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Shaman's Story
Dec 2011
Strandloper - Alan Garner - Harvill Press, 1997
* * * *
Despite my huge admiration for the author, I somehow missed this novel when it first came out, so was glad when a friend kindly bought it for me (thanks Dave!). Reading it after Thursbitch is, however, a disconcerting experience, like listening to the movements of a symphony in the wrong order. For if Thursbitch is a grand finale, this is definitely the preceding adagio - slow, technically simple, and for me, as someone who responds more to up-tempo sophistication than to deep feeling, relatively uninteresting. Its plot, based (apparently) on the life of a real person, is more straightforward than most Alan Garner novels, with no clever parallel stories or crossovers in time or space (except in one important respect, to which I'll return). And to be honest, I miss them.
The protagonist is Will Buckley, a young man whom we first encounter engaging in some decidedly paganistic rituals in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century rural Cheshire. He is chosen by a woman called Esther Cumberbatch to become shick-shack, a sort of King of the May, and becomes enamoured of her. This is unfortunate because Edward, the local squire's son, is also interested. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, William is arrested at a ceremony on Oak Apple Day for the crime of cutting branches from the squire's trees and is sentenced to be transported to Australia.
The following scene shows Garner at his best, vividly evoking the horrors of a transport ship almost entirely through dialogue. The subsequent Australian section, however, lost me. It is poetic but the mindset and culture it describes are too alien.
This is unfortunate because the chief theme of the novel - and apologies for the spoiler - is shamanism as a universal means of engaging with the natural world, and for me this didn't really work. I kept getting distracted by concepts that are not explained, like "singing" places in the landscape. Normally I find Garner's use of obscure language and extreme editing an effective way of enabling the reader to feel rather than simply read his stories, but here they worked too well. It seems I need the cultural referents of British landscape and folklore to decode his prose.
The book does eventually find its way back to its beginning, but the emotional impact of the ending was blunted by the bewilderment that preceded it. So for me this was not an entirely successful experiment in cultural cross-over. But it is a very interesting one, and perhaps a necessary lead-in to Thursbitch. Just read it before, not after.
Strandloper - Alan Garner - Harvill Press, 1997
* * * *
Despite my huge admiration for the author, I somehow missed this novel when it first came out, so was glad when a friend kindly bought it for me (thanks Dave!). Reading it after Thursbitch is, however, a disconcerting experience, like listening to the movements of a symphony in the wrong order. For if Thursbitch is a grand finale, this is definitely the preceding adagio - slow, technically simple, and for me, as someone who responds more to up-tempo sophistication than to deep feeling, relatively uninteresting. Its plot, based (apparently) on the life of a real person, is more straightforward than most Alan Garner novels, with no clever parallel stories or crossovers in time or space (except in one important respect, to which I'll return). And to be honest, I miss them.
The protagonist is Will Buckley, a young man whom we first encounter engaging in some decidedly paganistic rituals in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century rural Cheshire. He is chosen by a woman called Esther Cumberbatch to become shick-shack, a sort of King of the May, and becomes enamoured of her. This is unfortunate because Edward, the local squire's son, is also interested. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, William is arrested at a ceremony on Oak Apple Day for the crime of cutting branches from the squire's trees and is sentenced to be transported to Australia.
The following scene shows Garner at his best, vividly evoking the horrors of a transport ship almost entirely through dialogue. The subsequent Australian section, however, lost me. It is poetic but the mindset and culture it describes are too alien.
This is unfortunate because the chief theme of the novel - and apologies for the spoiler - is shamanism as a universal means of engaging with the natural world, and for me this didn't really work. I kept getting distracted by concepts that are not explained, like "singing" places in the landscape. Normally I find Garner's use of obscure language and extreme editing an effective way of enabling the reader to feel rather than simply read his stories, but here they worked too well. It seems I need the cultural referents of British landscape and folklore to decode his prose.
The book does eventually find its way back to its beginning, but the emotional impact of the ending was blunted by the bewilderment that preceded it. So for me this was not an entirely successful experiment in cultural cross-over. But it is a very interesting one, and perhaps a necessary lead-in to Thursbitch. Just read it before, not after.