Alan Garner has popped up a few times in the blog, especially when his novel Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I assert again that children’s fiction is among the best fiction, when it tugs at big ideas. Garner has always been fascinated by stories, myths and folktales, handed down through generations. It was his own grandfather who made him aware, through the stories he told, of the ancient myths of Alderley Edge in Cheshire, where the Garner family has always lived. It is also the place where much of Garner’s writing is set.
Education and Archaeology
A new interview with Alan Garner was published this week. It explores these ideas and the debt to his grandfather. It also explores the paradox of Garner’s education, which separated him from his family but also allowed him better to understand narrative, history, archaeology and himself. It also reveals a surprising early friendship with computer pioneer and Enigma code breaker Alan Turing through running.
Garner retains an ambivalent attitude to education, and in particular, literary criticism:
The thing that ties all creativity together is not something that universities should analyse, but people should just accept as wonder.
For me, however, the dichotomy between analysis and wonder is a false one. I find analysis can create even greater wonder.
The interest in archaeology is a physical version of Garner’s narrative approach. It delves into history, exploring the past and uses the imagination to piece out the emerging stories. I came across this short film of Alan Garner from 1972. While initially surprised by his youthful plummy voice, he has some fascinating things to say.
He recognises a violent instinct in everyone, but argues that it can be constructive:
Violence when it’s good we call creation.
In comments which chime with mob violence which breaks out periodically in every area of the world, he observes that:
…given the choice we find it easier to destroy than to create and when we lose our personal responsibility for violence by hiding in a crowd we destroy utterly.
Guides to Garner
If you’ve not read anything by Alan Garner, I suggest you do, and here’s a guide. As the article says:
…some of our greatest works (Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) have been published “for children”. Young readers are the best readers.
And Garner describes myth like this:
Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallisation of experience, and, far from being escapist, fantasy is an intensification of reality.
Read a review of Treacle Walker here.
And here is a review of his latest collection of essays, poems and other writing, Powsels and Thrums.