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| Author Alan Garner |
It really bugs me that, for the time being, I cannot trace which writer or academic wrote something like – “Alan Garner is a shamanistic storyteller, in that, through his fiction, he communes with deeper layers of the human psyche, the inner and outer spaces”, etc., etc. – or where they wrote it (it might be a misremembered reading of Manda Scott’s piece about Boneland in the Independent, but I’m sure it was in a book that I read it). It bugs me because I agree with this perspective, and would like to re-read this piece for a deeper understanding. You see, there was a time when Garner’s work, particularly the Alderley Edge series, utterly dominated my life. Reading Garner had been like reading a gramarye. It left me not quite the same person as before I picked the books up. It gave me a transcendental experience, a soul quest, a dreamtime vision. Suddenly I was aware of landscapes brought to life in the most profound and sometimes eerie ways, of the folkloric properties of plants and rocks and weather conditions, the minutiae of ‘old straight tracks’, constellations, small bodies of water, and of the devastating pull of history. It sounds mad, you know, I even sat up in bed once, half-asleep, outstretching my hand at some shape in the darkness, and shouting a series of cod-Latin, cod-Saxon words banished what I thought was an approaching evil. For what it’s worth, it seemed to work. It woke up my partner too, she wasn’t fazed (but she wasn’t impressed either, I do these waking nightmare things a lot). In the spirit of Discordianism (or perhaps the petit narrative of postmodernity), my reality became fitted with the Alan Garner lens – for about 6 months, before ebbing into the invisible regions of my soul – and in that time I internalised a great many lessons that shaped the pagan dimensions of my eco-spirituality. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, Alan Garner normalised paganism for me, and finally pulled me in.
Rules
The thing about that waking nightmare I mentioned, was that despite the nonsense incantation I was barking out, the illusion was repelled. This dark cloud, a spreading cover of blackness, balked, contested, then retreated and evaporated. I talked about it with a colleague the next day, and they being an avid reader of fantasy, reminded me that it’s not the words that matter, it’s the intent behind them. Gibberish is as good as any Latin, as though the strength of feeling from the speaker generates a psionic field that repels the evil force (think The Curse of Fenric). In ceremonial ‘high’ magic, it is the dedication and exact detail of effort, coupled with strong vocal will, that commands spirits. Once commanded, they obey. It’s as though the rules of the game have been met. This is a very Jungian idea because it’s the ‘language’ of the collective unconscious, and therefore as a form of active imagination, can be made to work upon and affect the psyche. The Alderley Edge novels, particularly the original two, are full of these rules: do not look behind you as you retreat up the old straight track; wear the bracelet and the palugs cannot harm you; start a fire on this hill to summon the Hunt; search for this flower at this time. All characters, all creatures, obey the commands of the magic, and can be expelled by those commands, but the magic must be invoked strictly according to the rules set down. This is explored to death by Susan Cooper in her Dark Is Rising sequence, but it points to an almost autistic adherence to detail, organisation, ritual, pattern and routine. As an autistic person, I like this very much indeed. In my ‘folk wicca’, I know that adherence to steps, clarity of intention, awareness of space, and properties, and rules, will bring the ‘magic’, and command the unconscious. These steps organise the mind, strengthens the will, and focuses the thinking.
The Owl Service adaptation (1969)
Ignorance of the rules therefore, is detrimental. If the internal, subjective rules that govern your mind, shaped by upbringing and genetics, are not governed, it is easy to fall into disarray with yourself, and the world around you. Your Psyche falls further and further into imbalance, your shadow cannot reintegrate and the individuation process stalls, perhaps even atrophies completely. Symbolically, the same can be said of Garner’s characters. Ignorance of the rules would be catastrophic for the protagonists of Alderley Edge, while being nearly-catastrophic for Alison in The Owl Service, and outright ruinous for Tom in Red Shift. In Alison’s case, the rules were straightforward: she will become owls, or she will become flowers – the difference is determined by Roger and Gwyn. What the rules are not, is obvious and clear. The elder characters, Huw Halfbacon, Gwyn’s mother and Alison’s mother, do not communicate effectively to the younger characters, but instead seek to steer them against the grain (or in Halfbacon’s case, steer them in the right direction, just not with plain-speaking or coherent methods, at least until Gwyn has drawn closer to his heritage). As a result, Alison very nearly succumbs to calamity. In Red Shift, of the three male protagonists in each time zone, it is Tom in the then-present day who comes off worst, as he is the only one who doesn’t give himself over to the axe head when he finds it – he sells it for a train ticket, and thus to emotional turmoil.
The message isn’t OBEY THE RULES. The message is – know the rules, know the effects of working with them, and beware the effects of mismanaging them. This is much my understanding of the Psyche.
