The Haunted Wood, page 37
But in a crucial way, and one he was to take much further, it marked a departure from its predecessors. Tolkien offered his readers a magical alternative world; Lewis invented a magical alternative world to which you could travel from this one. Garner and the fantasy writers of the sixties and seventies, though, offered a magical alternative world that existed at the same time and in the same place as the world in which we live. They re-enchanted the ordinary, so that the rabbit-hole was always all around us and, in Auden’s words, a crack in the teacup opened a lane to the land of the dead.
Garner created a syncretic mythology from a pick-n-mix of names and motifs from Norse, Welsh, Irish and Anglo-Saxon myths; and then rooted that patchwork mythos in a real landscape: Alderley Edge, in Cheshire, where he grew up. Where his great predecessor invented a magical Middle-earth that might fleetingly echo our own, Garner invented one that coexisted with our world: a palimpsest in which the magical and the mundane share space. As Neil Gaiman puts it, in Garner’s work “real English places emerged from the shadows of folklore, and […] people found themselves walking, living and battling their way through the dreams and patterns of myth.”*
From the point of view of a child reader, it became thrillingly imaginable that you, like his protagonists, might find yourself the central figure in a drama of cosmic importance taking place in a landscape as familiar to you as home. Garner describes himself as writing “under the discipline of Ordnance Survey grid references: you may not believe that this happened – but I can show you where it didn’t.”
There’s a fine comic example of this in Weirdstone, when the protagonists have a rendezvous with the wizard “on the summit of Shuttlingslow yonder at dawn on the morning of the fourth day from this.” The excellently sensible farmer’s wife Bess – she’s ironing one of the dwarves’ tunics at the time – injects a welcome pragmatism into proceedings:
‘You say as you’ve to get our Bridestone to the top of Shuttlingslow by Friday morning? Well, that wunner be difficult. You two con stay here, if you’ve a mind to, and catch a bus from Macclesfield to Wildboarclough, and then all you’ll have to do is climb up the hill and meet your wizard.’
‘We must take no chances,’ said Fenodyree. ‘That would be a dangerous course; we shall go on foot.’
‘Well, I don’t see it, myself,’ sniffed Bess.
The later books are often thick with authentic Cheshire dialect but have none of that Giblet-Son-Of-Gimlet nonsense. From Weirdstone’s sequel The Moon of Gomrath (1963) onward, there starts to creep a register that feels closer kin to Browning’s “Childe Roland” than to The Hobbit. “Colin […] grabbed at the hand. But though it looked like a hand, it felt like a hoof.” Or: “The bridge itself was the worst part. It was low, and the air stank of slime, and Susan fell against things that moved away from her in the darkness.”
Two things in particular seem to me to shape Garner’s work. The first is biographical. Born in 1934, he was of the first generation who benefited from the selective grammar-school education provided for by the 1944 Education Act. Winning a free place at Manchester Grammar School and going on to Oxford to study classics, Garner was the first of his family to receive a higher education, and, much as it launched him into the world, it also made him a “pariah.”*
School was “the only place I could be myself”; but being himself meant alienation from his origins.
His experience tracks a deep shift in the experience of growing up in the middle of the twentieth century in Britain. The hierarchical, geographically limited pre-war society was fissuring yet further. Cleverness, success in the eleven-plus, could send you to grammar school, then to university, and into a world that would have been unavailable, and often incomprehensible, to your parents and grandparents. Garner’s own grandfather was an unlettered blacksmith, and it was sitting with him in the darkness of the forge that the seven-year-old Garner first heard the local legends – among them the idea that a wizard guarded a magical army of sleeping knights under the hill – that would feed his fiction.
That gives a special poignancy to the stories that Garner has woven and continues to weave around Alderley Edge. The here and now, and the land of lost content, are one and the same thing. The Garner who has lived his whole long life in the place he grew up was also exiled from that place by his education. His mythologizing of the Edge is at once an act of lament and of reparation. It became Garner’s version of the beautiful garden Alice glimpses down the rabbit-hole.
