Hello Gentle Reader,
The 2022 Booker Prize shortlist remains the most resonant in recent memory. The two stand out novels of the shortlist: Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These,” and Alan Garner’s “Treacle Walker,” were exquisite cut diamonds, proving that reductionist prose is not akin to minimalist starvation. Instead, they were a testament to the principles of craftsmanship, technical brilliance, and lithe design. In complete contrast and revolt against the bloated maximalist writing parading itself as epicist in perspective (if only Atlas did indeed shrug, sparing everyone the slog and drudgery). Despite being the two standout novels with their principled executions, neither one received the Booker Prize, still they benefited from the nomination. In addition to their work, Claire Keegan and Alan Garner came to the forefront as two writers who entered the Booker Prize conversation as outsiders, and not conforming to the usual Booker Prize literary pedigree. Keegan is renowned as a master of the short story. Her two previous published collections “Antarctica,” and “Walk the Blue Fields,” were unanimously praised for their technical brilliance, further exemplifying that the Irish short story remained one of the most poignant portraits of the human experience. Keegan’s expanded short story turned novella “Foster,” remains a haunting and beautiful masterpiece of profound human tragedy and hope undercut by disappointment and reality’s uncanny ability to thwart expectations. Alan Garner in turn has built a magnified and solid career as a fabulist and folklorist, whose deep appreciation for Cheshire history and geography remain the defining bedrock of his work. Garner’s novels are renowned for their folkloric magic and fantasy, in addition to their cinematic pacing. Beloved by both children and adults in equal measure, Alan Garner is a literary chimera who refuses to acknowledge or swear allegiance to either canon, while “The Owl Service,” remains a classic novel that straddles the border between children’s literature and adult fiction, proving that literature maneuvers seamlessly between these two worlds and their divergent experiences, and that literature is not restricted or governed by age.
Alan Garner is a writer of place. Specifically of the Cheshire village Alderley Edge, where his family had settled since the 16th century, and their family history had become interwoven within it. Folktales, myths, legends, and stories were inherited with each generation, mythologizing the landscape. Garner’s own upbringing was one of rural-working class (while the area has since become gentrified and suburban in Manchester’s sprawl). Garner proved to be a capable student, and as education entered the public sphere seeking to single and rise capable youth above their working-class backgrounds, Garner was provided the opportunity to study at a Grammar School, where his fees were waived because of his means-testing, and eventually studied at Classics at Magdalene College in Oxford. Education, however, proved to be a schism between Garner’s background and family and himself. Removed from the insular and provincial world of Alderley Edge, Garner was suddenly a castaway in the larger society and in turn world. At once emancipated and exiled. Writing, then became Garner’s way of reconciling these cultural and social divisions, at point returning home and remediating his new found academic worldliness with the hardscrabble working-class background and those old myths and folklore stories; and his new appreciation for history, research, narrative, prose and grammar, and the ability to transform and share the mythic world of Alderley Edge and the Cheshire landscape with a wider reading public.
While not being an individual who is necessarily fond of children – we often find each other at an awkward impasse of polite pleasantries and then courtesy, if albeit, abrupt departures – children can be compelling characters and narrators. For many works, they work and succeed on the character of their childlike characters. Be it the titular fool in the ornamental and baroque lavish and loquacious novel “Firefly,” by Severo Sarduy; or the delight and cheek of Kamal in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, specifically “Palace Walk,”; or the rebellious Lullaby from the aptly named J.M.G Le Clezio’s novella, who engages in truancy and takes it upon herself to explore the world outside of the classroom, or all the other Le Clezio characters, such as the miraculously feral and fond Mondo, or Daniel in search of the sea. Childhood is not always one of innocence and sundrenched imagination. Patrick Modiano’s child-oriented characters who are at once abandoned to boarding school, family friends, or hired help, then adorned as an accessory or paraded around as a pet, before being left behind once more. In Alan Garner’s case, childhood is both a place of lonesome solitude and the last refuge. It’s a state of being, in which the real world remains at bay, and possibilities of imagination still hold some influence and sway. Garner, however, is no garden variety of fabulist. Impossibility is introduced via historical and arcane like measures, rituals, and objects. Whimsy and magical thinking are not in the repertoire. The strange manifests itself through the otherworldly and the historically unknown.
For readers who have been led to believe that complexity is exclusive to mammoth novels or dense uncompromising works of text, “Treacle Walker,” proves not only be the exception to this adage, but also a glowing example that complexity is not weighted by word or page count, but to the level in which a writer is able to refine and manipulate language into new startling forms of perspective; all the while providing commentary on complex themes and ideas. “Treacle Walker,” is a novel where language is layered and slightly obfuscated. The ‘Treacle,’ in question is not the sugared syrup of refined sugar of contemporary definition and understanding, but dates back to its previous incarnations, when treacle (or triacle) was considered an antidote. In the words of the titular rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, he advertises his ability to heal:
“[. . .] all things. Save jealousy. Which none can.”
Joe Coppock, is a sensitive and creative boy whose childhood is punctuated with loneliness and illness. He wears an eye patch to help correct a lazy eye, and he’s been instructed to reduce his exposure to the sun. Time is marked by Noony, the midday train passing through, whose steam coils through the fields and meadows of Joe’s home. As for Joe, he spends his days reading comics, collecting bird eggs, and bone, which are curated in his museum. These otherwise carbon copy lonely days are interrupted by the arrival of the rag-and-bone man who announces himself in the yard:
“Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rages! Donkey stone!”
After a transaction of an old pair of pajamas and a lamb’s shoulder-blade, to the rag-and-bone man, Joe Coppock will find himself central to an adventure of strange events, as Joe in turn is provided a stone with a primitive image of a horse etched on its surface, and a treasure from Treacle Walkers chest, whereby Joe pulls a cup of a strange ointment. Treacle Walker, speaks in enigmatic aphorisms, turns of phrases, and general nonsense, leaving Joe to retort frequently: “Bleeding heck!” Garner is a cinematic writer, seamlessly moving the narrative through quick cuts and snaps of dialogue, his true flourishes come through in flashes of action, as seen in the following scenes when both the titular vagabond and Joe sit at the chimney space becomes a bewildering scene, as Treacle Walker plays a tune on a shin bone:
“a tune with wings, trampling things, tightened strings, boggarts and bogles and brags on their feet; the man in the oak, sickness and fever, that set in long, lasting sleep the whole great world with the sweetness of sound the bone did play.”
When Joe plays on the same bone he summons the harbinger of summer: the cuckoo; whose cries echo throughout the following narrative. Other instances include the sporadic assault of a: “hurlothrumbo of winter,” [. . .] “A lomperhomock of night.” Due to an affliction or perhaps application with or of glamourie, Joe Coppock soon finds that a routine childhood disability provides him the means in which to perceive the world as it is and what’s behind it. What follows suit are comic book characters who find themselves emancipated from their panels; an encounter with an Iron-Age bog man named Thin Amren whose even more cryptic than Treacle Walker, who he dismisses as a “pickthank psychopomp.” All of which transpires within 150 pages. What would otherwise be a breeze of a novel, is instead slowed down by the thicket of ideas and the language, which prunes anything superfluous while ensuring enough barbed complexity will demand full attention. the narrative itself, may describe itself as octane fantasy, but its firmly rooted in reality, and delights in neither being fantastical or parabolic while completely abandoning any notion of realism. Language and truly specific cultural elements are what make “Treacle Walker,” more alienating, such as understanding what a ‘donkey stone,’ is and their antiquated application. Or what it means when an individual does a shufti. This specific vocabulary and vernacular understanding with no context and no definition, can be otherwise off-putting for some readers, but after a bit of digging and understanding of the terms, it comes to enrich the narrative, firmly rooting it in its specific landscape and history, which Garner celebrates. Though ‘clanjandering,’ and ‘nookshotten,’ remain unknown and impenetrable. “Treacle Walker,” remains one of the most interesting novels to have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and while many parts of the novel flew over my head or the language ensure I never entered into complete comprehension, it remains a surreal and interesting read.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
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