The Mythical Substratum
In The Owl Service, Alison and Roger are English, but are no less susceptible to the mystical forces in the Welsh valley they are holidaying in than Gwyn, the local Welsh boy. Because you see, the forces that govern the universe really, really, really don’t give a shit who we are, where we are from, what blood we have or don’t have, where we live in time, how we talk, how we live, what we do or don’t do. It’s utterly, utterly arrogant of us to assume that because our local, cultural social constructs belong to one group or other, they won’t mimetically, psychologically, and culturally affect others that come into its proximity. The mythical landscape spares no-one. But see how Alison and Roger are brought to heel by the Welsh landscape. As Halfbacon says, the English may own the property he tends to legally, but they are not the hereditary ‘rulers’, they do not have the kinship as he and Gwyn do. By illustrating this, Garner gives the local Welsh their identity, their deep meaningful connection to the locality, but he also tells us that any human who falls into its influence is given identity within the localised framework. Myth and folklore are both unique and inclusive. It’s frankly not in our power to stop it.
Alderley Edge
The thing that affects the three teenagers in The Owl Service, and that works its influence in all his works, is what Merlin Coverley, in his brilliant book Hauntology: Ghosts of Future Past, calls the ‘mythical substratum’. Coverley identifies in Garner’s work an ‘impact between topography and chronology’ (p145 of the 2020 paperback edition), and examines how events of the past shape, even scar the landscape, its after-effects influencing the present. He talks about Garner’s concepts of ‘inner time’, where your internal life bears the existence of and is driven by ‘engrams’ (that is, permanently-imprinted memory traces that evoke strong sensory and emotional reaction when triggered, and that through the successive generations populate the Jungian collective unconscious to haunt our descendants), ‘outer time’, the external world beyond the human being that creates engrams, and ‘mythic time’, where time is the non-linear experience of events and concepts belonging to mythical cycles. For Garner, the resolution of engram ‘attacks’, where the inner time spills into the outer time, and past becomes present, is a traumatic psychological journey into the Dreamtime, a concept he acknowledges adopting from Altjira, an Aborigine practice (do we call this cultural appropriation on Garner’s part? Or do we take a wider view, and suggest there’s a universality among us human beings, and sometimes we’re asked to find the grammar for such experiences from others in order to appreciate better our own cultural folklore). Time in Garner’s stories is a repetition, where successive generations are forced to live them through again and again, reworking them to fit their contemporary circumstances, but always toward the same consequences. Place in these stories, is a nexus of energy that stores itself up and, through people as ‘receivers’, transmits itself. Not unlike the stone tape theory, history (sometimes even future events, as in Red Shift) imprint themselves on the physical environment, and humans (and animals) experience them like recordings, consciously as apparitions or visions, or unconsciously through their behaviours and actions. Place and Time are nebulous, situated in the mythic time, where yesterday is as today, tomorrow is as a thousand years ago, it makes no difference.
Through his Dreamtime work, Garner was able to pull through his engram assault and achieve this place/time unification and experience the mythic time, something he’d previously only ascribed as being reached exclusively by people without formal education (notice this white, Western, Cambridge-educated man romanticising rural working class people and aboriginal cultures – a common concept of Garner’s time, to ascribe insight and mystic awareness to under-privileged, indigenous groups). Interestingly, Garner was only able to achieve this through suffering and visionary work, connecting him to the shamanic tradition. Shaman, in accounts I have read, need to be ‘taken apart’ (spiritual death) in order to access the Dreamtime, or the Spirit World, and this may take the form of physical suffering (such as being stung by a swarm of bees in order to loosen the soul fibres, as in the Saxon tradition) or by mental disintegration. Upon reassembly, the shaman has transitioned to a new consciousness and state of being – they now occupy the mythic time, where the inner and outer are as one. Achieving this, says Garner in a fantastic flurry of New Age 1970s awakening, will allow us to fulfill our evolutionary potential. It correlates with Jesus’s ‘emptying’ (the Greek kenosis) in the Wilderness: the harsh process of individuation in Jungian parlance.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
In the Alderley Edge novels, the mythic substratum is present in a very visceral way. The children Susan and Colin live it as direct experience. It’s there and immediate. The legends are real, as is the danger they present. The power in Garner’s writing here is to blend it with the everyday world. Although largely hidden from the mainstream human world, the realm of Fundindelve, and the larger fantastic reality it belongs to, is nonetheless in the same world as our own. It is a world where goddesses and evil wizards disguise themselves as ordinary locals or backpacking-wearing tourists, where svarts keep to the disused mines, where golden, expansive localities can arise from much small, more mundane places, before disappearing again. It absolutely infuses our world with magic, and overlays it with a mythical infrastructure by which all its inhabitants interact.
