Alan Garner on TV: The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Keeper

Red Shift - Tom and Jan on the heath

PART TWO
The power or spirit of place is always central to Alan Garner’s novels and his television work. This power is enduring and remains on some level untouched by the transformations of time and human inhabitation. In Red Shift, Rudheath, Mow Cop and Bartholmey church are the loci of events in all three time periods. They each exert their own particular atmosphere, and seem to provide the natural stages upon which certain acts in eternally recurrent dramas are acted out. Rudheath is the cursed heath, the lifeless interzone through which the motorway ploughs in Tom and Jan’s time. In the civil war episode, Madge calls it ‘a terrible place’ as she flees in the night through its low-lying scrub of trees and bushes with her wounded husband Thomas and the renegade Thomas Venables, who has both betrayed and saved them. The blasted plain is a symbolic landscape betokening a psychological state of despair and hopelessness. It’s most famous literary use is in Shakespeare’s King Lear, which is alluded to in Tom’s comment in the book, when they are in Bartholmey Church, ‘Tom’s a cold’. This is a line repeated several times by Edgar, the beleaguered son of the Earl of Gloucester, who has donned the disguise of Tom, a wretched madman (a variant of the traditional character Tom o’Bedlam). Lear and his loyal fool meet him in a hovel as they wander across a heath. Tom in Red Shift is clearly and self-consciously (and perhaps even a little self-pityingly) casting himself in this role.

The Owl Service - Gwyn by the mountain stream

The high promontory of Mow Cop and Bartholmey Church tower mirror mirror each other across time, both sacred spaces and lookout points. They are sanctuaries which can offer the platform for a more expansive vision, but can also become traps if the sanctity of the place is defiled. Holy sites and cursed ground can be co-existant, the divisions between states a matter of spiritual affinity or tribal affinity, or some more metaphysical distinction. In The Keeper, the cottage is a cursed place from the perspective of Sally and Peter and the local populace, as haunted houses tend to be by definition. But the land beneath is sacred. The pervading sense of wrongness derives from its violation through human incursion and the presumption of control over the surrounding land signified by the building of a gamekeeper’s cottage. In The Owl Service, the river, the hill with its crowning copse, the mountain and the whole enfolding valley itself are all imbued with a particular power, humming with inherent history and myth. Each landscape feature conveys a discrete episode in the overall story. When Gwyn climbs to top of the mountain, with the intention of crossing the ridge and walking straight on out of the imprisoning valley, thus abdicating his role in the drama, he is confronted by Huw, who seems to know everything which is happening on the land he claims as his own. He babbles on about the time when they stole the hogs from the neighbouring lord with the help of his (or Gwydion’s) magical trickery. He is relating another of the stories from the Math Son of Mathonwy branch of The Mabinogion, hinting at further tales attached to other landscapes. There is a geographical and narrative continuum which extends beyond the valley, which harbours just one chapter of the ongoing universal drama.

Paul Nash - Landscape of the Moon's Last Phase (1943/4)

The standing stones, copses of trees on hills and recurrent circle motifs in The Owl Service are all characteristics of the late paintings of Paul Nash, in which he imbues the landscape of the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire with a symbolism which is both universal and intensely personal. That sense of connection to a landscape, of an interior affinity with its contours and features, can lead to a deeper awareness of hidden aspects of the self. The possibilities (and dangers) of such self-knowledge are represented in The Owl Service by the positioning of mirrors in the woodland surrounding the house. This also adds a touch of surrealism. The props of the domestic interior (and we’ve seen the prominent dressing table mirror in Alison’s room earlier) take their place along the borders of the wild exterior. This is the landscape of the waking dream. The semi-cultivated forest of the unconscious shallows interpenetrating with the conscious furnishings of the ‘civilised’ mind. The boundaries between the interior of the house, the realm of Nancy and Alison, and the exterior patrolled by Huw and Gwyn is not clearly defined. Whilst Huw and Nancy, by now fixed in their roles, keep to their zones (Huw looks extremely awkward when he has to make a brief incursion into the house, his beatific expression temporarily dropping from his face), Alison and Gwyn are still flexible enough to pass regularly back and forth through (Alison creeping out of her room at night). Alison pleads with Gwyn to take her even further outside of her territory, to lead her along the ancient trackways which wind their way up the mountainside. These are the paths which the local inhabitants trod when they went to cut peat mountain’s flank. She wants to share in the connection to the land which Huw and Gwyn share through their ancestry. These trackways are a record of old human patterns of work and civilisation left on the land, lightly sketched traces scratched on the surface of the deeper temporal formations of geological and climatic forces. It is these forces which Gwyn refers to when they do make their ascent, leading Alison with the offhand order ‘let’s climb this metamorphic Welsh mountain’.

In The Keeper, the spirit of place is embodied (or disembodied). We are able to see through its eyes (or its point of view) without ever witnessing a visible manifestation. The spirit of place is the place. It’s also the place through time – what has been built upon as well as what has been built up. This spirit is a wounded and defensive entity, intent on guarding against further encroachment. It marks the increasing awareness of environmental degradation and the growth of the green movement, and is in tune with the sense of humanity’s disharmonious presence within the natural world. Sally and Peter fold out their own chairs and table in the cottage, and set out their scientific equipment all around. It is only when Sally finally sits on the chair in front of the fire, which we have witnessed the spirit of the place settling down into from the suggestive camera POV several times, that a connection is made. ‘All it wants is to be left alone’, she says. ‘The earth not broken’. The place has become cursed because of human presence. They are the ones who haunt it.

The Owl Service - red Alison with her coded snooker ball

There is a human rootedness in place which grows stronger over time (and so more difficult to break free from). In The Owl Service, Huw seems a part of the land, as much its guardian spirit as the invisible Keeper. He is generally rooted to the ground with rake or broom, which he leans on as a conductor of the earth’s power (wood being appropriate in this symbolic sense) as much as a contemplative and conversational prop. He rakes over the gravel of the drive as if to remove the traces of Alison’s father Clive and his wife Margaret’s invasive presence. His beaming face appears between the bracketing necks of a bronze statue of paired cranes, as if he too were a part of the fauna. After Gwyn has spent the night with Alison in the birdhouse in the woods, Huw, assured that the old tale is playing itself out once more, grows heady with his sense of his mythological nature, declaring himself to be the lord of the valley and that lives within it. Later, when Gwyn tries to escape the valley, Huw passes on his proprietorial position, along with the paralysing rootedness it brings with it (how long before he finds the equivalent of broom or rake?). ‘You are lord of the valley now’, he tells him. ‘The heir in blood’. The valley is likened to a reservoir of power, with the eternal triad her incarnated as Alison, Roger and Gwyn acting as conduits for its psychoactive narrative current. Stephen McKay, in his booklet notes to the Network dvd release, points out the colour symbolism running through the series. The three young characters are each represented by a colour corresponding to one of the wires in a plug (as they were coded in 1969). This is seen in the predominant colours of the clothes they wear. Alison dresses in red, Roger in green and Gwyn in black. There is also a scene in which they are all in the games room, rushing around the snooker table colliding their respective red, green and black balls against each other across the green baize surface.

In Red Shift, the atmosphere of place is associated with historical moments involving the clash of native and invading forces. There is a sense that the particularity of certain landscapes exerts a strong influence on human behaviour, and that they are stage sets waiting for certain acts in the dramas of the age to be performed. This is obviously the case in a military context, in which geography plays an important strategic role. Certain routes are ideal for an invading army, and certain elevated features offer advantageous positions from which to make a defensive stand. Rudheath is the place where the Roman legionary soldiers suffer ambush and attack, and are forced to retreat. In the book, on the other hand, it is the route they take on the way to launching a flash raid on the local ‘Cat’ village. It’s the direction from which the Royalist attack on Bartholmey comes. The heath is a transitory zone, steeped in an atmosphere of fear and uncertaintly. Tom lives adjacent to it in a static caravan with his parents, whilst Jan lives nearby in a bungalow with hers. Jan’s house is one of a series she has lived in as her parents move around the country according to the peripatetic needs of their work. Both are temporary and unstable homes, akin to the tents which the Romans set up.