The second stream that fed Garner’s creative project was neither literary nor mythological, but scientific: his growing interest in theoretical physics. The mind-bending discoveries of the first years of the century were trickling out into the wider world in the post-war period. Werner Heisenberg talked in the 1950s about the “Copenhagen Interpretation,” and Hugh Everett’s many-worlds theory was first published (though it was widely ignored or ridiculed at first) in 1957. Scientists were telling us that reality was far stranger and more magical than it appeared.
For something to be there and not there at the same time, for the universe to contain many avatars of the same character in various worlds, quantum superposition, spooky action at a distance, the many-worlds hypothesis, and the discoveries physicists have made about the extraordinarily peculiar nature of time itself: all of these were grist to Garner’s mill.
In a haunting biographical detail, as a young man Garner befriended a figure who stood on the boundary between the old world and the new: Alan Turing. An outstanding schoolboy runner in the early 1950s, Garner trained for competition by pounding the country paths around his home and found himself falling into step, and into conversation, with another runner. His new friend was a “delightful, funny, immature mathematician [with] a high-pitched, aristocratic voice […] who could run the socks off me because he was a marathon runner.”
For nearly two years, they would meet by arrangement to run and talk together. Turing, though Garner would not know until years later, was at the time going through the hell of chemical castration after his 1952 conviction for indecency (homosexuality remained illegal till 1967). Garner would go on to imagine strange physics, science twining with magic. Turing had been among the brilliant minds at Bletchley Park who changed the course of the Second World War, and was the father of artificial intelligence and the digital age. Both were in a process of transformation. Neither was fully known by the other.
Their friendship came to an end abruptly when Garner was visited by the police, who issued him with a formal warning to have no further association with his friend. “No explanation given,” Garner said, seventy years later. “It almost destroyed me. It took me decades to get over.” Shortly afterward Garner went to do national service. While he was away Turing killed himself. In imitation of his favorite fairy story, “Snow White,” Turing ate an apple poisoned with cyanide.
Alan Garner still lives in a house in Cheshire “on top of a Bronze Age burial mound on a site which has been occupied without a break culturally since the end of the last ice age.” It’s right next door to Jodrell Bank Observatory. The Lovell Telescope first started to take readings from the universe in the year he moved in. “We’ve been in step for sixty-five years,” he said.
Science made a steadily greater showing in the work as time went on. By the time he wrote Elidor (1967) Garner was starting to see how the world of myth and the world that realist literature describes can be brought electrifyingly together. On the face of it, Elidor takes its cue from C.S. Lewis: four siblings, wandering through a broken-down backstreet in Manchester, stumble through a portal into a magical realm that is under threat from an encroaching evil. They are tasked to retrieve from a tumulus four magical objects – a sword, a chalice, a spear, and a keystone – that will in some unspecified way save the kingdom of Elidor.
But the otherworldly quest stops abruptly. The rest of the story takes place in our world, where the magical objects appear as bits of junk (though, like that foot that feels like a hoof, they feel in the hand like swords and spears). The story is not about human children trying to save a magical world, but about the menacing possibility of incursions from that world into our one. The proximity of magical objects, which exist in both worlds at once, affects electric razors and stand mixers. The antagonists triangulate their power, like radio signals. And instead of the default fantasy trope of omniscient magical beings spouting mysterious prophecies, the magical creatures are just as baffled by the prophecies as their human counterparts.
The Elidorian Malebron says that the mystical “The Lay of the Starved Fool” was originally read in Elidor “only for its nonsense” – but that when parts of it started to come true he saw in it “a waking memory of what was to be” and started to work to make sense of it. “I knew nothing,” he confesses to the children, “of what I have just told you about our two worlds. I have had to find out that for myself by trial and thought, by asking all the time: how is this true, and if it is true, how can it be?” Elidor, too, has its folklorists, its scholars of myth, its experimental scientists. As the fantasy novelist Jonathan Stroud put it in his introduction to a later edition of the book, “Novels like Elidor are themselves a boundary, set like standing stones between earlier tales of movement between worlds and recent books (so common now) that mingle magic with the day-to-day.”
