In 2010 – on 10/10/10, to be precise – Alan Garner celebrated fifty years of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, his classic fantasy novel, written in his early twenties. Celebrations included an exhibition at the Grosvenor Muse- um in Chester, lectures, storytelling sessions, a medieval fair and a special- ly commissioned portrait of the author, destined not for the National Por- trait Gallery in London but for permanent display in Cheshire. Andrew Tift painted the author in photographic detail in his ancient house, surrounded by totems and books, piercing the viewer with an intense blue gaze.

Garner has always been treasured as a regional writer. He can date his fam- ily’s links to Alderley Edge back to at least the late sixteenth century, and the land his ancient house stands on, in the shadow of the great telescope at Jodrell Bank, shows traces of human occupation going back more than 10,000 years. His work is rooted in the local area: Macclesfield, Mobberly, the Edge. As a Northern child I thrilled to Elidor (1965), which proved that even in gritty Manchester, portals can be found to other worlds.

Weirdstone drew on an ancient legend of Alderley Edge, told to Garner when he was a boy by his beloved grandfather. Centuries ago, so the story goes, a farmer was waylaid on the way to market by a mysterious old man who wanted to buy his horse. Refusing, the farmer was assured he would find no takers in Macclesfield. On the way home, dejected, he met the old man again and agreed to sell. The wizard led him ‘by Seven Firs and Golden Stone to Stormy Point and Saddle Bole’ to a rock which he struck with his staff, re- vealing iron gates and a tunnel winding into the hill. There slept 149 knights and 148 horses, resting until England’s time of greatest peril. Led out again minus his horse, but with treasure for his pains, the farmer was never again able to find the entrance to the hidden chamber in the hill. (Hearing Garner lecture on the legend and the genesis of his book, inspired me to write a poem, ‘Little White Horse’, which was published in this magazine.)

‘I grew up on the Edge, aware of its magic and accepting it. I didn’t know that it wasn’t the same for everyone. I didn’t know that not all children played by day and by night, the year long, on a wooded hill where knights slept in the ground,’ Garner wrote years later. Although he claimed never to write specifically for children, Weirdstone, with its questing protagonists, twins Colin and Susan, seems firmly aimed at a young audience, although it’s certainly not without charm and interest for adults. For one thing, Gar- ner’s skilful use of language casts a powerful enchantment. (Garner claims a kinship through landscape and dialect with the medieval Gawain poet.) Like Tolkien, Weirdstone seems an Urtext for much later fantasy.
The twins are swept up into a metaphysical battle they seem almost inci- dental to; Garner is too subtle a psychologist to pander to youthful fantasies of omnipotence. Yet they are never patronised either, and come to play a key role in a titanic struggle of darkness against light. And the Morrigan remains a terrifying female villain whatever the reader’s age.

Weirdstone was followed by The Moon of Gomrath in 1963, then Garner turned to other projects. For a while it even looked as though the well had dried up. ‘I can’t go on reading four books forever. So when are you going to write another? The last was published five years ago,’ wrote an A-level student plaintively.
Readers had to wait until 2012 for the astonishing and unsettling final in- stalment in the Weirdstone trilogy. ‘It seems right and natural that Garner should need five decades to gyre back round to where he began [and]… to follow his story deeper into the human psyche and the dark abysm of time,’ wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, calling him ‘more mythmaker than fantasist’. This last title was definitely not for children; Colin is now a depressed and brilliant scientist, and Susan … well, Susan may be one of the Pleiades. It’s a device that possibly only Garner could have come up with.

‘In each of my books the child protagonists have aged. The distance be- tween them and me has stayed the same. Is this a coincidence, or have I been engaged in something much more subtle and unconscious, to do with my own psyche, not theirs?’ he noted. This sense of being on a personal quest has paradoxically made his books all the more resonant to his read- ers. ‘You must go on writing for yourself. It is the only true self we can all share,’ another fan wrote perceptively.