Red Shift - John Fowler directs the church defences

Rudheath is an open and exposed place, both literally and symbolically, where lives are lived in a state of vulnerable uncertainty. Those who find themselves there are looking for the first route out. In contrast, Bartholmey Church and its surrounding village, set in its enfolding valley, is a place of retreat and entrenchment. Tom suggests that it could be ‘a Come to Britain poster’, a Batsford book cover rural idyll. The empty church becomes a sanctuary for Tom and Jan, a place apart from the judgemental scrutiny of his parents. It’s in the hushed surrounds of its nave that they both come to the realisation that Tom’s mother has been intercepting Jan’s letters and disposing of them. For them, it becomes a place where truth is revealed, an enclosed space of sacrosanct intimacy (despite Tom’s unstoppable flow of sardonically clever comments). In the Civil War era, John Fowler leads the villagers into the church in anticipation of the Royalists’ arrival. His attempts at an honest expression of his feelings towards Madge are firmly rebuffed, and we gain the impression that have become a frequent and unwelcome imposition. The church becomes a sanctuary besieged and eventually breached. John refuses to step forward when his name is called by the Royalist commander ‘for breach of the King’s peace’, even when his fellow villagers are killed one by one. It is his father who finally betrays him for the sake of the others (a futile gesture, as it turns out). The sacrosanct, sheltering space which has allowed Tom and Jan to find an element of truth and honesty is here defiled. John’s silence, which condemns his neighbours to death, echoes the silence which Tom’s mother tries to impose on Jan by stealing her letters. Her duplicity is uncovered by her son’s openness in questioning Jan, whereas John’s disavowal of responsibility is uncovered by the passive father. He is the local vicar and thus, in a sense, the guardian of the sacredness of the place.

Red Shift - Macey with the killing axe

Mow Cop, a holy site for the Celtic Cat tribe, also becomes a sacred space besieged and desacralised when the Roman soldiers make defensive camp there. They are safe while they remain there. Logan, their leader, who knows all about local customs and beliefs, sees the tribal heads carved from stone and realises that they have ‘touched sacred ground – blood can’t be shed on it’. In the Civil War period, too, the villagers are led out from the church before being lined up and slaughtered. We are witness to the bloody history running beneath the placid pastoral poster image of Britain. The historical episodes in Red Shift represent a progression from warring tribalism to settlement and towards an intimate and self-contained domesticity. This progression follows a geographical progression from Rudheath in the north (on the Cheshire Plain near Northwich), through Crewe (where Tom and Jan meet at the station), then east to Bartholmey and Mow Cop. Crewe was a town built around the railway and its manufacturing needs. As such, it can be considered an extension of Rudheath, in that it was inherently a transitory place, and one associated with the needs of a particular industry. We go from the open heathland where nothing substantial takes root and everything is vulnerable to external influence or assault, and then to Crewe, a no-place until its growth in the mid-nineteenth century to facilitate people getting elsewhere. Heading east, we come to the village in the valley, and from there to the cottage, the sacred cave and the tower on the hill. This progression is also reflected in the change in the status of the stone axe-head which is used by Macey in the Roman period and subsequently rediscovered in the Civil War and modern eras. It begins as a violent, bloodstained weapon, with which Macey fells tribal attackers left and right during one of his berserking frenzies. When he becomes close to the corn goddess, however, he rejects its violent use, telling her that the killing is ‘not from me’. When Thomas unearths it from the streambed in Bartholmey, it becomes a ‘thunderstone’, a talisman lodged in the fireplace to bring protection to hearth and home. Tom finds it still in place in the ruin of Thomas and Madge’s cottage atop Mow Cop. It then becomes the token of Tom and Jan’s intimacy, and of a continuity with a domesticised past, which offers the hope of a future in which they too are settled. When Tom sells it to a museum, he betrays their intimacy, and undermines that hope.

Holding history - unearthing the axe-head

The axe-head connects the characters from their separate times, bridging the divide of centuries. It also implicitly makes connections with inhabitants of more distant eras, since it is evidently an object which Macey has himself discovered and appropriated for his own use. Tom’s studies reveal that it was ‘a votive axe from the Beaker period. 3,500 years and it had survived’. Its smooth roundedness is designed for the firm grip of a hand, which gives it a symbolic weight and solidity, the conjunction of geology and history made tangibly real in the holding. This conjunction is given a further cosmic dimension as the camera circles its holed, sinusoidally curved oval form at the end of the story. It’s a shot which echoes the circling nebulae which we saw in the opening credits sequence, the axe a similarly illuminated form set within depths of surrounding darkness. Layers of human, historical, geological and cosmological time are embodied in this one simple yet symbolically complex piece of worked stone. It ends up encased beneath museum glass, an objectified artefact on display to all. But it can no longer be held or touched, and so the feeling of a direct physical connection to generations past is broken.

Artefacts charged with externally imposed meaning also feature in The Owl Service. Guilty relics associated with the betrayal and murder in the recurring Mabinogion tale are squirreled away in a rocky cleft on the top of the mountain. The arrowhead from Gronw’s spear and the brake blocks which Huw removed from Bertram’s motorbike, inadvertently leading to his death, lie side by side. Gwyn replaces the arrowhead with a cheap tourist gewgaw with an owl design, bought in the village but made in England. In a present in which the substance of local myth and ancestral history grows more attenuated, its form altered to sell as a romanticised and sanitised package to tourists and outside investors, the authentic is replaced with the manufactured facsimile. Deeper meaning has been drained away, the stories trivialised and their darker, more profound currents diverted.

The Keeper - the empty room

The cottage in The Keeper is also a place to which stories adhere. Peter’s grandmother had told him ‘tales’, and the suicide of the original gamekeeper, followed by his daughter’s decision to let the house fall into a natural state of ruin rather than profit from its sale, make it clear that there has been a foreboding atmosphere about it from the beginning, which has echoed down the years. There is a deeper substrata underlying the building which stretches beyond history and into geological expanses of time. The Keeper embodies and ancient, pre-human spirit of place. The generational stories attesting to its presence are reminiscent of the layered hauntings in Nigel Kneale’s 1972 TV play The Stone Tape, which are successively erased until only some formless, pre-historic abyss remains, along with whatever inhabited its dark depths. The cottage opens upon a similar abyss, and as in The Stone Tape, ends up becoming an ageless prison or tomb. In the final shot, Sally and Peter are no longer there, and their equipment has been cleared away. The chair in which Sally sat and the window which she looked out of and in which her face was reflected are both now bare. The fire burns in the grate once more, the chair still rooted in place in front of its warm glow. It’s as if they’d never existed, never crossed the threshold of the cottage’s front door. This has become a place of disappearance, of non-being. Sally’s reading book, Schindler’s Ark, which we glimpsed earlier, connects this metaphysical abyss with more particular historical disappearances and erasures.

The Owl Service - making owls in the doll's house

Garner’s characters often find themselves confined within enclosing spaces. It’s a confinement which is a reflection of psychological states as much as it is a delineation of literal limitations. In The Owl Service, the valley forms such space, albeit a fairly expansive one, with the house another set within it. House and valley are separate realms, as we’ve seen. Nancy seldom leaves the house, as if to do so would deprive her of some essential part of herself, which is inextricably connected to this dark interior. Huw, meanwhile, is rooted to the valley outside, only occasionally retreating to the shabby shed in the grounds where he sleeps. The two are often caught gazing at each other from their divided worlds, separated by panes of glass. Huw has become so accustomed to his limited horizons that he acknowledges nothing beyond the valley’s rim. Gwyn tries to remind him that ‘there’s a world outside’, but his own attempts at leaving the valley prove futile. Gwyn also attempts to point Alison towards farther, more expansive horizons when he finds her hunched up in the woodland hen coop. She has escaped the house and her bedroom sanctuary to retreat to this even more claustrophobic and constrained space. ‘You can’t spend your life in a doll’s house’, Gwyn tells her, with possible reference to Ibsen’s play about the frustrations arising from the domestic respectability expected of women of a certain class in late nineteenth century society. But the rather whiny and spoiled Alison shows little signs of having the individual will or strength of character to cast off the comfortable privileges which such a constrained life can afford. Roger is also to be found in the confined space of the basement, where he sets up his photographic developing studio. Hanging up the images he has taken through the ‘eye’ of the Stone of Gronw, he is able to ‘see’ further in this room with no windows than in the outside world of objective vision. This is an inner space, the confining white-washed walls of the basement those of his own skull. Clive, meanwhile, can generally be found polishing his car. This is the confined space he’d prefer to be inhabiting, mobile and heading away from this place. As his car would retreat down the drive, Huw would be raking over his traces behind him.

