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. I use the word window advisedly, for Garner’s prose is as clear as glass, perfectly conveying the precision of his thought. Precision runs in the family. The book is dedicated to his grandfather, Joseph Garner, who was ‘a triple smith – white, black and lock’:
Grandad remembered having used fifteen tons of iron to make thirty-three thousand six hundred shoes for eight thousand four hundred horses during the first world war.
But Joseph’s own ancestors were handloom weavers. ‘Powsels and thrums’ were the remnants of work they kept to make clothes of their own. They are offcuts, but ‘the product of the same loom’. Garner was the first in his family to have no skill with his hands; and so, too, the first in his family to have a tertiary education. His schooling (Manchester Grammar School, Oxford) plucked him out of his native milieu but also gave him the tools to comprehend it. He has spent a lifetime ‘working with a pen’ – a phrase which any author might use, but in Garner’s case underlines his role as craftsman, one in a long family line.
You don’t have to know his work well to become immersed in this little book, but it will surely make you return to his novels. ‘The Carr’ is a moving, vivid demonstration of what it truly means to know a place, as Garner describes a lifetime’s relationship with an alder coppice not far from his home. ‘The Valley of the Demon’ is an uncanny account of the work that led to his haunting 2003 novel Thursbitch and is one of several pieces that demonstrate a philosophy which proves, over and over again, that ‘myth is as near as words, through poetry and metaphor, can get to the wholeness of perfect truth’.
‘If the other feller can do it, let him,’ Joseph told his grandson. All his life Alan has carved his own path. Some of the delights in this volume take the reader back to his youth, to discovering the joy of book-learning at MGS – his greatest teachers are named and given their due – to the loping runs he took along the roads of Cheshire with a young scientist who would first be brutalised and then honoured by the state. He tells us he could never write a short story, and then provides one which raises the hairs on the back of your neck: ‘Feel Free’ from 1966. He reproduces it here, he says, not for our literary delight but because it ‘exemplifies a period of cultural change when working-class children were shown to have aesthetic sensibilities’.
To read these words is to sense a rebuke. There’s being given the skills to understand the past, and then there’s heading back to darker days, and that we must never do.
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