A few connoisseurs of esoterica gathered online to discuss Alan Garner's latest novel - if it is long enough to be a novel; it's 152 small pages of big type.
Garner has long been noted for writing stories so deeply embedded in cryptic references to English and Welsh folklore - especially that of his native Cheshire - that they're difficult for any but the well-versed to understand, and which have been getting more challenging over the course of his over 60-year career.
We predicted that we'd be among the very few Americans to read this book. I refrained from pointing out that it'd be even fewer for a book that needs to be ordered from England and takes over a month to arrive. We'd already put off this discussion for a month because nobody'd gotten their copies yet who hadn't already read it.
One of our number argued forcefully that this time Garner has crossed the line. This book is so difficult to understand that it's not worth putting the effort into it. (I thought of my friend DGK, who maintains that nothing is so difficult to understand that it's not worth putting the effort into it.) I said that I was hardly in a position to judge, as Garner hit that threshold for me with Red Shift, which was his fifth book half a century ago. (I loved the first four.)
On one level, Treacle Walker is pretty simple. It's about a boy named Joseph Coppock who lives alone in a small house by a railway track, spending his time reading comic books. (It was suggested at the discussion that he might be dead, which would certainly explain a lot.) He meets a rag-and-bone dealer named Treacle Walker, trades with and sort of befriends him, and learns about magic from him. Joe can evidently see magical glamour with one eye but not the other. Treacle teaches Joe to whitewash his front steps with donkey stone, which keeps magical beings out of the house - or in, if they're already there. These supernatural practices, I am told, are all from Cheshire folk tradition.
You may wonder what donkey stone is. I wondered that myself, from the first words of the book which are Treacle's street-seller's cry: "Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!" So I looked it up, not knowing it'd become important later. Donkey stone isn't around much any more, but it was common in northern England for much of the 20C. It's an extremely rough soap made of hardened cement slurry, cut into blocks and used for cleaning grimy exteriors. An early manufacturer used a donkey as a trademark, thus the name.
But what this all adds up to, and whether there's an actual plot to this book, remained cryptic to us readers. Treacle Walker is written in an extremely deep countryside English dialect, full of nobbled telegraphic sentences, in which utterances like summat and nowt are words.
Yet on the surface level it's easy enough to read. The relationship between Joe and Treacle is querulous and difficult and even leads to humor:
'You're set on flummoxing me!'
'And if I am not?'
'You are! You! You! You big soft Nelly!'
'That is an appellation new to me,' said Treacle Walker. 'How may it be construed?'
'Sod off!'
Treacle Walker stood and ducked under the mantel beam.
'Where are you going?' said Joe.
'To observe the imperative,' said Treacle Walker. 'If I may.'
I know what you mean about Red Shift -- that's where Garner lost me as well.
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