For the 50th anniversary of Alan Garner’s debut novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in 2010, a series of events took place in the author’s native Cheshire: talks, a portrait by Andrew Tift, an exhibition in Chester’s Grosvenor museum. I was invited to walk with Garner over Alderley Edge, the setting for much of his fiction for children and adults. He took me, in the incantation repeated in his latest book, “from Thieves’ Hole, by Seven Firs and Goldenstone, to Stormy Point and Saddlebole”, showing the place where, as local legend relates, you can hear the clink of reins from the sleeping army below. I put my ear to the ground as commanded and – jingle jangle! The magus stood, hands in pockets, a sly yet innocent expression on his face. As my grandfather, born in Wigan, would say, he was “codding on”.
Garner lives in the place where generations of Garners have before him. The “powsels and thrums” of his weaver ancestors were fabric scraps, cutoffs, experiments, intriguing threads: a homely metaphor for this collection of poems, lectures, memoir fragments and essays. Certain notes recur from past work: tales of his grandfather, Joe Garner, who first told him the legend of the sleeping heroes of Alderley Edge and issued the gnomic advice: “If the other feller can do it, let him.” In other words, find the work that you, and only you, can do. We see again how Garner, living by the Jodrell Bank telescope, is both rooted in the land and gazing at the stars: the brief poem Nova just as cosmic as his astounding novel Red Shift. The little contains universes.