In the books that followed, Garner turned into quite another writer than the wizard-and-goblin merchant of his earliest work. The Owl Service (1967) was a bewitchingly sinister contemporary retelling of a folktale from the Mabinogion as a drama of family breakdown and sexual anxiety, its characters inescapably re-enacting the trauma of the deep past. “Nothing’s safe any more. I don’t know where I am. ‘Yesterday,’ ‘today,’ ‘tomorrow’ – they don’t mean anything. I feel they’re here at the same time: waiting.” Physics is there, too: the crockery of the book’s title, plates whose patterns can be interpreted as a floral motif or as one of owls, are likened to batteries, storing the power of the myth.
1973’s Red Shift – the title is taken from a term used to describe the Doppler effect on the wavelength of light, which allows scientists to demonstrate that the universe is expanding – took three time periods from English history and juxtaposed them. Entirely gone, in that book, is any trace of Weirdstone’s fey archaism: Garner’s Roman soldiers speak, in fact, like US marines, and the My Lai massacre (then fresh in the news) finds an extraordinarily savage echo in the dirty warfare of pre-modern Britain.
Garner, incidentally, has never accepted the label “children’s writer”: “I’m writing for anybody who cares to read, after I have written for myself.” That is more, I think, than just a writer demanding his due. Garner is in the myth business – and myths, back at their roots, were never for children. He seems to me, too, to offer a suggestive metaphor. In fantasy writing like Garner’s, the portals between worlds go both ways. The story puts an adult writer on the threshold of the world of childhood, a world vibrating with enchantment; and it puts children on the threshold of a world of adult agency, of adult responsibility, of adult peril.
In Elidor the children are chased down an ordinary suburban street by dimension-hopping warriors. When they call out for help, curtains twitch closed and they hear bolts sliding shut. Here’s a classic children’s fantasy moment: adults won’t understand and can’t help. It sits on the shivery/thrilling borderline between a fantasy of being alone in a vital responsibility and the terrifying reality of being, well, alone in a vital responsibility. Does it not also, perhaps, reflect a growing anxiety about the fraying of communities in the here and now? The organic unity of the premodern village has given way to a society of suburbanites, safe behind their curtains, not caring to put their noses in the business of their neighbors.
* * *
Following hard on Garner’s heels and startlingly close in approach to his early work was another gifted writer, Susan Cooper. Her Dark is Rising series began in 1965 with Over Sea, Under Stone, and concluded with 1977’s Silver on the Tree. The first book even shared Garner’s Enid Blyton-ish set-up (children staying in a strange old house on a countryside holiday; in Cornwall, in Cooper’s case, rather than Cheshire) and finding themselves drawn into a mythological quest. The magical milieu of Cooper’s books also draws on existing mythologies associated with the geographies of their settings: in her case Cornwall, North Wales, and the Thames valley. She and Garner both mined the Mabinogion. And Cooper even manages a Black Rider, which can’t but be a hat-tip to Tolkien.
The mythologies and even some of the story beats cross over. The Moon of Gomrath and The Dark Is Rising both include a version of the Wild Hunt, a motif that appears all over Northern European folklore, as Jacob Grimm observed more than a century before. A malevolent magical winter has a pivotal place in both sequences, as do evil parliaments of rooks. In both, the antagonists at various points take the shape of formless clouds of darkness. In both, keeping to ancient pathways offers protection from evil magic.
