pullman, that indefatigable champion of children’s books, doesn’t think he’s celebrated enough.”

  Garner’s best-known book is probably his fourth novel, The Owl Service, which won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. I’m interested to see that his second book, The Moon of Gomrath, was a sequel to Weirdstone, in which Susan is possessed by an evil spirit. He intended to write a trilogy, but astonishingly the third book, Boneland, was not published until fifty years later, in 2012. Here, apparently, we meet Colin as an adult, an astrophysicist working at Garner’s neighbouring establishment, Jodrell Bank, where he searches for Susan in the stars. It’s a book for adults, though there has long been debate about whether Garner’s books are for adults or for children, and Garner himself says he doesn’t write for children, yet seems to get the best reactions from them. ‘Readers under the age of 18 read what I write with more passion, understanding, and clarity of perception than do adults,’ he said in 1989. ‘Somehow, I connect with them.’

  “there has long been debate about whether Garner’s books are for adults or for children”

  In slip notes to a 2006 edition of Weirdstone, Garner tells some stories about t
he origins of the novel, and reveals that he explored those underground caves when he was nineteen. But the stories go back much further than that. They are all tied up with his ancestors, rural workers and craftsmen who had lived in the Alderley Edge area since the sixteenth century. In the novel, Colin and Susan come across an old well with the face of an old man, with long hair and beard, carved into a cliff. This is a real carving, made about 150 years ago by Garner’s great-great-grandfather Robert, above a centuries-old well which is known as the Wizard’s Well. Robert’s grandson Joseph told his own grandson (Alan) the legend of the army of knights sleeping under Alderley Edge, waiting for the summons to the last battle.

  And Alan’s own father taught him about the Devil. When he was four, his father took him up on the Edge to the lookout and cavern of Devil’s Grave, and told him that if he ran three times widdershins round the stone in the hole, the Devil would get him. Naturally little Alan did the run. Suddenly there was screaming, and pebbles thrown up from the hole. As Alan fled in terror, he heard two men laughing. His uncle Syd was hidden in the hole. The brothers had planned the trick: ‘They had decided that I was of an age to understand the Devil’s Grave.’ No wonder the svarts came erupting out of it twenty-two years later.

  I have the feeling that the origins of this novel have been passed on down through the family as the Weirdstone was passed on down to Susan, for who knows how many hundreds of years. But the publisher, Sir William Collins, picked it up for very contemporary reasons: he was looking for a new fantasy novel to follow on from the success of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which came out five years earlier. ‘Billy Collins saw a title with funny-looking words in it on the stockpile, and decided to publish it,’ was how Garner described it.

  Weirdstone was an instant success with critics and readers. But in the way some authors have of looking back on their first novel, Garner never seemed to think much of it. He called it ‘a fairly bad book’ and said that his first two books were ‘very poor on characterisation because I was somehow numbed in that area.’ But he also said those books were ‘very strong on imagery and landscape, because the landscape I had inherited along with the legend.’

  He was right about the imagery and landscape, but I think Garner was being too hard on himself and on Weirdstone. In no way is it ‘a fairly bad book’. There is some substance, however, to the ‘very poor on characterisation’ claim. And here I must concede one negative finding on re-reading: when you construct a tale with such a steam-engine of a plot, there are sacrifices.

  One sacrifice is depth of character: while there are little touches of humanity, and I’m particularly fond of stout Gowther, most of the people in this story are types rather than rounded individuals. Another sacrifice is lack of context, of simple explanation. Who are these odd folk dropping into the story? Who is the Stromkarl? Where does his prophecy come from? Who is Gaberlunzie? Where do those elf arrows come from? Why do the svarts talk their own language at their meetings, but in English elsewhere? What is going on with Cadellin’s long-lost brother? I’m all for a bit of mystery but there seems to have been some hasty editing and some backstory that was perhaps cut out in the interests of streamlining the tale, and this can be frustrating.

  “when you construct a tale with such a steam-engine of a plot, there are sacrifices.”

  But although this matters for me as an adult reader (yet never enough to make me want to stop reading), I remember that neither the characters nor the lack of explanations bothered me at all as a child.

  Another feeling I had to work to overcome this time, at least when I started reading, was that reluctance to enter into the dignity and solemnity of the tale and its telling, that superficially jaded deja vu reaction adults sometimes get to children’s fantasy. ‘More fucking elves,’ as C. S. Lewis was said to remark when his friend Tolkien revealed he was working on another instalment of the Middle-earth saga. Lewis was being mischievous, because he knew perfectly well that the very power of myth lies in being more of the same, and authors who use its fragments to fashion their own tales rely on that deep archetypal sense of recognition. A website on Garner’s work quotes a lecture Italo Calvino once gave on myth:

  Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. The narrator’s voice in the daily tribal assemblies is not enough to relate the myth. One needs special times and places, exclusive meetings; the words alone are not enough, and we need a whole series of signs with many meanings, which is to say a rite… To return to the storyteller of the tribe, he continues imperturbably to make his permutations of jaguars and toucans until the moment comes when one of his innocent little tales explodes into a terrible revelation: a myth, which must be recited in secret, and in a secret place… Myth tends to crystallize instantly, to fall into set patterns, to pass from the phase of myth-making into ritual, and hence out of the hands of the narrator into those of the tribal institutions responsible for the preservation and celebration of myths. The tribal system of signs is arranged in relation to myth; a certain number of signs become taboo, and the ‘secular’ storyteller can make no direct use of them. He goes on circling around them, inventing new developments in composition, until in the course of this methodical and objective labour he suddenly gets another flash of enlightenment from the unconscious and the forbidden. And this forces the tribe to change its set of signs once more.

  This seems to me a wonderful description of how the storyteller (or in our age, the writer or the film-maker) interacts with myth. We prize originality, yet something in us still craves that set pattern, that ritual into which myth so quickly falls, to which it owes much of its power, and which paradoxically can reveal something (but not too much) of the hidden story. On one level Weirdstone is an exciting adventure using a real setting and familiar stories and characters; on another, it is reaching out to pluck strings in us which we scarcely realise are there. And in our age, the people who are most receptive to the power of myth, who have not built up defences against it, who do not say ‘Aha, how Freudian,’ when they read of people squeezing through impossibly tight tunnels, are children.

  “We prize originality, yet something in us still craves that set pattern, that ritual into which myth so quickly falls”

  Alan Garner’s inaugural Garner Lecture in 2015 talks about the power of creativity in ways that echo the power of myth. Creativity, he says, is not an occupation: ‘It is service to something beyond the self. In this broad sense, it partakes of the religious.’ It is intuitive, not intellectual – which echoes the Calvino storyteller’s ‘flash of enlightenment from the unconscious and the forbidden’. It makes connections between entities that have not been seen to connect before. And above all, it is risk: ‘Heedful risk, but risk entire.’ He gives as an example, Dylan Thomas’s introduction to Collected Poems 1934–52, where the poet mentions a shepherd who was asked why he made ritual observances to the moon from within fairy rings to protect his flocks. His reply: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ Thomas goes on to say his poems were written for the love of Man and in praise of God ‘and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.’ So no matter what you believe or don’t believe, the creative act is a form of risky ritual.

  “no matter what you believe or don’t believe, the creative act is a form of risky ritual.”

  Reading too is a creative act: the reader creates her own individual book from the clues the writer provides, and no two reader interpretations will be quite the same. This resonates for me with one of the most mysterious explorations I find myself making as I journey into Weirdstone for the second time: trying to recall why I felt a strong sense of identity with the children. Because I didn’t know Colin, I didn’t know Susan. I didn’t remember anything about them, not even how many children there were. But I do recall that vicarious sense of being stuck in a tunnel, sand-wiched between miles of rock, working my way along with my fingers and toes; or coming out to a dea
d end (I remembered the colours wrong: not orange-yellow and blue, but chocolate water topped with yellow foam). On re-reading, there is nothing idiosyncratic or especially interesting about either Colin or Susan: they seem to take it in turns being brave and being paralysed with fear, particularly when crossing and recrossing the shaft on that rotten plank. This alternation seems quite natural, and it’s at least refreshing that Susan isn’t a cowering, screaming wimp just because she’s a girl. I’d go so far as to say that the lack of characterisation that the older Garner so regrets actually works in the story’s favour. Colin is Everyboy and Susan is Everygirl, and therefore it is easy for the reader to become them.

  But aren’t they just victims, swept along by huge currents outside their control? Here I realise something important. At the beginning of the story, they are indeed the puppets of destiny, because Susan just happens to have the thing that everyone wants on her wrist. Then, still fairly early in the story, the terrifying Grimnir wrests the bracelet from her and vanishes into the mist. The children are appalled and feel responsible, but Cadellin is kind: they couldn’t help it. Here is their get-out clause. They are not like Frodo Baggins, charged with a mission. Cadellin tells them they are safe now, no-one will pursue them, he will take up the fight himself and they can get back to their normal lives.

  Of course they do no such thing. After an anxious period of watching and waiting, they suspect that Grimnir is visiting the Morrigan at her house, and they make a fateful decision to go and spy through the window. Another kind of story might visit a terrible punishment on the children, with the moral that you shouldn’t go snooping when you’ve been told to stay out of the way. But The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is not that kind of story. This is the moment when the children both volunteer to cross a line, from helpless and innocent victims to active agents in the fight against evil. It doesn’t seem like such a big step at the time, and they could not have anticipated what horrors would follow, but they know they are doing something extremely dangerous, and yet they still do it. And as I read the story that first time, I crossed the line with them. I was no longer passive. I was active. It’s a tremendous feeling of exhilaration, and I realise now that I never felt manipulated into this position by the narrative; I felt I was choosing it all by myself. I was giving myself the power to stand up and be a fighter.