A reaction, not a review. I think I did the right thing. I just spent a few weeks re-reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, Elidor, Red Shift, The Owl Service and Thursbitch, because I felt that I needed to take a run up to Boneland. If you're expecting Boneland to be what it's been advertised as, a sequel to The Weirdstone and The Moon of Gomrath, then put those expectations aside, because they'll do you no good. If, like me, you've just surfaced from the dark lake of Garner's previous works, then you'll see that Boneland follows on remorselessly from Red Shift and Thursbitch as much as it does from the others. The book left me frustrated and annoyed because it didn't give me what I wanted, but it's also left me thinking about it, and talking about it. and planning to come back to it in a few months for a re-read. Four stars 'I really liked it', or five stars 'It was amazing'? Neither do it justice really. Forget the stars, this bloody book got under my skin, and annoyed the hell out of me at the same time. Over 50 years ago Alan Garner wrote The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, two books of magic and myth, featuring the children Colin and Susan. They encounter a wizard who guards sleepers beneath the hills – Arthur and his knights, perhaps – sleepers who will wake to save us in our time of greatest need. The children encounter elves and dwarfs, goblins and killer cats, battle the evil shape-shifting Morrigan, and make their way through a patchwork of mythic events and battles, culminating, at the end of The Moon of Gomrath, with a Herne-like Hunter and his men riding their horses to meet the nine sisters of the Pleiades, leaving Susan, who needed to be with them, behind, wanting to go the stars, and Colin only to watch.(There are well-drawn characters in those books, but they are not Colin or Susan. And the landscape of Alderley Edge is the strongest character.)Garner continued creating mythic fantasy out of the matter of Britain, building, reimagining and recreating tales from the Mabinogion and from a hundred other sources, and then he began writing novels intended for adults, stories hewn and chipped from the past. (The past is always with us in Garner. The stones have stories.)There was to be a third novel of Colin and Susan, but for fifty years Garner did not write it.In Boneland, he also does not write it, although he describes it, implies it, tells us its shape. Instead he gives us, what? A fourth book? A coda? Either way, it is an adult novel about loss and history and memory and mind, a link between the present and prehistory, a place where everything Garner has made before comes together.Colin has grown up to be a brilliant, but extremely troubled, astrophysicist. Susan is not there. Colin is autistic, has problems with memory (he remembers everything after the age of 13, nothing before), cannot relate to other humans, is searching the sky for intelligent life, and hunting for his sister in the stars. As the book begins he is being released from a hospital after some kind of breakdown.Boneland is a realistic novel of landscape, inner and outer, past and present. It becomes a novel of the fantastic toward the end: perhaps old magics have risen to show Colin the way out, perhaps he has conjured them himself as he confronts his demons and his pain. I do not know if the conclusion of this book makes sense if you have not read the first two books, and I am not entirely certain whether reading the first two books will make it easier to read this one. Boneland demands a lot of the reader, either way. But it returns more than it demands.The characters are well drawn – Meg, the too-good-to-be-true therapist and Bert, the salt of the earth taxi driver, linger in the memory long after the book is done. The Watcher, who provides the novels alternate point of view, gazing out from the caves of prehistory, gives us an affecting and powerful look at a mind ten thousand years away, and a way of looking at the world that is not ours, or Colin's. As the Watcher story intersects with Colin's story, the Weirdstone novels also conclude (although they conclude in negative space, as if we are seeing the after effects of events in a book unwritten) and Colin's story concludes with them.Trying to express how and why Alan Garner is important is difficult. He does not write easy books. His children's books were powerful and popular, but never easy or comforting; his adult novels are lonely explorations of present and past. He is a master of taking the material of history, whether myths and stories or landscapes and artifacts, and building tales around them that feel, always, ultimately, right – as if, yes, this was how things were, this is how things are. He is a matter-of-fact fantasist, who builds his fantasies solid and real. Boneland feels like the book you write when you can no longer muster the belief in magic to write about elves and wizards in caves, but you can write about the older magics, the flint-knapping workings of ancient times, and you can believe in the power of the mind, and the crags and caves and outcrops, you can believe in the landscape, because the landscape is always there. And you can still believe in sleepers under hills, believe in the legend of the wizard buying a horse that began The Weirdstone of Brisingaman.The words Garner chooses, carves, inserts into his prose are perfect. He deploys short, accurate words better than anyone else writing in English today, and he makes it look simple.Boneland is the strangest, but also the strongest, of Alan Garner's books. It feels like a capstone to a career that has taken him, as a writer, to remarkable places, and returned him to the same place he started, to the landscape of Alderley Edge and to the sleepers under the hill.
What do You think about Boneland (2012)?
Strange little book; strange, sad little ending to a story I read so long ago . . .
—Mary
Heel bijzonder. Een boek dat op meerdere lagen binnen komt
—dea
