Boneland by Alan Garner

 

The gestation of Boneland is now famous: it is the third and final part of a trilogy begun in 1960, with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and continued in 1963 with The Moon of Gomrath. The first two were books for children, and they were meant to be the end of the series; Boneland is an adult novel whose presence has slowly insinuated itself in the author’s mind over the intervening years. On the surface it sounds an unlikely undertaking. For fans of Alan Garner’s outstanding work, though, it is entirely natural and wholly welcome. Boneland is a book that had to wait fifty years to be written.

Weirdstone and Gomrath are superb children’s novels, among the best of the last century. Their inventiveness, their use of myth, the wonderful rolling rhythms of the language, the thrilling sense of adventure and danger and supernatural fear, all combine to produce something truly memorable. And Boneland, though far from flawless, is an extraordinary sequel: it somehow manages simultaneously to be entirely different from and wholly consistent with its predecessors. Such a contradiction would probably please the author. It is a remarkable feat.

Colin, the child protagonist of the original stories, is now a forty-something astrophysicist still living in the myth-haunted space of Alderley Edge where the earlier books (and most of Garner’s works) were set. His twin sister vanished as a child (as was suggested at the conclusion of The Moon of Gomrath). Colin is obsessed by her. He is deeply troubled, possibly bipolar, certainly subject to manic periods. He can remember every moment of his life since the age of thirteen (when the previous novels ended) but nothing at all of what happened before that age. As Boneland begins he is clearly approaching a crisis, quite possibly a total breakdown.

The narrative shifts between a straightforward and realist description of Colin’s daily life – his travails at work, his singular home lifestyle, the counselling he undertakes with the mysterious psychiatrist Meg – and a dreamscape in which myth and time and sumptuous descriptive passages meld into a breathtaking otherworld. This takes place in some pre-lapsarian existence of our earliest ancestors and yet, at the same time, one feels its centre is in Colin’s consciousness, that troubled and tormented place. There is more than one time, there is more than one story, there is more than one moment. We are taken into a Nietzschean whorl of infinite return, time cycling and recycling, never linear, never simple. We spin round our mortal realm, we reach out into the stars, probing, searching, looking for clues, but what is truly out there is too far way, too long ago, too remote for us to grasp. It is beyond. It is not, nor ever will be, us. The answers are there. The answers are nowhere.

This is the nature of the myth world into which Colin is thrust. And that we cannot – quite – grasp what is happening reflects the turmoil that Colin, too, must endure. There is a juncture where myth and history collide, and Boneland describes that space. It is a boundary, and as Colin explains: “Boundaries aren’t safe... They occupy neither space nor time. Boundaries can change apparent realities. They let things through.” These passages, then, are uncomfortable, unsettling, both unreal and hyper-real, as though the senses are operating at the edge of their experience.

Great fiction will always use the personal to explain the universal. But truly great fiction will use the universal to explain the personal. One thinks of Crime and Punishment, for example, which could not exist without the reader being aware of both the inner sensibilities of Raskolnikov and the outer, moral pressure which defeats him. Or William Golding’s Pincher Martin on his island, in his death. Or Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree in the wilderness of his imagination, balancing fears that are, at once, private and eternal, his dead twin and his dead self. In the character of Colin we have just such a conjunction of personal and universal. Through him we come to a greater understanding of humanity while, at the same time, through the novel we come to better know an individual human being. Only the great writers can achieve this. Garner is a great writer.

I’m not convinced, however, that Boneland is a great novel. In particular, Garner has some difficulty with dialogue. It seems remarkable to me that someone with such an acute sense of the rhythms and beauty of language should have such a tin ear for dialogue. One gets the feeling that, in real life, Garner may be someone who thinks a lot but wastes little time on the trivia of chitchat. And that this matters in the novel points to a second problem: by consciously writing the main narrative in realist mode, these shortcomings in dialogue become all too apparent. As Ursula Le Guin pointed out in her perceptive review, the mixture of realism and fantasy is a brave literary choice. For the most part it succeeds, and it is certainly true that the prehistoric era passages grow in weight and depth and resonance as the novel progresses, but there remains a disjunction when a writer writes in realist mode and unnatural elements such as clunky dialogue intervene. I do not know what else Garner could have done, because I believe the overall approach he takes is both brave and correct, but the dialogue remains a problem with the novel.

In the end, though, I don’t believe it matters. Boneland stands as a fine piece of literature. It takes a true and honest approach to myth, far removed from elves and dragons and childish quasi-medieval posturing. Mythology is a serious enterprise, a generations-old attempt to explain the inexplicable: who we are, why we are, where we are, when we are, how we are, what we are. This is the true nature of myth, and it is a difficult and troubling thing. Those who use myth properly write dark novels – McCarthy, Golding, Coetzee et al. They know what myth is and they know its power. When asked in Boneland about myth and science, Colin, the astrophysicist, makes the perhaps startling declaration that they may have equal validity. Each is real in its own ways but “they occupy different dimensions”. If this isn’t the message of a writer like Cormac McCarthy I don’t know what is. And it is certainly the message of Alan Garner’s work, beautiful, wise and powerful as it is.

