Fifty Years Later: “Boneland.”

A few months back I read Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, both of which I considered here. In 2012, some fifty years after the original two-thirds of the Weirdstone Trilogy (or the Tales of Alderly), Garner released Boneland. I won’t say it is the concluding volume of the trilogy. That may be a trifle confusing. Let me try to explain.

The first two books fit neatly into Young Adult territory, or were, perhaps, Juveniles, (e.g., The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark is Rising, etc.) Fifty years later Garner could not, or would not, return to the world he’d created with the same approach. For whatever reason, he did not write another YA or Juvenile novel. He instead chose to focus on one of the twins (Colin) as an adult. And the book is written by a man with fifty more years under his belt, a writer with other interests and something different to say. Boneland is not, therefore, a continuation of the narrative; it does not pick up where Gomrath left off.

Not only is there a narrative breach, there is a fundamental tonal breach. Do not open Boneland expecting to encounter dwarfs, wizards, witches, and plucky youths pursing adventure. This is an entirely different story, a frequently internalized, psychological story. In short, you have to be in the mood for it. Garner’s prose, trimmed to the bone, demands a lot from the reader. He does not take the reader by the hand and lead him through the tale. Instead he leaves it to the reader to decipher what exactly is happening, what is real, what is imagined, and what is perhaps some juxtaposition of the two.

Now, I’m not always in the mood for that. Sometimes I simply want to be told a story, not be expected to puzzle out the events or meanings. Happily for me, I was in the frame of mind for the challenge. (Yes, I think “challenge” is the right word.) Colin (decades after his sister Susan disappears) is now a polymath, employed as an astrophysicist attached to a radio-telescope project; a project Colin has apparently manipulated to search the Pleiades for some contact with Susan. But this is never entirely spelled out. Instead, the reader is left to consider if the events Colin experiences are in fact hallucinations or manifestations of mental illness. Much of the narrative involves Colin’s interactions with his therapist, Meg, who may or may not have some connection to the events of the first two books, and who may either be inimical to Colin or entirely on his side. There is also, seemingly, another, unnamed narrator from the deep, deep past involved in a parallel quest of ritual magic — a quest that may be read as convergent rather than parallel. Garner seems no longer interested in local folklore, or even Pan-European myth. He is dealing with more fundamental, universal themes, reaching back to the dawn of mankind (and, in fact, even further.) He is dealing with the intersection of faith and science, with the power of story and belief to influence reality (or at least the perception of reality.)

And he is fully committed to ambiguity.

That, I think, is the theme or message of the work. Ambiguity. That the knowledge of uncertainty is the only true certainty. Anyway, that’s what I got from it. Admittedly I may have entirely missed the point. Still, I appreciated it, though I am self-aware enough to realize that had I read it at some other time I would have been either bored with the book or irritated by it.

I hope never to bore with any of my tales of two-fisted fantasy. Try some for yourself.

2 comments

  1. Indeed, a very different book; one that tidies up the author’s unfinished business here, rather than, as you say, being a concluding volume of the trilogy.

    By happy coincidence, the Jodrell Bank radio telescope is only a few miles from Alderley Edge, a convenient event which allowed everything to loop back to the starting place.

    The nameless character out of prehistory may at one time become known as Cadellin. Or Merlin. There is that air about them.

    1. An interesting theory. Thank you for sharing. It has been some time since I read the first couple of books, but I seem to recall that the Merlin figure/analogue was an exemplar of modern, more rationalized magic. It strikes me that the nameless character embodied the primeval, wild magic and thus was unlikely to transform into Merlin. But I could well be wrong.

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