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.