Red Shift - Tom in his headphone world

In Red Shift, Tom is marooned in the confined space of the family static caravan. This is not the forced proximity of the family holiday, however, but the permanent situation in which he must exist. The caravan is further subdivided, at convenient moments, into separate living spaces, everybody retreating into their own private cells. Tom retreats even further into his headphone space, blocking out the sound of his parents and their TV programmes. He goes so far inwards that he is in danger of losing contact with the world outside of his head altogether. We see the outside of Jan’s house (her parents’ bungalow) but never go inside. Her life is, to a certain extent, closed off to Tom. An essential element of mystery and separation remains. In the Roman period, the soldiers lie within their small tents upon the heath. These offer wholly inadequate protection when they are penetrated and slashed by the swords and spears of tribal attackers outside. Up on Mow Cop there is another enclosed, womblike space, in which the corn goddess is discovered. Macey and the tribal Celt enter through its narrow aperture to commune with her, the other soldiers blunder through to violate her. The church and its tower are the spaces into which people retreat in the Civil War period. All of these confining interiors are places in which to gain some necessary or protective distance from the world, to shut it out. But the world keeps forcing itself in.

The Keeper - Interstitial spirit

In The Keeper, the spirit of place whose perspective we share via the camera’s point of view crawls around the margins of the cottage’s central room, keeping to the crumbling and splintered interstices of the walls. It drifts about, looking out from the cold darkness behind the hearth. This spirit of the natural environment has been driven to the wainscot spaces within the larger confining space by human habitation, or civilisation, to take a broader outlook. If the cottage, like Roger’s basement, can be seen as analogous to the mind, an interior space, then this is the instinctive level of consciousness pushed to the borders by human intelligence. It represents the freedom of the pre-rational mind, before the development of self-awareness and the resultant separation from the surrounding world (the Fall, essentially); a dispersed consciousness free from the cage of rationality and the self.

The Owl Service - On top of the world

These confined spaces open up into wider universal perspectives, if only the characters are able to perceive them. In The Owl Service, Gwyn and Alison climb the mountain and rest against the Ravenstone outcropping at its peak. From here, they look out across the valley and to hills and mountains beyond, gaining a godlike view of their environment and the lives they’ve been leading within it, and a heady sense of new and unlimited possibilities. They temporarily rise above the restraints of inheritance and learned social assumptions. Alison’s desire to climb the old path, with all its associations with traditional manual labour, and to climb it with Gwyn as her guide indicates a desire on her part to rise above the limitations and expectations of her social and class status. Huw is also affected by his ascent to the mountaintop, the boundaries of his kingdom expanding to infinity as he proclaims ‘my land is the country of the summer stars’. The small, enclosed valley is suddenly one with the vast expanse of the cosmos.

Red Shift - cosmic perspectives in the local landscape

In Red Shift, too, events are seen within the compass of a cosmological scale. We move from the particular and the inwardly personal to the universal. Tom has a star chart on his wall in the caravan, beneath which he studies the Neolithic stone hand-axe which he has discovered with Jan on Mow Cop. The expanses of deep space and the layers of deep, geological time and human pre-history are all connected, each enfolding or unfolding within the other, and each encompassed by the human mind. Tom and Jan place themselves within the cosmological perspective, orienting themselves when separated in space by looking up at Delta Orionis in the belt of the Orion constellation. This is in fact a multiple star, with three stellar bodies orbiting each other, and thus also acts as a cosmological metaphor for the connection between Tom, Thomas and Macey across time. In looking at an object across such vast distances, Tom and Jan are also effectively looking back in time, the light which is focussed onto their retinas having taken many hundreds of years to reach them. ‘We’re looking at it as it was when the Roman’s were here’, Tom tells Jan. When they cycle out from Crewe towards Bartholmey, which will establish a further connection across time through the experience of the spirit of a particular place, we see the great white oval of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. Its dish is tilted up to point at distances far beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and drink in the radiation emitted across the spectrum from all directions, connecting the Earth with the cosmos. The Jodrell Bank dish can also be seen in the documentary on Garner included on the Owl Service dvd, a grand big science construct in the rural landscape neighbouring the reconstructed medieval farmhouse where he lives. So these connections across time and space are ones which he makes in his own life, too.

The Keeper - weathering the storm

In The Keeper, Sally and Peter are subjected to a terrifying assault of banging noise reminiscent of The Haunting, as if something were trying to smash its way through a door or boundary wall to get to them on the other side. They are also cowed by a howling wind and what seems to be a crushing increase in the density of the local gravity, which forces them to the ground. They cling on to each other to prevent themselves being swept away into some netherworld. Their minds are forcibly opened to a dimension lying beneath the surface layer of human civilisation and its attendant boundaries built up by the rational mind. There is a deep series of substrata underlying the walls which humanity has built, beneath the very thin layer of history silted up on top.

The Owl Service - Bloduedd revealed

The opening up of space is accompanied by an opening up of time. In The Owl Service, the past is a part of the present. Again, it rises through like underlying, granitic substrata once the surrounding territory has been eroded away. This is directly represented by the disintegration of part of the wall in the games room, revealing the painting of Blodeuwedd beneath. This is actually a reproduction of one of the female figures from Boticelli’s Primavera, her eyes grown hollow and shadowed. Spring has entered her autumn. The use of this reproduction might have been due to time or budgetary restrictions, but it actually works quite well, linking the Mabinogion character to wider mythic traditions. Huw talks about the legend in the present tense. Indeed, his speech generally avoids the use of the past tense. He exists in a temporally transcendent state, the eternal present of mythic time. Hauntings and possessions, the stuff of supernatural fiction, are here a manifestation of the collapse of the temporal perspective inherent in ordinary human consciousness. Gwyn intuits this when he suggests that the re-emergence of ancient mythic archetypes is a temporal phenomenen - ‘not haunted, more like still happening’.

Oral history also keeps the past alive in the present. Huw’s telling of the legend makes it feel as if it is happening now. When such oral histories are written down, they are also fixed for future generations, and can be brought to life again in the minds of literate societies. Gwyn and Alison read the Mabinogion, and through it come to a better understanding of the present and their own part in the eternal story. Gwyn’s seemingly native knowledge of the valley is also a product of oral history and storytelling. He grew up in North Wales, but has learnt all about the place from his mother, who never really left in spirit, and knows it better then the landscape of his childhood.

Red Shift - Thomas looking out from the church tower

In Red Shift, the erosion of temporal boundaries is suggested by camera angles and editing. Film editing splices time within the same space. What is implied in the form and structure of the Red Shift film is also present in The Owl Service. Roger’s camera captures moments of frozen time, with the ‘eye’ in the Stone of Gronw forming a megalithic focal point, a locus of power which enables the collapse of temporal boundaries. In Red Shift, we see Thomas in the tower of Bartholmey Church in the Civil War period looking east to Mow Cop. We see Macey and the legion encamped there looking west, and then Tom looking out from the ridge of the outcropping. Thomas is like a fulcrum connecting these two distant eras together. The rubbled remains of his cottage, where he settled with Madge, are the ruins of time, implying a domestic life after they’d fled Bartholmey. It’s a life we never get to see, however. The shifts in time are brought about not by periods of quiet and contentment, but by moment of crisis, of personal and historical fracture.

Red Shift - the blooded axe

Blood and ancestry is another way through which different times are connected. Blood is used as a symbol in The Owl Service and Red Shift. In The Owl Service, Alison draws blood from Roger’s cheek soon after she has been ‘possessed’ by the mythic energy contained in the owl patterned plates. The three lines from her raked fingers are like the scratch of an owl’s razored claws. The blood on the axehead is also a mark of violence which connects Macey with Tom’s smashing of the caravan window, and his shedding of his own blood in anger. As mentioned before, the sacred space on Mow Cop is ground on which blood is not allowed to be spilled. The same goes for the church at Bartholmey. Rape and violation, which occurs in and around both sites, is a way in which the invader or outsider can impose or imprint themselves on the territory which they claim, both psychologically and genetically. So, the Royalist soldiers rape the village women whose husbands they have just killed outside the church, and the Roman soldiers rape the corn goddess in her holy cave. Logan, the legionary commander, makes things quite clear when he points to the goddess pregnant belly and says ‘that’s the legion in there’. This is more explicitly chilling in the novel, where they take her as a captive from the village they raid. In the television adaptation, she is already heavily pregnant when they find her in the cave. But the sense of a more insidious invasion, carried in the blood, is evident. At the end of Red Shift, Tom confronts Jan over her ‘betrayal’ of him. He has spied on her in London, where he intended to surprise her by meeting her at Euston rather than Crewe, and seen her with another man. Refusing her explanations, he attempts to claim her by having sex with her. It’s a scene which connects uncomfortably with the scenes of violation in the other eras which we witness. Jan makes it very clear that she feels she has been used as an object. ‘It would like to go now’, she says through clenched teeth.

