The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

This bog-man informs Joe that his lazy eye is the result of “the glamourie” – a gift that enables him to see time collapsed, to perceive the eternal in the now. Joe wanders out into the marshy wood behind his house where he meets Thin Amren, a naked man with copper-brown skin and a hood made of leather. This is classic Garner territory: obscure but resonant objects, a present that feels wedded to a mythical past, a questioning child seeking to unravel the mysteries of an off-kilter world, a landscape freighted with meaning.

The cup has Joe’s name written upon it, the stone is inscribed with the picture of a horse. One day a rag-and-bone man appears, named Treacle Walker, and offers Joe a cup and a stone in exchange for an old pair of pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder bone. His parents are not in evidence, and he measures out the days by watching the passing of Noony, the train, through the valley below. He has been poorly, he says, and wears a patch to correct a lazy eye. Joe, our hero, is a child living a strange and circumscribed existence. It should perhaps not surprise us that, again, he takes time as his subject. Garner lives in a medieval medicine house on a site that has been inhabited for 10,000 years and is a stone’s throw from the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire. “Time is ignorance,” reads the book’s epigraph, from Carlo Rovelli, and the novel is essentially a response to this idea, seeking to ask how we would experience the world if we were able to step out of the straitjacket of time. Indeed, it seems as though the subject of time is the theme that underpins much of his later work – how we experience it, how we might refigure or alter our relation to it.

OL20105890W Page_number_confidence 93.15 Pages 294 Partner Innodata Pdf_module_version 0.0.15 Ppi 360 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20211019080708 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 389 Scandate 20211013141112 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog isbn Scribe3_search_id 9780007355211 Tts_version 4.Garner’s latest novel, Treacle Walker, also belongs in this hybrid space. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 03:14:00 Boxid IA40261412 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner