In Garner’s hands they look magical
Posted in General on 21. Jul, 2010
In Garner’s hands, they look magical.”If you were an Aboriginal woman, you would be killed for seeing that stone,” he says, with a faint air of menace I put it down hastily. He comes up to me, very close, still holding the spear thrower. I had to be able to move through space and time – because nothing else moved.”He grows fiercer by the minute during this declaration, and then switches off my tape recorder. That’s why I survived – it produced such anger inside when the doctor said it – I was raging at heaven.” It also produced, if not mysticism, then a profoundly vivid imagination. “If you’re an only child, isolated in a room for years, and for a lot of that time you can’t move more than your eyes – then that’s when you’re paying your dues.
For my sanity’s sake, I made pictures on the rough plaster of the walls, and I made landscapes – and that is the land of `Elidor’.” (He is referring to his third book, where three children slip from a Manchester urban wasteland into a sinister, colourless otherworld.)”I had diphtheria at the age of two, pneumonia at eight – and I heard myself declared dead at the age of six, from meningitis. “For the first ten years of my life, I spent nearly three-quarters of that time paralysed, in a white bedroom, with cheese cloth over the windows. A paralysed body with a totally functioning mind in a white room is suffering sensory deprivation, and I had out-of-body experiences. They have the country’s largest milk round, delivering to one-third of all homes. And as the largest undertaker, they bury a quarter of the population !. ALL restaurants have to start somewhere, and I’m not sure that the conventional six months of builders for a massive refit, weeks of painters up ladders under the eye of a world-famous interior decorator and days of hysteria before the press launch, with an eye-catching logo, a biography of the chef and gallons of bad champagne poured down the throats of media folk is necessarily the best way of going about it. Customers are aware, however dimly, that they are the ones who are eventually going to have to pay for it.
None of the hallucinatory passages in the book are invented … But for heaven’s sake, do not make me into a mystic.” One thing Garner hates is anything to do with what he sees as New Age mystical pretensions: “There are no free lunches, and New Agers are free-loaders,” he says, angrily.He points out that not only has he immersed himself in the study of Aboriginal culture with an academic rigour – but also that he has “paid his dues” “Now it can be told,” he says, dramatically. “If you open up your receivers, you can not only receive, you can transmit It works both ways. “She can think and behave as an aborigine, and express herself as one – then she can go around the other side of the mirror, and run any fellow of All Souls into the ground.”Garner appears to have been deeply influenced by what he learnt of Aboriginal spirituality.