Father figures - Macey and Logan

A certain ancestral connection between the characters in each time is also implied in their shared name, with its different variants: Tom, Thomas and Macey. Tom comes out with the old phrase ‘more know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows’ at the beginning of Red Shift. The Toms are in a sense aspects of the archetypal figure of the fool. The fool is not necessarily an idiot or jester, but can be seen as someone at the beginning of the journey through life, taking the first steps along the road. They have experienced little of the world, and have yet to accumulate any significant wisdom. They are, in fact, something of a blank slate. But their naivety and innocence can sometimes lead to insights which the more world-weary and cynical might miss. The three aspects of Tom are all attempting to set out into the world, to become themselves more fully. To do so, they have to gain some distance from the respective father (or mother) figures who have shaped their lives up to this point. Tom needs to get away from the moralising scrutiny of his mother and from his father’s weak attempts to assert his paternalistic authority. Thomas needs to get away from the baleful influence of John Fowler. And Macey needs to break free from Logan, his surrogate father. All three father figures have the aspect of military leaders to some extent or other. Logan is the legionary commander; John Fowler organises the defence of the church and is clearly the dominant voice in the village; and Tom calls his father the sergeant major, whether because he is in the army or just as a jocular mode of address is not made clear. In order to establish themselves in the world, to assert their individual, sovereign selves, the Toms must free themselves from this paternalistic authority.

To be concluded
PART ONE is here.

Alan Garner on the Television: The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Keeper

PART ONE



Alan Garner is widely regarded as one of the finest writers of children’s fantasy in the post war period. His first two novels, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963) were both set around the Cheshire escarpment of Alderley Edge, the area in which Garner grew up. Ancient mythological figures and legends were reawakened to play out their archetypal conflicts once more in this landscape. In Elidor (1965) a church in a decaying area of Manchester proves to be a gateway to a similarly barren otherworld, a chivalric Arthurian realm whose golden age is long over. The worlds of urban realism and symbolic fantasy are implicitly linked, as are the two very different literary modes which they represent. A strong attachment to landscape and the myths and histories that inhere within it has been a characteristic of his fiction ever since. Towards the end of the 60s and into the 70s, his novels became more enigmatic, written in a condensed, elliptical and very literary style. They demanded a great deal of concentration from an adult reader, let alone the young readership to which they were still being marketed. It was these challenging and emotionally highly charged stories which Garner adapted for the television, beginning with his 1967 novel The Owl Service, which he scripted for ITV in 1969. In 1978 he turned his 1973 novel Red Shift into a BBC Play for Today. And finally, he wrote a haunted house (or cottage) story for the half hour ITV children’s series Dramarama in 1983.

Alison, Gwyn and Roger - the eternal triangle

The Owl Service largely takes place around a large old manor house adjacent to a village in a Welsh valley. The house has been inherited by Alison, a girl in her late teens. She and her mother, Margaret, have come here on holiday with her stepbrother Roger and his father Clive. It’s a new family set-up, Clive and Margaret having just married, and tensions soon become apparent. The house is kept with sullen resentment by an outsider, Nancy, who also acts as cook. She has returned after many years, having moved away to the other side of Wales. She is accompanied by her son, Gwyn, a precociously intelligent, self-educated boy. Standing sentinel outside, endlessly raking the gravel drive, is Huw Halfbacon, the gardener. He watches the house and the comings and goings of its inhabitants as if waiting for something to happen. The story begins with Alison hearing scrabbling, scratching sounds coming from the attic above her bedroom ceiling (premonitory shades of The Exorcist). She gets Gwyn, with whom she is on friendly terms, to climb up and take a look. He uncovers an old, dust and grime coated set of plates painted with a pattern which weaves the beak and eyes of an owl into a garlanded floral design. Alison becomes obsessed with tracing out the pattern onto sheets of paper, which she then folds into origami owls. Once she has done this, the original pattern disappears from the plates, leaving them blank. Her driven creation of owls from flowers acts as the trigger for the re-enactment of an age-old legend associated with the local landscape. Huw looks on and makes obscure bardic proclamations. It’s as if he had expected this to happen, and had experienced it countless times before.

Tom and Sally parting at Crewe

Red Shift, like The Owl Service, features teenage protagonists on the cusp of adulthood, but who are still beholden to uncomprehending parents. They too are wracked with intense, wrenching feelings for one another which are thwarted by the social and economic forces of the world around them, as well as by their own doubts and anxieties. Tom lives in uncomfortable proximity with his mother and father in a static caravan in Rudheath, Cheshire. He has an expressively romantic relationship with Jan, who lives with her parents in a nearby bungalow. When they move away and Jan begins her nursing studies in London, Tom arranges for them to meet at regular intervals at Crewe railway station. From here, they cycle out into the outlying countryside. Besides Tom and Jan’s story, we also slip back into two historical eras, witnessing violent events which occurred within the landscapes which they explore. These time shifts are triggered by a mixture of emotional affinity and a tapping into the spirit of particular powerful locations.

The struggling rump of a Roman legion, which includes some native followers, is ambushed and retreats to the rocky outcrop of Mow Cop. Here it becomes pinned down on a sacred tribal spot, where the soldiers discover a heavily pregnant woman sheltered in a cave. She is regarded by the local tribe as a fertility goddess, but treated as a prize of war by the Roman members of the legion. The exception is Macey, who refuses to violate her like the others, treating her with due deference. He is a young Romanised Celt brought into the legion when he was just a child, and used by its leader, Logan, for his ability to go into a state of frenzied violence when certain trigger words are used. Another story takes place in the Civil War period. Another young seer, Thomas Rowley, gazes out towards Mow Cop from the tower of the church in the nearby village of Bartholmey as the inhabitants prepare for a siege. A militia of Royalist Irishmen is sweeping across the country from the West ruthlessly set on rooting out parliamentary sympathisers. Amongst those they seek is John Fowler, a charismatic figure in the village who is central to the organisation of the retreat into the fortress of the church. The Roman and Civil War periods are linked by a physical artefact, a stone axe-head. It is used by Macey, who breaks it from the axe in one of his frenzies, and dug up by Rowley, who calls it a lightning stone. He believes it to be a token of good luck if placed with a hearth, a ward against future lightning strikes. Tom and Jan discover it in an old ruined cottage on top of Mow Cop, and Tom takes care of it for them, holding it as an emblem of the possibility of a future spent together.

The Keeper's cottage

The Keeper is an enigmatic and subtly disturbing supernatural tale. It concerns Peter, an enthusiastic amateur ghost hunter. He is accompanied on one of his nocturnal investigations by Sally, as they seek to find proof of reported hauntings in a half-ruined gamekeepers cottage. Peter intends to measure and record any phenomena which might become manifest, confronting the unknown with empirical rationalism backed up with a battery of scientific equipment. His grandmother had told him tales from her childhood about the house and its reputation as a bad place. It had been left to fall into ruin by the daughter of its last inhabitant, a gamekeeper who shot himself in 1912. Sally seems to sense an abiding and watchful presence in the house. Her intuitive, empathic feel for the spirit of the place acts as a counterbalance to Peter’s analytical aloofness. As the night wears on, they play scrabble to pass the time. The words they choose with uncommon swiftness turn out to be from the lines of an old folk rhyme, which Sally has also unconsciously written out. It becomes increasingly clear that they have, through their curiosity, made a connection with some formless but powerful spirit of the land, a keeper which resents their presence.

Many of the themes of The Owl Service and Red Shift can be found in condensed form in their opening title sequences. The Owl Service uses musique concrete and diagrammatic animation and shadowplay to fold together modernity and age old tradition, the natural and the mechanistic, rational and supernatural in disconcerting visual collage. The title card pictures, with their clear and simple outlines and monotone colouring look like printed illustrations from a children’s book. Their minimal animation therefore gives the sense of stories coming to life, pages flickering into being, their contents made physically manifest in the world beyond the covers. The music begins with the rippling of a harp, a sound redolent of bardic traditions and the old oral storytelling fixed and codified in the books of the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of Celtic legends. The harp is followed by a gurgle of water draining down a plughole, the sound transformed to give it a metallic cast. It conjures notions of a fluid passage corkscrewing through time. We then hear a motorbike engine revving, a more guttural reiteration of the harp and water sounds which lets us know that we have entered the mechanistic age of the internal combustion engine. All three sounds form elements of an unbroken continuum, it is suggested.

