This bog-man informs Joe that his lazy eye is the result of “the glamourie” – a gift that enables him to see time collapsed, to perceive the eternal in the now. Joe wanders out into the marshy wood behind his house where he meets Thin Amren, a naked man with copper-brown skin and a hood made of leather.
This is classic Garner territory: obscure but resonant objects, a present that feels wedded to a mythical past, a questioning child seeking to unravel the mysteries of an off-kilter world, a landscape freighted with meaning. The cup has Joe’s name written upon it, the stone is inscribed with the picture of a horse. One day a rag-and-bone man appears, named Treacle Walker, and offers Joe a cup and a stone in exchange for an old pair of pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder bone. His parents are not in evidence, and he measures out the days by watching the passing of Noony, the train, through the valley below. He has been poorly, he says, and wears a patch to correct a lazy eye. Joe, our hero, is a child living a strange and circumscribed existence.
It should perhaps not surprise us that, again, he takes time as his subject.
Garner lives in a medieval medicine house on a site that has been inhabited for 10,000 years and is a stone’s throw from the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire. “Time is ignorance,” reads the book’s epigraph, from Carlo Rovelli, and the novel is essentially a response to this idea, seeking to ask how we would experience the world if we were able to step out of the straitjacket of time. Indeed, it seems as though the subject of time is the theme that underpins much of his later work – how we experience it, how we might refigure or alter our relation to it. Garner’s latest novel, Treacle Walker, also belongs in this hybrid space. This is classic Garner territory: obscure but resonant objects, a landscape freighted with meaning They asked me where to begin and I suggested the wonderful, time-collapsing R ed Shift, largely because I feel like it contains the best of each of Garner’s worlds: the magic of his children’s fiction and the emotional and philosophical complexity of his adult work. I was speaking at an event with Ruth Ozeki and Karen Joy Fowler recently and, having mentioned Garner in my talk, was surprised that neither of them had read – or even heard of – him. A lan Garner’s novels are usually separated into his wildly successful books aimed at children – T he Weirdstone of Brisingamen, E lidor, The Owl Service and The Moon of Gomrath – and his adult writing – T he Stone Book Quartet, Thursbitch and Strandloper, which are more difficult and quixotic, at least thematically (Garner is always an author of supremely clear and readable prose).
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