Above all, like Garner, Cooper offers a sense of the way that deep time and old magic are buried just beneath the surface of our own world. The eschatological scheme jostles with the ordinary furniture of modernity: Garner imagines that mundane bus route to the endpoint of the quest; Cooper describes how the Dark’s uncanny blizzard affects what later generations will come to call the Muggle world, with “British Rail […] fighting numerous electrical failures and minor derailments caused by the snow.” Both succumb from time to time to the reactionary nostalgia endemic to children’s writing: we’re invited to wince a little at the way the ancient purity of their landscapes is despoiled by hikers, litter and tourists.
In the building of Cooper’s sequence the connective tissue is the mythology itself – an immemorial struggle between the Light and the Dark that takes place behind history. The only character shared between the first book and the second, for instance, is the enigmatic white-haired Merriman Lyon, whose real identity is hinted at in a wonderfully spine-tingling moment in the closing pages of Over Sea, Under Stone – “‘Merriman Lyon,’ he said softly to himself. ‘Merry Lyon… Merlion… Merlin.’”
Cooper’s story follows several protagonists as they struggle to find (and protect from the Dark) a series of ancient magical objects, guided by riddling old songs. In book one, the three Drew children are engaged in a Dan-Brown-style pursuit of the Grail, complete with ancient maps, secret chambers, and geographical puzzle clues. In book two, which deepens the resonance and scope of the story, the seventh son of a seventh son, Will Stanton, discovers his destiny (his birthday surprise is finding out he’s the last of the Old Ones) and searches through time for the six Signs that, united, will give the Light the power to push back the rising Dark.
That second book – published eight years after the first, and considerably more ambitious and grandiose – takes the series out of harbor. From Greenwitch (1974) onward, the stories link: the Drew children from Over Sea, Under Stone and Will come together to follow the breadcrumb-trail after the Things of Power and a fifth player, a pale-skinned Welsh foundling called Bran, is introduced in The Grey King (1975). The whole sequence is uneven – its high points are books three and four, which are lean as elvers, grounded in their landscapes and electrically connected to their myths – and the final book, though it contains some of Cooper’s best writing, is confused and overlong. But the whole sequence is thrilling to read and full of unexpected and haunting moments and ideas.
As in Garner’s work, there’s more than one layer to the mythology: the magical struggle between good and evil sits atop a still older set of powers (the equivalent of Garner’s “Old Magic” is Cooper’s “Wild Magic”) that precede good and evil itself.* As that contrast develops – the children both in and out of a magical world or slipping through time – the moral scope of the stories broadens. In Cooper’s jumbled but resonant cosmology, the millenarian struggle between Light and Dark sometimes steamrollers frail human feeling.
Among the most poignant and troubling figures in the book is Hawkin – an ordinary man plucked from his home in the thirteenth century to serve the Light. He realizes that his master Merriman is quite prepared to sacrifice his life if circumstances require it, and he is cursed to spend centuries tramping the earth as “the Walker,” a human poste restante waiting for the Sign-Seeker to be born so he can hand over a package. The betrayal shocks him into going over to the other side. Being a pawn of Destiny, in Cooper, isn’t always fun. The magical objects in Greenwitch and Silver on the Tree are guarded by creatures who seem, above all, depressed by their place in the eschatological scheme: a sacrificial totem, racked with a childlike loneliness; a catatonically sad king immured in a tower in the Lost Land. As Merriman puts it: “This is a cold battle we are in, and we must sometimes do cold things.”
Robert Macfarlane, who adapted the second book for a 2022 radio adaptation, wrote ahead of broadcast: “Though it’s structured around a Manichean opposition of Light and Dark, Cooper’s novel refuses to cleave into neat binaries. I think of it, in fact, as a cold war novel, first published in 1973 and kindred in its moral complexities to early le Carré; describing a conflict fought in the shadows, in which no one is clean.”*
Once again, the adult world shades that of even the most fantastical children’s story. Macfarlane’s framing the book as a Cold War novel accounts for the darker shades in its moral tapestry. There is, which seems to me a subtle lesson for a children’s story, a ruthlessness to those dedicated to a higher purpose, or working on a timescale measured in millennia rather than decades.
Those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun […] At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light […] in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else.