Bird shadows

We see a stand of trees on a hill which are then contracted within a circular frame. In the story, this is both the focal lens of Roger’s camera and the hole in the standing stone which seems also to act as a lens, bringing resonant echoes of past events into focus. The combination of the two create a composite vision, an amalgamation of ways of seeing both ancient and modern. As if to give this concept visual form, we then see a pattern of concentric circles rippling inwards, waves of time drawn towards a focal point. A pictorial candle’s glow is animated into flickering motion, the camera zooming into the flame as if our vision were drawn mothlike towards its immolating fire. A papery flutter of wings accompanies bird shadows cast by hands joined at the thumbs. A similar image was used at the strikingly effective cover of the Ghost Box LP As The Crow Flies by The Advisory Circle. It wouldn’t be surprising if its designer, Julian House, had been influenced by The Owl Service titles. Another of his Ghost Box covers, for Belbury Poly’s The Owl’s Map, also features an outline owl design. Hands then make a circle, echoing the one in which the trees were framed. This circular formation, a cyclical symbol, hints at a non-linear view of time, one which encompasses rebirth and recurrence. It is an invitation for something to come through, for an old pattern to re-establish itself.

Colouring in the owl service pattern

After the flight of wings, the harp returns, playing an old Welsh tune, and we see the pattern on the plate constructing itself, growing in an almost organic form, like time-lapsed lichen. As it is coloured in, as if by an invisible child’s felt pen, it seems flushed with renewed life. We hear a scrabbling, percussive patter, as of the scurrying of small, clawed feet. This morphs into an unnerving rubbing, ratcheting and stretching sound. It feels like some plastic material whose tensile strength is being tested to its limits, pulled taut from both directions. Something trying to break through the skein of time, perhaps. It also perfectly expresses the psychological tensions caused by the close proximity of the story’s characters, and the threat that one or more of them may snap, unleashing a destructive backlash. The raking tracks of clawed nails tears three ragged, parallel lines down the flower and owl mandala, and it fades from view. These titles really are a miniature masterpiece in themselves. They manage to convey so much, with such power, in a very short space of time.



Red Shift begins with a bounding Autobahn style electronic theme by Phil Ryan. It immediately introduces the idea of modernity and of fast motorised motion. We see blue lights coming towards us on a motorway, which blur and reform in the shape of stars approaching (or some interstellar vessel rushing towards them), a ring nebula at the centre perhaps the remains of some cataclysmic supernova. This gives an idea of the contrasts in scale which will be a feature of the story – from the intimate and personal to the historical and cosmological. It also introduces the central astronomical metaphor of blue and red shifts. Observation and measurement of these opposite ends of the visual spectrum allow us to determine whether a star is moving towards our point of perspective (blue, indicating a greater frequency in wavelength) or disappearing into the distance (red, indicating a lower frequency). The ring shape of the nebula again hints at a cyclical view of time. We see the faces of the three male protagonists framed within its iris, morphing into one another within this symbolic stellar formation. The personal and the universal are brought together, a cosmic connection outlined.

Tom in the iris of the ring nebula

We then see red car lights moving away along the other lane of the motorway, the title Red Shift appearing over them, the metaphor spelled out. Two people stand on the verge, rooted in the local landscape while all about them is in motion. They are seen from both perspectives, the blue and red shifting streams, stationary observers within the flux of progressive and regressive time, their relativistic perspective not yet available to us. They are depersonalised, peripheral figures stranded on a hard shoulder no-man’s land. These are our present day protagonists, Tom and Jan, but they are located from the beginning within a wider expanse in terms of time and space. In the opening scene, we find them sitting on a sandy hillock adjacent to the motorway, watching the cars and lorries rush past. To Jan’s innocent question ‘where are we going?’, Tom gives a smart aleck response, talking about continental shift, planetary rotations and expanding universes. Such geological and cosmological perspectives threaten to dwarf them, reduce them to insignificant specks. But when Jan announces that she’s going to move to London, the perspective narrows down to matters of immediate personal import, which have a more direct emotional impact.

Watching the trespassers enter

After the 80s electropop of the Dramarama titles (complete with synth drums and vocodored vocals), the opening credit sequence is contrastingly quiet and restrained. We hear the sparse and suspended chordal clangour of a hammered dulcimer (generally an indicator of East European intrigue in cold war spy thrillers) lightly breaking the silence in the interior of the gamekeeper’s cottage. The breathy whisper of a flute is suggestive of soft respiration, and the sense of presence is further indicated (as it is throughout the story) by the movement of the camera. A chair is set before the fireplace, with logs burning in the small iron grate. The camera eye point of view moves towards the chair, where it lowers its perspective. It’s as if some invisible form were settling itself in before the warm glow. The titles appear over the flickering flames. We hear two figures noisily approaching, and the camera swings suddenly around, startled by this unexpected intrusion. The blank gaze notices them passing by the window, and the door is forcefully shouldered a few times before it bursts open. Sally and Peter enter, and we see that the room is entirely bare, the chair unoccupied, the fireplace cold and the grate empty. We have immediately been introduced to the discomfiting idea that there is something in the cottage, however, and that it is watching. Sally’s later comment, when Peter asks whether she has ever seen a ghost, is perceptive and prescient: ‘I’d be more bothered if a ghost had seen me’.



Mythology and folklore are the matter at the heart of each of the three stories. The sense of a present at the nexus of deeper veins and currents of time is suggested by the way that ancient tales or rhymes whose words flow with incantatory cadences are made manifest in the modern world. These old legends are often attached to a particular place, but they are also universal in their recognition of the play of human emotions, and the conflicts engendered by the potent mixture of sexual, social and generational tensions and rivalries. In the Owl Service, the three young protagonists are driven to enact the story of the rivalry between Lleu Llaw Gyffes and Gronw Bebyr, lord of Penllynn. Their murderous rift came about because of the love between Gronw and Blodeuedd, Lleu’s wife. The story is told in Math Son of Mathonwy, the fourth branch of the Mabinogi, the Celtic legends collected in the 14th century in two volumes, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest and brought together in what is now known as The Mabinogion.

In this story, the magician Gwydion makes a wife for his nephew and charge, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, from ‘the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet’. He does this after Lleu has been cursed by the Lady Aranrhod, his mother, whom Gwydion had tricked into breaking a previous prophecy. She had provided Lleu with arms to defend her castle against a nonexistent enemy which Gwydion had conjured up, and had thereby gifted him his territorial inheritance. In revenge, she consequently vows that ‘he shall never have a wife of the race that is now on this earth’. Blodeuedd, the woman of flowers, is fashioned for Lleu in what amounts to a magically arranged marriage. But she develops a will and independent desires of her own, and falls for Gronw Bebyr, lord of Penllyn, whom she meets whilst he’s abroad hunting stag. He also falls for her, and they plot to do away with Lleu. As is generally the case in these stories, there is a complicated and unlikely set of conditions which must be met before a particular destiny can be fulfilled. There is an element of Celtic tall-tale telling to the legends, which Gwynn also indulges in when he spins Alison a shaggy yarn about sheep on the upper sides of the valley needing stilts to balance and stop themselves from toppling over. He describes this as ‘soaking the Saxon’, maintaining the tribal divisions of past millennia.

Updating the old tales - Gwyn takes aim at Roger

Once the conditions which will render Lleu vulnerable have been met (in this case involving him standing with one foot on the side of a bath by a riverbank, the other on the back of a goat), Gronw strikes him down from the hill crest of Bryn Cyfagyr with a specially fashioned spear he has honed in the prescribed manner over the course of the previous year. Lleu is instantly transformed into an eagle and flies off, seemingly banished for good. Gronw claims both Blodeuedd and Lleu’s cantref of Ardudwy. Gwydion, meanwhile, vows to discover Lleu’s aquiline incarnation and determine whether his fate is irreversible. He eventually finds him in the branches of an oak tree, shedding flesh and maggots which a sow feeds on below. This would seem to indicate that there was some remnant of the mortally wounded human still present. Gwydion uses his magic to transform him back into the old Lleu once more, although he is in a pitifully mangy condition. He recovers in Caer Dathyl in Gwynedd, Math son of Mathonwy’s kingdom, and then sets out to take reprisal against Gronw and Blodeuedd, with Math’s forces at his disposal. Gwydion overtakes Blodeuedd as she is fleeing with her maidens, all of whom drown in a lake. He transforms her into an owl, telling her ‘thou art never to dare show thy face in the light of the day’, and that she will be regarded as an enemy by all other birds.

Gronw, meanwhile, negotiates with Lleu in an attempt to save his own skin. But Lleu will accept nothing less than the opportunity to strike a blow similar to that which he was on the receiving end of, and on the very same spot as well. Gronw pleads to be allowed to place a stone between himself and the intended trajectory of the spear, arguing that the balance of blame for his bloody deed lay with Blodeuedd and her insinuating persuasions. Lleu grants his wish for this seemingly impenetrable piece of mineral armour, but he throws the spear with such force that it transfixes both the stone and Gronw’s heart. The stone with a hole through it is left standing on the banks of the Cynfael river in Ardudwy like a memorial headstone, and is named Llech Ronw, or Gronw’s Stone.

