A Sense of Place
Jul. 24th, 2011 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselNov 2010
Thursbitch - Alan Garner - Vintage, 2004
* * * * *
Alan Garner is one of my favourite writers who has created some of my most memorable reading experiences. The Owl Service, Elidor and particularly Red Shift (possibly the most upsetting book I've ever read) all stick firmly in the mind.
One of the reasons I like him so much is because of his obvious respect for the intelligence and time of the reader. He is his own most ruthless editor, paring down the dialogue and the description to the bare minimum needed to carry the story and leaving the reader to puzzle out the emotions and the meaning of the sometimes impenetrable dialect in which the characters speak. This last can be taken so far that it becomes a distraction (as it is here), but has the interesting effect of forcing the reader to use the part of the brain normally reserved for reading the rhythms of poetry, enabling Garner to convey impressions and feelings that cannot easily be transmitted by text alone.
This technique results in strongly atmospheric novels in which a sense of power and foreboding hangs over every page. Nowhere is this more evident than in Thursbitch, and here it works particularly well. For the main character is not the four people around whom the story revolves, but the landscape itself.
Thursbitch is an isolated Cheshire valley with an unhealthy reputation. Its story is told through the lives of four characters in two timezones: in the eighteenth century, John Turner, a jagger (packman) and his wife Nan Sarah, and in the present day Sal, a geologist with failing health, and her walking companion Ian with whom she has a familiar and spiky relationship. The story opens with John Turner's death in a snowstorm on the road to his house. How did such an experienced packman come to die so close to home? And why was there a single imprint of a woman's shoe in the snow next to his body? It will take the rest of the book to find out.
If there is a criticism to be made, it is that the story is a mash-up of tropes from previous Garner novels without anything substantially new added to the mix. There are the old legends in a landscape from The Owl Service, cross-overs between worlds out of Elidor and parallel characters from Red Shift. Their familiarity means that the emotional impact is blunted compared to his earlier stories, but it is subtler and more polished.
Against that, there is the exciting prospect of seeing an author draw together the ideas of previous works into a coherent whole. It’s like the finale of a good symphony, where themes from the earlier movements are juxtaposed and tied together, creating something that is familiar and yet original. And what is brilliant about this is that the very construction of the novel illustrates what Garner is saying about landscape. A constant theme of his work has been that landscape is a living thing, ancient, vastly alien and uncaring of human existence. The parallel stories and all the other clevernesses aren't just writerly tricks, they are necessary to illuminate this strange creature.
In some respects, what Garner is doing is purest science fiction. He is taking an alien concept and using the very structure of his story to give you a feel for it, in a way that words on their own could never manage. And to do this while not forgetting the human (for both the eighteenth century and present day stories have affecting endings), and in such a small number of pages, is masterly.
Thursbitch - Alan Garner - Vintage, 2004
* * * * *
Alan Garner is one of my favourite writers who has created some of my most memorable reading experiences. The Owl Service, Elidor and particularly Red Shift (possibly the most upsetting book I've ever read) all stick firmly in the mind.
One of the reasons I like him so much is because of his obvious respect for the intelligence and time of the reader. He is his own most ruthless editor, paring down the dialogue and the description to the bare minimum needed to carry the story and leaving the reader to puzzle out the emotions and the meaning of the sometimes impenetrable dialect in which the characters speak. This last can be taken so far that it becomes a distraction (as it is here), but has the interesting effect of forcing the reader to use the part of the brain normally reserved for reading the rhythms of poetry, enabling Garner to convey impressions and feelings that cannot easily be transmitted by text alone.
This technique results in strongly atmospheric novels in which a sense of power and foreboding hangs over every page. Nowhere is this more evident than in Thursbitch, and here it works particularly well. For the main character is not the four people around whom the story revolves, but the landscape itself.
Thursbitch is an isolated Cheshire valley with an unhealthy reputation. Its story is told through the lives of four characters in two timezones: in the eighteenth century, John Turner, a jagger (packman) and his wife Nan Sarah, and in the present day Sal, a geologist with failing health, and her walking companion Ian with whom she has a familiar and spiky relationship. The story opens with John Turner's death in a snowstorm on the road to his house. How did such an experienced packman come to die so close to home? And why was there a single imprint of a woman's shoe in the snow next to his body? It will take the rest of the book to find out.
If there is a criticism to be made, it is that the story is a mash-up of tropes from previous Garner novels without anything substantially new added to the mix. There are the old legends in a landscape from The Owl Service, cross-overs between worlds out of Elidor and parallel characters from Red Shift. Their familiarity means that the emotional impact is blunted compared to his earlier stories, but it is subtler and more polished.
Against that, there is the exciting prospect of seeing an author draw together the ideas of previous works into a coherent whole. It’s like the finale of a good symphony, where themes from the earlier movements are juxtaposed and tied together, creating something that is familiar and yet original. And what is brilliant about this is that the very construction of the novel illustrates what Garner is saying about landscape. A constant theme of his work has been that landscape is a living thing, ancient, vastly alien and uncaring of human existence. The parallel stories and all the other clevernesses aren't just writerly tricks, they are necessary to illuminate this strange creature.
In some respects, what Garner is doing is purest science fiction. He is taking an alien concept and using the very structure of his story to give you a feel for it, in a way that words on their own could never manage. And to do this while not forgetting the human (for both the eighteenth century and present day stories have affecting endings), and in such a small number of pages, is masterly.