Strandloper (1996) was the first novel he wrote specifically for adults, but even before that he was crafting books so difficult and peculiar they posed challenges for all readers. I’m not sure I fully understand Red Shift (1973) even now. For me, though, his masterpiece is the famously oblique and riddling The Owl Service (1967), in which two English half-siblings and a Welsh boy find themselves unwittingly re-enacting a tragic love triangle from the Mabinogion.

‘One of the best things about your book is the way you never tell the reader anything; you only show us through what is said and through events,’ wrote a young Australian fan who had read it twenty-seven times. ‘I wish… that I knew what happened after the end of the book, although the ending is so good that anything else would have been a perfect anti-climax,’ wrote another. (Quoted in a lecture Garner addressed to English teachers in Bir- mingham in 1985.)

A really good novel won’t seem made up to a child; it will have a core of truth mere fact can’t provide. The Owl Service seems to sink in and become part of the receptive reader’s literary DNA. At the heart of the story is the titular set of china, on which a floral design can be made to configure an owl. (Garner’s own plate from the set appeared in the Chester exhibition.) Again, maybe only Garner could make a link from pretty plates to the an- cient Welsh legend of Blodeuwedd, the ill-omened woman made of flow- ers. In the 1970s The Owl Service was made into a TV series for children, which managed to retain much of the book’s haunting, eerie quality. In a strange twist, one of the young actors was killed in a random attack in London a few years later.
I went to hear Garner lecture on Thursbitch (2003), another novel for adults about the survival of the Mithras cult in a quiet valley in Cheshire, a notion that Garner typically claimed was based on fact and his own archaeological investigations. At the afterparty in an Oxford bookshop I saw him deep in conversation and hovered nearby, wondering whether to butt in. The man he was talking to showed no inclination to clear off and I had to leave to catch my train, so it was now or never. ‘Excuse me’ – I batted the man aside and launched into a passionate declaration of admiration. As I gushed about how Garner meant more to me than any other living writer, I kept giving uneasy glances to the other man, who was watching with amusement. Fi- nally the penny dropped. ‘Oh my God – you’re Philip Pullman. Well, um, you’re great too of course …’ I backed away, practically genuflecting from these two lords of literature.

For Pullman, Garner is simply ‘the most important British writer of fantasy after Tolkien’. Garner’s other celebrity fans include Neil Gaiman, Jona- than Stroud, Susan Cooper and even Michel Faber. ‘Alan Garner is one of the greatest and most influential writers this country has ever produced,’ Garner’s publisher announced in 2010, hailing his works as ‘a unique and hallucinatory alloy of fantasy, mythology and contemporary action’. But is this richest of corpuses still devoured by teenagers today? Asking around, I find that the curriculum seems to have moved on in favour of simpler fare, and his name no longer carries instant recognition for readers of Young Adult fiction. Is there an appetite still for books that refuse to give up all their secrets or pander to a lust for the easily assimilated?

One strength is that, being otherworldly, the books have not dated the way works of documentary verity do. Garner’s characters seem archaic in more fundamental ways than merely not using mobile phones and social media. But is this enough to attract new readers?

A writer who has in some ways taken on Garner’s mantle today is the Northumbrian David Almond (who is another fan: Garner is ‘one of our greatest writers’). His latest novel, A Song for Ella Gray, reworks the myth of Orpheus for modern teenagers, although the characters feel timeless rather than rooted in the here and now. Like Garner, he writes in a height- ened, intense style, almost straining for the numinous.

Recently I heard Almond speak movingly about the responses he had re- ceived from young readers. To take a myth like that of Orpheus, he ex- plained, and apply it to the modern age is to dignify and elevate the feelings of young people, to connect them to the age-old stories and to validate their turbulent emotions. It assures them that they matter; it links them to an unbroken line of lovers and heroes. Garner’s own motivation is perhaps simpler. His grandfather, a craftsman, gave him a laconic piece of advice: ‘If the other feller can do it, let him.’ Garner’s genius is that no one can do quite what he does; and no one ever will.