Did all of the things in the first two books actually take place, or did Colin invent them as part of a delusion created because of childhood trauma? In many areas, it is down to the reader to draw their own conclusions, which will be unsatisfying to those who like things a little more cut and dried. Lobotomy: Colin is threatened with electro-convulsive therapy and "sectioning", ie this being done to him without his consent, is also mentioned. Indeed, the enigmatic eight opening lines of the novel describe somebody being anaesthetised prior to an operation. note Local anesthetic is injected into the scalp prior to application of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) Magic Versus Science: The "Magic Is Mysterious" version, which cannot easily be quantified according to known science.

The movement of time is not linear in Garner’s novels. As Colin in Boneland suggests: ‘Time is multi-dimensional and exists in different forms’ (Garner 83-84). It is patterned on personal history and identity connected with landscape and legend. Scratching surface layers reveal a past coexistent with the present. Boneland and the medieval text of Sir Gawain are linked by setting and dialect, but also by the failure to recognize a sacred connection with the natural landscape, spiritual values, identity and heritage. In Garner, landscape and language are threatened by loss through material values, Capitalist homogenization, the commercial destruction of the environment and violent acts of architectural vandalism.And I could, and do, ask the same of Treacle Walker. Because it seems to me that once again we have a novel of two parts. On the one hand, a person who is apparently on the point of death debates the nature of time and the possible existence of an afterlife with two embodied mythic figures; on the other hand, there is a framework of folktales, local history, and dialect which teeters on the brink of being incomprehensible. In the past I might have suggested that Garner was commendably preserving his own history within his work, but as time has gone by, I’ve felt more and more that, as his use of dialect grows more evident, and the dialect itself has become stronger, Garner is using language as a means of keeping readers out rather than inviting them in. Thursbitch was a case in point: parts of the eighteenth-century portion of the story were almost incomprehensible at times. Yes, this might have been how people actually spoke, but in reproducing that faithfully Garner tells us more about himself as a writer than he does about his characters. And the same is true here. The Hecate Sisters: Garner's work retells old folk myths from the British Isles and draws on thousands of years of oral and mythological tradition. The mythology and folklore of the moon and lunar cycles features heavily, as does the symbolism of triads and triples. Observe the triad of roles played by Meg Massey as she shifts gears and approaches in dealing with Colin's mercurial states. She is almost-girlfriend(the maiden, the waxing moon); healing therapist (the nurturing Mother, the Full Moon) and closes her involvement with a kind of separation(the waning old moon, the Crone, herald of Death and change). But enough of me. I want to hear from you. Have you started Boneland yet? How are you finding it? And do you have ideas about interpretation? All opinions, interpretations and reactions will be gratefully received. Since Boneland has only just come out we're going to leave this thread open for a few weeks so it can (hopefully!) slowly build as a resource as more people start to uncover its mysteries.

But Colin will have to remember what happened when he was twelve, if he wants to find his sister. And the Watcher will have to find the Woman. Otherwise the skies will fall, and there will be only winter, wanderers and moon… Dark and Troubled Past: Colin. It is progressively revealed throughout the book that before he was thirteen, he was: Meaningful Name: Colin is the modern version of the Irish hero's name Cú Chulainn. He invokes the Grey Wolf as a nature spirit. note or else the Watcher invokes Colin to come to him as the Grey Wolf...Drawing on local myth and legend, Garner continued the story of Colin and Susan in The Moon of Gomrath, in which the siblings light a fire on Alderley Edge and summon the Wild Hunt. The author has now completed the trilogy with Boneland, out from Fourth Estate in August, which sees an adult Colin searching for his lost sister. A. I never "target". I write the story as it comes, for its own sake, no other. Who reads it is beyond my control.

Garner had rediscovered his own vocabulary in the cadence of the poetic text. It was a lifeline that retained a sense of a national identity continually under threat over time. There are allusions to the survival of the poem’s dialect in Boneland, when Bert (Bertilak?) the taxi-driver informs Colin, in reference to the duration of his working shift, that he ‘is the governor of this gang’ (Garner 141). Similarly, in The Stone Book (1976), a novel steeped in the vocabulary of Garner’s Cheshire, the Father states that when left at work alone on the church steeple he is ‘the Governor of this gang’ (Garner, 2006 7). These are of course references to the Green Knight’s entrance into Arthur’s court when, after scanning the noble company seated high on the dais, he undermines their elevated position and status by asking: ‘Wher is […]/ The gouernour of this gyng?’ (ll. 224-5). The language of the poem is easily accessible and understandable for the Garner’s and idiomatic expressions survive through successive generations inhabiting the same Cheshire landscape over many centuries. But one can’t help wondering how long it will be before Joe’s youthful vigour is ground down by the demands of Treacle Walker’s job, and he takes to plodding along as Treacle Walker seems to have done. I can’t help feeling that here, at the end, rationality still trumps instinct, and the old wild magic of intuition is rejected in favour of the more reliable but less interesting magic of Newtonian science. Even quantum mechanics cannot save Joe from the literally quotidian routine of the day. This seems an oddly downbeat ending, yet it is entirely characteristic of Garner’s work, because this is what happens every time. Garner may valorise the old magic but inevitably he, or his characters, rejects it, as though there is no permanent place for it in the world, because it is too unpredictable. Not even death, or a flirtation with quantum mechanics, offers respite.

About This Game

A few years later, after The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath and after I had returned to teach at the school, he came to talk with my 1D: