Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations. Something glints in the light, catches his eye. ‘It is thin, translucent, honey-black and sharp; sharper than a surgeon’s steel.’ He knows just what it is. A flint, a tool, a precision instrument. ‘I am the first to know in the eight to ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.’ Alan Garner knows time; time knows Alan Garner.
Powsels and Thrums is a collection of essays – and poems and a little bit of remarkable fiction – published in Garner’s 90th year. Since his first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, appeared in 1960, he has held a unique place in British contemporary literature, being both a popular children’s author of what is often described as fantasy and a writer whose work inspires an esoteric devotion for its distinctive scholarship and original thought. A couple of years ago he found himself on the Man Booker shortlist for his slim, stunning novel Treacle Walker, which is, on its surface, a book about a sickly boy’s encounter with the past, with myth and magic, but is, too, an encapsulation of so much of what has preoccupied Garner from the start.
There is more evidence of these preoccupations in Powsels and Thrums, a sequence of work collected from various sources across the years which offers a remarkable window into Garner’s mind and heart.
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