When the Magic is Gone
But what happens when the magic is gone? Garner talks about his mental health issues, his depression. Many of us know the landscapes of depression: when it arises, all the magic gets sucked out of our world. There’s no wonder, there’s no Light. It’s just the cold concrete of reality, day to day. Even when we are surrounded by people, we are alone. The good times are in the past, your own future is cancelled. In Boneland, Garner presents us an adult Colin from the previous Alderley books, but much like the post-peak world of Prime Suspect 6, or the comedown of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we find ourselves in a world where the adventure is over. There are no alfars, no palugs, no wizards, no Morrigans, and no characters apart from Colin to have survived into the present time from the late 1960s. Alone, amnesiac, autistic, obsessed and adrift, Colin is searching for his missing sister Susan, and seeking to recover his lost memories. He sits in front of the rock that once led to the Sleeping King, but it never opens. He waits in the valley that once held so much magic, but is surrounded by nothing but stones and pebbles. The reader is left with the impression that Colin may have imagined the events of the first two books, that they never happened at all or, they did happen, but were not magical: villainous witch Selina Place could have been just a human child molester, and the whole mythical adventure was an imaginary coping mechanism. This says a lot about my own attraction to spirituality. Do my traumatic childhood experiences and autistic brain force into creation an imaginary, fantastical inner reality, so I can cope? Basically, yes. But then, that’s all religions, right? What’s important is that, Colin’s interactions with the mythic have a healing effect, they make him stable and give him purpose. Although he has no strict answers by the end, he is left with a renewed sense of magic. He has reconciled himself to the knowledge the world has changed, its access to magic and Fundindelve weaker than ever before (as was hinted to be happening in The Moon of Gomrath due to human pollution and activity), and that the physical, familial, social and cultural familiarities of childhood, have gone. It is strongly hinted that agents of Fundindelve have intervened to bring him to this peace and sense of responsibility. Again disguising themselves as ordinary people, the suggestion is that the Morrigan, or some aspect of the Goddess, has steered him where he needs to be. He finds the magic again, in this new world, and on his own terms.
So what can we do when the magic is gone?
Go and get it back.
Light vs. Dark
As with Susan Cooper, Garner works with the duality of Light and Dark. Not just in his fiction, but in his personal writings. We are in battle both within ourselves (in Garnerian view, to overcome the bad engrams, or what Jung would call complexes and neuroses) and with external forces (that implant bad engrams). For Jung, Light and Dark are not independent, intelligent agencies, but are formed from within us, which then outwardly projected onto people, places and situations. There is no Devil, no Satan, no Absolute Evil but the evil we make. In the Alderley Edge novels, the Light and the Dark are in constant struggle, with representatives on each side. As with Cooper again, the Light never seems to have as many troops, isn’t as coordinated, isn’t as organised, isn’t as influential and far-reaching, as the Dark. And yet, when Light acts, it has only to fulfill a specific and much less sizable effort than the Dark will muster.
Nastrond from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Consider a match lit in a pitch black room. Immediately the dark retreats as the room becomes filled with light. Only one match is needed.
The Shamanism of Alan Garner
In Boneland, he examines the inheritance of shamanistic burden. Starting with a prehistoric shaman in flashbacks that underscore events in the present time, we see a laboured individual working to keep the stars from falling. Eventually he passes the responsibility to a newcomer from a migrating tribe. The suggestion is, these responsibilities to keep the Dark from overcoming the Light, evolve throughout the ages to take on different forms. For the prehistoric shaman, it is his task to make sure day follows night. For Cadellin, epochs later, High Magic is used to prepare the Sleeping King for his last battle. For Colin in the present, it is astronomy and other minute actions (his autistic routines for example) that enables his shamanistic responsibilities to manifest. All three forms are vastly different from each other, and here Garner is telling us that there’s no absolutism in the methods, detail and aesthetics of the shaman’s struggle to keep back the Dark, but an underlying truth that shape-shifts through the countless generations, and across multiple cultural exchanges. It is a simple yet profound message, that wisdom falls back on universality to transmit itself – and from Garner the shaman himself. Consider how his mental anguishes (Attack of the Engrams!) brought him to mythic time. Consider also the fact that when he was a child, he was very ill and bedridden for months on end, year after year, to the point where he entered delirious dreamtimes and neared death. Such trauma is the bedrock of shamanic awakening, and as he reached adulthood and started to publish his books, Alan Garner initiated shamanistic storytelling to awaken his readers, bring them inner, outer and mythic time, and experience the violence of repeated histories.
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