The Garners were all craftsmen he says in his classless BBC English accent I was no good because I couldn’t use my
Posted in General on 21. Jul, 2010
“The Garners were all craftsmen,” he says, in his classless, BBC English accent “I was no good, because I couldn’t use my hands. My grandfather, the blacksmith, used to say to me [he adopts a broad Cheshire accent], `what do they learn you? Whatever are we going to do with you?’ “Garner, who was born in 1934, was a sickly only child, who survived early bouts of diphtheria, pneumonia and meningitis – and then made it to Manchester Grammar School. “I was born in Congleton, seven and a half miles from where we are now – but that was simply because my grandmother lived there, and my mother went to her mother to have the child. But I grew up in Alderley Edge, which is seven miles to the north of here. And when I moved the seven miles to here, my father never overcame the distress of my emigration – because here be dragons. He was born in the house where every member of my family had been born for over 200 years – and I have documentary evidence of a Garner living in the same half square mile in 1592.
Peasants don’t move around very much.” (It might occur to anyone of a nervous disposition that Garner is not so much a peasant at large in the land of the dragons as a peasant’s descendant turned into a dragon.)All his writing (bar The Owl Service, which is set in rural Wales) is located in this small patch of Cheshire. Behind the house, at the bottom of the garden, run high-speed trains from Manchester to London; at the side of the house is a Tudor timber-framed building which Garner bought for a pound in 1970, and had moved, piece by piece, from 20 miles away; looming over the whole thing is the huge Jodrell Bank telescope. The conjunction of ancient and modern is a fitting reflection of his novels, where different worlds and times collide to startling effect. Yet for all its abstruseness, it is likely that fans of Garner’s earlier work will persevere with Strandloper: several generations of children have already learned from him that difficult books (like difficult authors) can be exciting as well as scary.A MEETING has been arranged at Garner’s medieval longhouse in Cheshire, the appropriately named Black Den, which is to be found at the far end of a very bumpy private lane.
Filled with great chunks of dialect interspersed with almost hallucinatory descriptions of Aboriginal rituals and visions, the book is, like its author, a forbidding prospect. Rereading Garner’s novels before I interviewed him, I wondered if, in fact, he should ever have been classified as a children’s writer. His later books in particular (The Owl Service, The Stone Quartet, Red Shift) are complex and challenging enough for most grown-ups. But now, at last, we are about to be presented with a new, specifically “adult” book by Alan Garner: or at least, the first to be deemed so by his publishers.
Strandloper, which took 12 years to write, is the true story of a Cheshire man who was transported to Australia in 1803, where he became a holy man in a tribe of Aborigines. But for those familiar with Garner’s brooding, dark, mythic tales, the writer’s aversion to children is not so surprising.
Sotheby’s Post 1930s Furniture Sale, 1 April 1996, 34-35 New Bond Street W1 (0171 493 8080). Christie’s South Kensington, Modern Design Sale, 13 April, 85 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 (0171 581 7611).. NAILED to the door of Alan Garner’s study is a notice which says: “Danger, Do Not Enter Wild Animal Within”. It was given to him by one of his five grandchildren, all of whom have learned, as his five children did before them, that the genius was not to be disturbed while at work (which has been most of the time, for nearly 40 years).