 

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison

 

Set in 1930s Suffolk, Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley is an atmospheric evocation of an English way of life which was constantly evolving but which would change beyond recognition in a few short years. The community it describes – farmers who have farmed the land for generations – is rooted in tradition, the old ways, even witchcraft, but it is also pragmatic. Farming is a way of life, a vocation, but above all it is a business, and one that must change and adapt in order to survive. At first All Among the Barley appears to be a subtle and seemingly mellow novel, but its undercurrents grow gradually darker as the story unfolds.

We are in a time before industrialisation, when the land was managed by hand, with horses and only the most rudimentary equipment. The pain of the First World War is still being felt, even sixteen years on, with a lack of manpower and an economic hardship that steadily built through those inter-war years. In the middle of this is the novel’s narrator, Edie Mather, fourteen at the time the action unfolds and an ingenue who much prefers her own company to anyone else’s, a clever girl who lives in her own head and in the countryside which she describes in exquisite detail. The evocation of rural life is truly beautiful.

This is not some bucolic idyll, however. We see the story through Edie’s uncomprehending eyes, and we can discern what she cannot, the casual racism and anti-semitism and petty nationalism and grinding poverty which were used by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists in the 1930s to seed their repellent worldview in unsophisticated and vulnerable communities. We see the superstition that clings to rural life. We see the hardship which, at times, trumps community, where the consequences of accidents are measured not in human terms but in economic, and where compassion can become a rare commodity.

And through it all, Edie battles her own demons, oblivious that there is anything wrong with her, blaming herself for every mishap, misinterpreting everything around her. She places herself at the centre of events which unfold only in her own mind. Meanwhile, real life grips its claws ever more tightly around her, until we reach a climax which is truly shocking.

All Among the Barley is a very fine novel, thought –provoking and memorable. Edie Mather, seemingly insignificant in her own community, is a compelling and tragic sister to Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood or Carson McCullers’s Mick Kelly or Frankie Addams. Like those young women, you wish them well while fearing the worst.

Nietzsche and the Burbs by Lars Iyer

 

Nietzsche and the Burbs is a fascinatingly odd novel, one in which nothing really happens, over and over again, like time waiting for a nudge in the midriff. This is Nietzschean eternal return taken to its hellish, suburban conclusion, the world waiting for its ubermensch while all the time knowing deep down that no overcoming is forthcoming. It’s also extremely funny.

The narrator, Chandra, is a Pakistani teenager, part of an apocalypse-obsessed group of sixth-formers plodding their way towards their final exams and the end of childhood and the beginning of – what? They dream of death and discord, play doom-laden music which is seemingly devoid of melody or substance or cohesion or anything vaguely musical, they take drugs and debate the philosophy of nothingness. It is their fuck-you to the death-inducing stupor caused by living in the suburbs of Wokingham.

Into their life comes a new student, studiously strange, strangely charismatic. He argues with the teachers and is given to gnomic utterances about nihilism. Immediately, the others identify him as a leader and invite him into their group. He is nicknamed Nietzsche because of his resemblance to the philosopher of Sils Maria (except for the moustache, obviously). Here, the author, Lars Lyer, clearly a playful sort, has all sorts of fun threading the real Nietzsche’s history into that of his schoolboy Nietzsche – the overbearing mother, the bullying sister, dead father, love for a girl named Lou, the portents of mental disintegration. Nietzsche joins the band as lead singer, chant-speaking his way through typically adolescent death lyrics like Ian Curtis but without the talent.

The group’s story is at once banal and hilarious. They study, do PE, make smart-arsed comments to their teachers, deprecate the cheap lives of the grunts around them, get fabulously drunk and pair off in a variety of ways over and over, each chapter divided into the days of their final ten weeks of school. There isn’t a lot of plot and there doesn’t need to be. Lyers’s ear for dialogue is acute, and the unintentionally bathetic nature of the group’s philosophical pontification is extremely funny. There are certainly flaws in the novel – in particular the constant repetitions of the starts of sentences or people’s names or activities becomes wearing. The musical descriptions, although initially funny – Chandra’s unwitting self-delusion about the band’s musical ability most strongly reminds me of the achingly funny musical essays Patrick Bateman slides into his narration in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho – in the end appear to often and at too great length.

But make no mistake, this is gloriously funny. If you’ve read Percival Everett (particularly Erasure) and enjoyed his whimsical use of philosophy as narrative engine, then Nietzsche and the Burbs is for you.