Gronw's Stone - Roger as target

We see it in the opening scenes of The Owl Service, Celtic spiral patterns forming a tangled horizon beneath the hole. Roger swims in the river from whose banks it rises, climbing out to lean against the bole of an aged tree, his exposed breast directly in line with the imaginary vector of the spear’s flight suggested by the hollow circle. In the next scene, we find Alison in her bedroom, idly tracing the circular pattern of light reflected from a glass of water or the pond outside to shimmer on the ceiling. We are immediately reminded, both by this and by the circle in the stone, of the circular patterns in the opening titles. When Alison hears the scratching coming from the attic above her (and above the circle of light) it is almost as if she has summoned it up, invoking the recommencement of a pre-established cycle of events (the circularity of which will also be reflected in the round, white circle of the plates themselves, which are uncovered in the attic). Gywn is called in, and the two are evidently comfortable in each other’s company (Alison remains dressed only in a loose, oversized nightshirt). He picks up the ornamental spear which stands by the dressing table and pokes at the ceiling with it. The roles which each will inhabit are established from the outset. Roger is the cuckolded and ousted Lleu, Gwyn the local usurper Gronw, both in romantic and territorial terms. And Alison, of course, is Blodeuedd, the woman created from flowers and later turned into an owl.

Comic icons 1 - Gwyn as green man

Comic icons 2 - Roger as green man

Gwyn and Roger also take up ironic modern poses with echoes of the old iconographies of the green man or wild men, figures connected to the natural landscape (woodlands in particular) and its seasonal changes. Gwyn is seen in the corridor holding his arms up to either side, the globe of a cabbage balanced in each hand. Roger poses more awkwardly and self-consciously in front of his timer-set camera, a large branch held up above his head as if it were sprouting from his ribs. With his silly grin, and with Gwyn’s cabbages from the garden, they are both caricatures of the figures of the ancient British wilds. Their foolish stances are a reminder that industrial civilisation has largely swept such dark and mysterious places aside, although certain residual impulses remain lodged in the inner depths. The bathetic nature of their impressions also makes it clear that they are hopelessly ill-prepared for the mythological roles they are fated to play.

Learning the part - reading the old tales

After the plates have been found and Alison has begun transferring the patterns into origami owls, we find her reading a green hardback Everyman edition of the Mabinogion (the paperback version of which I’ve taken my quotes from) in the garden on a hot summer’s day. It’s a book which Gwyn has lent to her, as if to impart the ancestral knowledge which is an instinctive part of his Welsh inheritance. Alison looks every bit the sulky English Lolita in her red bikini and bright plastic sunglasses. Her awakening sexuality is the catalyst for casting her as the reincarnation of Blodeuedd’s freshly created spirit. It also makes her a precursor of Angela Carter’s modern reinventions of female fairy tale characters in her Bloody Chamber stories and in the film The Company of Wolves which derived from them. The reflections of Gwyn and Roger framed in the twin screens of her dark lenses points to the formation of a new incarnation of the eternally recurrent triadic relationship. Alison uses the book to shield herself from both of them, dispelling these reflections and blocking their undisguised boyish desire. When Gwyn kicks the book away, we see a brief flash of the flowered owl design tattooed on her face. She is possessed as much by the power of the word and the truthful outline of the story as she is by the energising effect of the occult circuitry in the plates’ pattern. The word reinforces and fixes the energies which the owl service patterns and the paper models which are made from them unleash.

Mask of anger - the owl tattoo

The dangerous power of words and of powerful, archetypal stories is made alarmingly apparent when Gwyn is attacked by a fluttering flock of torn pages (an attack accompanied by shrill free jazz flurries and squawks). They swirl around him with the angry, snapping susurration of mobbing birds driving off an invasive, threatening presence. ‘Boy, there’s axiomatic’ he comments at this self-evident demonstration that the old myths still have power. Gwyn is one of a number of auto-didactic smart-arses with more than a hint of self-portraiture about them which can be found in Garner’s work (Tom in Red Shift is another). The ancient word comes to life and punishes Gwyn for his disrespect, his contemptuous kicking of his own book and his own traditions. It asserts its undiminished force in the world (or this corner of it, at least), the abiding truth encoded within the eccentric symbolism of its surface details.

Huw Halfbacon is a complex figure who is both Gwydion (and specifically identifies himself as such in the novel) and, in a previous iteration of the tale involving him, Nancy and Bertram, the former upper class owner of the house, an incarnation of Lleu. He also acts as a chorus, and both he and Gwyn talk about the old tale from the Mabinogion. Gwyn provides clarification and a narrative précis, whilst Huw comes out with a kind of running footnote commentary and explicatory exegesis, progressing from an anticipatory ‘she is coming’ to a declamatory ‘she is come’. His reading of the story attempts to reach a more sympathetic understanding, however, which would transcend his and the boys’ assigned roles. It could almost be seen as a revisionist modern interpretation, taking into account and giving primacy to the female perspective of Blodeuedd/Alison, and acknowledging the way in which she is controlled, the pattern of her life set out for her.

Huw Halfbacon

Through having been created for a particular purpose, marriage to a lord, she comes to represent, to a contemporary reader, the social powerlessness of women and the rigid expectations of class. Huw observes how hard it is to be ‘shut up with someone you’re not liking very much’. He notes that Lleu is a hard lord, and that Gronw is ‘not a bad man’. His repeated mantra ‘she wants to be flowers and you make her owls’ points to an alternate outcome to the story which takes her needs and desires in to account. His despairing cry ‘why must we destroy ourselves’ suggests that he is all to well aware of his own powerlessness to alter events, however. He seems to have abdicated his own role and shrugged off complicity by displacing any sense of responsibility. For all his proclamations of power and regal guardianship (‘I own the ground, the mountain, the valley; I own the song of the cuckoo, the brambles, the berries’, and ‘my land is the country of the summer stars’) he is in the end helpless in the face of Alison’s violent climactic metamorphosis and the seismic meteorological chaos is unleashes across the valley. The time of his domineering, capricious and vengeful authority is over. A new balance of power must be found to re-establish harmony in the world.

Garner claimed that Red Shift was inspired by the ballad of Tam Lin and Burd Janet and the Queen of Fairy, which may be familiar to many through the version Sandy Denny sings on Fairport Convention’s classic Liege and Lief LP. This is a fairy tale of the darker variety, before the old superstitions were diluted into sweeter and less threatening nursery fare. The Queen of Fairies is a figure of fearful otherwordliness who has held Tam Lin under her spell since capturing him when he fell from his horse. Janet disobeys explicit instructions not to go to the large house of Carterhaugh where he lives. The local story has it that any maiden who goes there will lose her virginity to the rakish Tam. But Janet has been promised the house by her father, and goes there to claim her inheritance. Carterhaugh is a haunted place which has the feel of being located on a threshold. It is also a world away in terms of class and wealth for local lass Janet, of course. But she meets and falls in love with the enchanted Tam Lin, and according to several versions becomes pregnant with his child. He warns her away, however, revealing that he is doomed to be offered up by the Queen of Fairy as a tithe to hell (an interesting collision of Pagan and Christian iconography there).



Janet once more shows her independent strength of spirit, however, and insists on fighting for his life. If she is to break the spell she must pull him from his horse as he rides by with the Queen and a retinue of knights on All Hallow’s Eve, when the exchange of the human currency of the damned is due to take place. She must then hold on to him throughout the long night as the Queen wrenches his body through many transformations, turning him into a lion and a serpent before he finally lies as a naked knight in her arms. The story is clearly ripe for modern interpretation as a parable of sexual awakening and of female independence and strength. It has been used as such in Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock and Catherine Storr’s Thursday (Storr is better known for her children’s classic Marianne Dreams). It use in Red Shift is a little more oblique and notional, however. Charles Butler has written an excellent article, Alan Garner’s Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of Tam Lin, about how Garner incorporates the spirit of the ballad into his story rather than using it as a rigid template. He points to the key moments in the story in which the female characters hold on to the vulnerable male protagonists, whose transformations are the inner ones of wrenching emotion and psychological turmoil. The women are holding them together and shielding them from external forces which manifest themselves as manipulative parental figures (real or proxy). They hold them through dark nights to keep them from disintegrating mentally (or at least try to). The corn goddess does this on Mow Cop in the Roman period; Madge Rowley holds Thomas in the Civil War episode to warm his wounded body through the night on the bleak plain of Rudheath after they have fled the churchyard massacre; and Jan (the modern equivalent of Janet) tries to keep the volatile and mentally hyperactive Tom (the modern version of Tam) from suffering an implosive breakdown which will burn out his buzzing neural circuitry. Such an implosion would be an inverted echo of the supernova which created the ring nebula we see in the titles at the beginning.

The Bloody Braggadoccio prepares to strike

Other elements of the story are taken from fragments of history which have been passed down through hearsay and rumour as much as record. The Roman strand draws on the legend of the lost Ninth, the legion which disappeared and many have gone native, blending in with the local tribes. They are explicitly identified as such in Garner’s novel, in which their leader Logan states ‘we’re the Ninth’. We learn that they’ve disguised themselves as the ‘Mothers’, who make tribal war with the local ‘Cats’. In the Play for Today adaptation, they are more like a ragged and beleaguered rump. There are a few natives in tow, but in a significant variation from the book, this is a desperate remnant of men adrift in unknown territory, ambushed in their tents and driven towards Mow Cop where they make ready for their last stand. There is certainly no sign of the raid on the Cat village which occurs in the book. The Civil War episode is based on reports of a massacre at Bartholmey in 1643, which only became widely known after the Field-Marshal of Royalist forces in Cheshire, Sir John, Lord Byron, unwisely crowed about it in a letter which fell into the wrong hands (thus earning him the title ‘the bloody braggadoccio’). The lack of any more detailed report leaves a vague blankness which leaves room for the imaginative expansion of legend.

Automatic Scrabble writing

In The Keeper, the hidden meanings of folk rhymes form the basis of the story’s revelations. The sinister sense decrypted from seeming nonsense verse gives voice to some unnameable other, a force which is beyond conventional understanding. Language and words are key here. The rhyme emerges through the letters placed with semi-conscious haste on a Scrabble board, and is then written down in an idle moment by Sally, once more without conscious input. Both Scrabble rounds and scribbled rhyme are a form of automatic writing, bypassing conscious intent to reach some deeper layer of intuitive awareness. With the chill realisation which is at the heart of the best classic British ghost stories, it becomes retrospectively evident that some presence has found its way into both their minds. Whatever force is at work appears to be drawing on deep veins of folk memory to deliver its message or, as it turns out, warning. The rhyme, once pieced together in acrostic form and written out on paper (a bit like a Cageian chance score which taps, Zen-like, into the momentary flux of a larger universal order) reads thus: ‘go away from my window my love, my love/Go from my window my dear/for the wind’s in the west and the cuckoo’s in his nest/And you can’t have a lodging here’. The image of a figure standing at a window looking out hints at an observing presence in the house. The roving camera, which observes the two protagonists from various interstitial points of view (behind the fireplace and from between the exposed slats of the crumbling wall) gives a constant sense of something watching and waiting. The reference to the cuckoo in its nest also hints at the discomforting sense that this presence has found a lodging in their minds, the fragile house of the self in which it will grow and eventually evict the inhabitants for which it was originally built. The fact that the cottage they are spending the night in was built for a gamekeeper, someone who watches over the surrounding land to make sure that trespassers don’t intrude, suggests that this invisibly scrutinising force has an analogous role. It’s the guardian of some more intangible threshold.

PART TWO is here.

Alan Garner - Return to Brisingamen

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Alan Garner’s first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and BBC radio 4 acknowledged the enduring importance and popularity of this and subsequent Garner novels with a short documentary last Thursday entitled Return to Brisingamen. It was presented by John Waite, best known as the voice of gentile indignance and well-mannered outrage on You and Yours, a long running consumer affairs programme on radio 4, whose fixity within the schedule is assured by the revolutionary fervour of listeners when faced with any substantive change to their daily radio routine. Its prosaic and indubitably valuable focus on the mundane minutiae of the everyday world and the gripes and grumbles which dealing with it engenders is at the far opposite end of the spectrum from the mythic framework within which Garner’s stories unfold. He is the ideal host, then, to convince a sceptical radio 4 audience that a documentary about a book which is not only fantasy, but fantasy written for children, is worthy of their attention. It should be added at this point that Garner has said (in the essay A Bit More Practice) ‘I do not write for children, but entirely for myself’, although he goes on to add ‘yet I do write for some children, and have done so from the beginning’. He elucidates a couple of paragraphs later, stating ‘only recently have I come to realise that, when writing for myself, I am still writing for children; or, rather, for adolescents. By adolescence I mean an arbitrary age of somewhere between ten and eighteen. This group of people is the most important of all, and it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement’. It’s a good argument for the importance of ‘children’s literature’ in general, and its appeal to a readership beyond the age of those at whom it is ostensibly aimed. Philip Pullman, who also appears in the programme, carefully defines him as being ‘one of the greatest writers of books that children read’. Waite reveals his own love of the book, which stemmed from a childhood reading, and talks of the very personal way in which it affected him. He grew up in Wilmslow in Cheshire, with Alderley Edge, the setting of the novel, looming constantly in view through the bedroom window above the corner shop his parents ran. Waite describes this prominent outcropping as being ‘the Ayers Rock of the Cheshire Plains’. One day, in the shop, he served a man who he was told was the local writer Alan Garner, who’d written a story based on the local legend of the Edge.

Like many a post-Tolkien fantasy, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen includes a map in its opening pages across which the reader can trace the questing trail of the story’s characters. In this case, however, it represents not the secondary world of the author’s creation but a real landscape with which Waite was intimately familiar as a boy; the landscape of Alderley Edge. The fact that Garner used a real place in which to stage magical scenes allowed him to feel that he was a part of the story, since he could locate the specific sites at which various events took place. It’s like finding a location used in a favourite film. The place, ordinary as it might be, acquires a certain glamour through having had a story overlaid, an aura of immanence created through the association with a particular scene. Why else would efforts have been made to save a brutalist car park of the most unforgiving starkness in Newcastle were it not for the fact that it had been featured in a memorable car chase and murder scene in Get Carter. With Alderley Edge, the magic and sense of otherness was already inherent in the landscape, and naturally attracted an accumulation of stories and legends which gave expression to its special atmosphere. Garner’s use of the legend of the Edge, with its hero king and his armoured knights lying dormant beneath its slopes, guarded by an ancient wizard, waiting to be re-awakened for the final battle in which they will ride again, demonstrates the power of myth to evoke the spirit which inhabits certain places. These places are marked by the potent intersection of generations of human habitation with the formations of geological time, history and culture with stories, language and literature. Landscapes with isolated hills, ridges or escarpments erupting from otherwise low-lying surrounds seemed to have a particularly rich accretion of layers of legend. These sometimes involve giants or dragons, tales suggested by the resemblance of geological features to the awkwardly arched back of a recumbent gog or magog, or the ridged, scalar spine of an arête gently inclining down into a still curve of tail, its sinuous folds filled with the potential for sudden motion. There are also many myths, of which the legend of Alderley Edge is one, of figures from a fabled golden age lying in hidden halls reached by secret entryways beneath the hills. The location of Arthur’s resting place beneath Glastonbury Tor is probably the best known of these, but Cadbury Castle in Somerset, Torbarrow Hill in Gloucestershire and the Eildon Hills in the Scottish borders offer further examples.

The Voice That Thunders - great, great grandfather Robert Garner's Wizard Well carving

The programme centres around Waites’ interview with Garner, who also takes him on a wander around the Edge to find some of the landmarks found in the book. He points out a sacred well, which he speculates almost certainly dates from pre-Christian times, and which is now known as the Wizard’s Well. Its stone receptacle bears a carving of a bearded face, shaded green by a light coating of moss. This was made by Garner’s great-great grandfather, a stonemason, in the mid nineteenth century. His family have lived here for generations, and have made their mark on the landscape, whether literally, in the case of Robert’s carvings and stone walls, or in a more notional sense, through the knowledge, values and stories which they’ve passed down. Garner talks about his great-grandfather William Jackson, a Fabian deeply engaged with social issues, and his wonderfully diverse, autodidact’s library of books, which he left behind upon his death at the age of 93 in 1942. These were discovered by the young Alan during a summer spent with his grandmother, William’s daughter, and indiscriminately devoured. He was effectively absorbing the outward remnants of his great-grandfather’s particular knowledge and interests, the physical projections of his inner world. It was a powerful and influential legacy to inadvertently bequeath. In the programme, Garner mentions Marx’s Das Kapital (in English) and the Hindu epic The Ramayana, which was particularly important in opening his mind to the power and universality of mythic storytelling. In his essay Aback of Beyond (included in the collection The Voice That Thunders) he goes into more detail about the range of literature and ideas which he absorbed during this intense summer of reading. In a hot July and August’, he writes, ‘I swallowed The History of the Co-operative Movement, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Elements of the Fiscal Problem, The Golden Bough, Hone’s Popular Works, the corpus of Thackeray and of Spenser, Carlyle, Swift, Dickens; British Battles at Sea, Nietzsche’s Human All-too-Human, The Living Races of Mankind, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, The South African and Transvaal War, Capital:from the German and Engel’s Communist Manifesto of 1848.

Grandfather's stone wall

Garner refers to the vernacular phrase ‘to get aback of something or someone’, from which the above essay title is derived, as expressing the idea that you have to live up to the example of your forebears, but also create a certain distance, choosing to make your own particular mark on the locality in which they lived and worked. Garner’s ancestors were craftspeople, his grandfather a smith, and he tells their generational story in the Stone Book Quartet. His eventual decision to become a writer was partially arrived at whilst sitting opposite a wall which his great, great grandfather Robert had made. It’s a wall which he shows us in the 1980 tv documentary The Edge of the Ceiling, included in the extras of The Owl Service dvd. Garner’s grounding in his great-grandfather’s library had set him on the path of book-learning, and he progressed from Manchester Grammar School (in fact an independent school which took in scholarship pupils) to Oxford University. He had determined that he would be a prominent academic, preferably the chair of Greek classics at Oxford. This would really have been getting ‘aback of beyond’, in the words of his elders. But self-doubt set in as to the purity of his motives, and he began to think that this kind of ambition was merely a way of seeking power as an end in itself. Perhaps it was the craft heritage of his ancestors which drew him to the idea of writing fiction, creating with words rather than stone or iron. His tutor at Oxford encouraged him to test his abilities with his own sardonically wise variant of telling him to get aback of his parents and grandparents. ‘Discover if you’ve got an original mind’, he suggested. If he then found out that he didn’t, he could devote himself to studying the work of those who had.

Oxford is the other central site of significance in Garner’s life, if only in that it showed him what he didn’t want to do. He listened to lectures there by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, in the latter days of their professorships. Waites goes to visit Philip Pullman, another resident Oxford writer of fantasy, to hear of the high regard I which he holds Garner, and the formative influence which he had on him. He points to the clarity and natural rhythm of his writing, the unique and surprising quality of his imagination, the mythic focus on forces greater than human life, and yet his concurrent ability to encompass elemental human conflicts and emotions within such a grand frame. He cites The Owl Service as a book which particularly struck him when he first read it, and which combines all of these elements. Garner’s papers are now housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and Waite is granted a look at those pertaining to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. The librarian comments on the beautiful italic hand in which he wrote, which would suggest that the original manuscript was handwritten. There are also some early drafts over which Garner has scrawled some savagely dismissive comments in red pen. His assessment of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in his essay A Bit More Practice, included in The Voice That Thunders, but first published in the Time Literary Supplement in January 1968, just after the publication of The Owl Service in the previous year, would seem to indicate that he is his own worst critic (although some of the children’s letters he quotes in the later essay Hard Cases show that he’s had some pretty stiff competition at times). ‘My first attempt, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’, he wrote, ‘is a fairly bad book, but there had to be a start somewhere, and consolation rests in the even worse first drafts of the opening chapter, which I pin up when things seem to be going well’. Hopefully the book’s continued success (it has made it to the Waterstone’s best 150 novels of all time, and has never been out of print) has made him feel a little more kindly towards it.

Rooted in local particularity - The Stone Book Quartet

Garner delves back into the early days of his childhood to trace the roots of his intensely vivid imagination and his ability to enter into the different, interesecting planes of time which the local landscape inhabits. His early education was characterised by attempts to eradicate the Cheshire dialect of his grandfather (he names the teacher who used to wash his mouth out with carbolic soap), and his mother’s efforts to correct his lefthandedness (a sign of wrongness and potential deviance). It has to be said, the former project seems to have been very successful, as he now shows little trace of an accent of any regional origin, although the milieu in which his subsequent schooling and higher education took place may have had as much to do with this loss. The memorialising of local distinctiveness, both in terms of place and of dialect and custom, which can be found in all of his novels could be seen as a way of regaining what had been programmed out of him, and of making sure that a record of it remained. This concentration on the ‘inner time’, as he puts it, of a particular place has continued through to his novel of the 90s, Strandloper, and of the 00s, Thursbitch (read the M.John Harrison review here). Like a craftsman who takes his own good time, he generally manages a book a decade now. As for his insistence that myth and imaginative storytelling relate a form of truth as valid as any rational, empirical observation (if the writer or narrator is a good one, that is), that seems a very lefthanded point of view.

When he was six, Garner contracted whooping cough, measles and then meningitis, and at one point was so ill that he heard a visiting doctor declare him to be beyond help, having apparently started slipping irrevocably towards death. This authoritative declaration, a dismissal of life which brooked no argument, and to which he could offer no response anyway, filled him with anger, and it was this inward rage to which he attributes his survival. The young Alan spent long periods confined to his bed, virtually immobile, and he talks of his sickness as having concentrated his imagination. He projected himself out of his recumbent body through a conscious act of will, and lost himself in a landscape which revealed itself to him as he lay staring up at the white plastered ceiling, its uneven surface suggesting hills, rivers or roads. He describes it in more detail than in the programme in his essay The Edge of the Ceiling, once more included in The Voice That Thunders, also noting the direct inspiration it provided for a later novel. ‘The world of the ceiling was three-dimensional’, he wrote. ‘Objects were solid, visual perspectives true. I never ate or drank in the ceiling (as I later found out was the rule for the Other World). There was no wind, no climate, no heat, no cold, no time. The light came from no source and was shadowless, as neon; but before I knew neon. And everywhere, everybody, everything was white. It was the genesis of the dead land of Elidor’. Sometimes, however, the landscape disappeared and the ceiling was taken over by ‘a plump little old woman with a circular face, hair parted down the middle and drawn into a tight bun, lips pursed, and small pebbled eyes…she was a waning moon: her head turned to the side, as if she had broken her neck’. He knew he must not enter the world of the ceiling when this fearful figure appeared, nor let it enter the room where he helplessly lay. This was his death, patiently waiting.

Forge of creation - the writer at work

Garner’s experience of an imaginary world, which often seemed more solid than the real one reductively framed by his bedroom window with its distorting panes of glass, is also recollected in the 1980 TV documentary Alan Garner – The Edge of the Ceiling, which is, as previously mentioned, included as an extra on The Owl Service dvd. This documentary also allows us to have a look around Garner’s , which is in fact two conjoined houses meeting each other at right angles. Outside, inter-city trains occasionally rush past on the railway line, and on the other side of the tracks, the large dish of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope cranes its face to the sky – the technological sublime towering above its pastoral surrounds but somehow fitting in nonetheless. Even when it comes to his home, he collides different eras, eliding great swathes of time. The timber frame of his original house dates from 1850 whereas the later addition, moved from elsewhere in 1970, dates from 1550. The room in which Garner is seen at his table, researching and writing, is a large open space with a timber vaulted roof and joists, and a small open fire in the centre, sending smoke up to gather beneath the ceiling. It certainly feels like a place in which to tell tales.

DVD of the 1969 Owl Service adaptation - including the documentary Alan Garner:The Edge of the Ceiling

He guides us around the landscape of the Edge in this programme, too (as indeed he does more recently in this short Guardian video). In this case, the accompanying music bears no resemblance to the extract of Elgar’s cello concerto used at the beginning of the radio 4 documentary. It is filled, rather, with the unsettling polyphonic choral mutterings and chattering whispers of Bill Connors’ score, whose restless spectral sounds seem to leak out from the timbers, stones and earth, faintly picked-up ancestral voices fluttering in the surrounding aether. 1980 was still effectively the 70s (the first couple of years of any decade can generally be considered a part the previous one), and this was an era in which children’s fantasy programmes such as Children of the Stones, King of the Castle and Doctor Who (and indeed the 1981 adaptation of The Day of the Triffids) would be eerily soundtracked with atonal scores written by composers clearly in thrall to the modernist strain of contemporary classical music – the likes of Ligeti, Stockhausen and Berio exerting a strong influence.

Garner takes Waite to the Devil’s Grave, the cleft in the rock through which Colin and Susan crawl to make their claustrophobic escape from the forces of evil which are pursuing them. This involves Colin getting stuck in a nightmarish bend in a narrowing passage, an experience which Garner half-jokingly likens to a birth trauma. Finally, Garner and Waite end up at the rock (a ‘great tooth of a rock’, as Garner describes it) which, in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, cracks open to reveal the iron gates which guard the tunnel to the chamber in which the sleeping king and his knights lie dormant, waiting for a sign. Waite naturally has to strike the rock with a stick, the wizard’s ‘open sesame’ in the novel. The way fails to open for him. It’s clearly not yet time for the final battle to commence. But don't worry, it may not be long.