Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Strandloper by Alan Garner Strandloper by Alan Garner. Strandloper. Alan Garner. Reviewed by Jason Fisher. [This review originally appeared in Mythprint 47:10 (#339) in October 2010.] Alan Garner isn’t the most prolific of mythopoeic authors, so I don’t feel particularly guilty about reviewing a book published more than a decade ago. Garner has published only one novel since, Thursbitch (review forthcoming in Mythprint ), so in the context of his career, Strandloper is not that old. I also do not feel particularly guilty cannibalizing a shorter review of the novel I wrote almost four years ago—though perhaps on that score, I should! This is a remarkable, luminous, difficult book. It doesn’t do the reader any favors—exposition? bah!—but if you take the time to work at penetrating this seemingly impenetrable novel, the rewards are many. It is the most purely mythopoeic of all Garner’s novels, describing the experiences of William Buckley, a real historical figure convicted in his (and Garner’s) native Cheshire and sentenced to exile in Australia. Once there, Buckley escapes and is abandoned for dead. But he is not dead: he is discovered by an aboriginal tribe, who accept him as one of their own. I will not say more about the plot here, but suffice to say that the novel echoes Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes and other novels of the “noble savage” tradition. But it is also heavily steeped in traditional English folklore, as well as the beautiful and inscrutable mythology of the aborigines. Having said this, I must caution that Strandloper is not for all readers. If your preferences are for straightforward fantasy, this isn’t that. If you’re looking for “another Alan Garner novel”, this isn’t even that . Some reviewers have likened the prose style of Strandloper to that of William Faulkner, and the comparison is an apt one. If you find getting through Faulkner a bit difficult, then Strandloper is going to make you want to check into an asylum—or possibly chuck the book into the fire. Garner’s deep, almost baptismal immersion, first into the folklore, then into an alien mythology is exactly that: immersive. The idiom is very difficult. Unfamiliar words and phrases are very many, and they are almost never defined. Reading the novel is not a passive act, the way reading most novels usually is; you have to take an active part in working to unravel its abstruse layers of narrative and meaning, and if that doesn’t sound like much fun to you, then put down Strandloper and try something else—perhaps O’Brian’s Master and Commander . But if this kind of engagement sounds rewarding, give it a try. Strandloper may be a tough nut to crack, but for me at least, it was very much worth the effort. Alan Garner. The immediately startling thing about Strandloper is its language. It is dominated by dialogue (and some stream of consciousness) and Garner reproduces a multitude of voices with their colloquial idioms: we begin in the Cheshire countryside, with characters speaking dialect English; on board ship we add to this thieves' cant, Irish brogue, and even Latin; and in Australia words from various Aboriginal languages. Throughout there is repetition of nursery rhymes, chants, and nonsense syllables, which also takes some getting used to. The narration, in unadorned modern English, complements this nicely and has a poetry of its own. What makes Strandloper really extraordinary, however, is its ethnographic depth. Enmeshing the reader in an alien culture is never easy, but Garner attempts it twice in the one short novel (eighteenth century rural England being in some ways as foreign to the modern reader as Aboriginal Australia). Garner's earlier children's novels demonstrated his affinity for English folklore and myth; in Strandloper he demonstrates an equally impressive feel for Aboriginal culture. Even more ambitiously, he hints at links between the two, at a shared pattern. Hubris would be a reasonable accusation, were it not that he succeeds so well! This probably makes Strandloper sound unreadable, but that is not the case at all. Once one adapts to its rhythms and its language and the intensity of the engagement it demands, it moves along as compellingly as any mundane thriller could. Though it is finished all too quickly, when the end is reached it is as if five hundred pages rather than two have passed, so much does it hold. Strandloper is definitely out of the ordinary. Rubbing salt in the wounds. The first line of Alan Garner's new novel stands on its own, on a page ahead of the main text. "Go back. What was must never be." Thursbitch goes forward almost unwillingly under the force of this admonition. Its narrative thrashes like a broken power cable between past and present, twisting with the energy of old language, old ways of seeing, old acceptances, old determined rebellions against the nature of things. Thursbitch isn't a story that takes life lightly, nor does it expect to be taken lightly in turn. 1755: Jack Turner freezes to death in deep snow on the moor beyond Macclesfield. The print of a woman's shoe is found nearby; the stone beside him is "covered all over with honey". Two hundred and fifty years later, out for a walk on the moor, Ian and Sal find old stones, old buildings, wells and structures unmarked on maps. The global positioning system won't read. The compass places them "11 degrees west of where we should be". For a moment they're lost, somewhere between Jack's vanished world and their own. Deep time, Garner time, coils threateningly around them. We are in familiar territory, in which one narrative can only be completed - or interrupted, or fully glossed - by another. Jack makes his living as a jagger, driving pony trains of salt down the ancient moorland paths. Sal is a geologist. Jack is the shaman of a Celtic bull- cult, losing its rites in the face of Chapel fervour. Sal struggles with neuro-degenerative disease. While Sal sees the valley either in geological terms - "hereabouts we're in R-Two Marsdenian country" - or as the highway of a loathsome contemporary traffic of ramblers and mountain bikers, Jack's understanding is focused by rituals indistinguishable from the astronomical events they celebrate. Somehow these two are charged with saving each other. All they have in common is the Thursbitch valley itself - a real place, gripped tightly in the vice of Garner's concerns but still available to the rest of us at or around grid reference SJ 992 751, from the A537 east of Macclesfield. Garner's habit is to strip a scene to its dialogue, then force that to carry the action. This works best in Jack's narrative, where it engages the blunt poetry of dialect, the specifics of 18th-century farming, and the "timeless" nature of his relationship with the moor. By contrast, the contemporary idiom often leaves the reader on the edge of comprehension, struggling to make sense of what's happening. We learn little, and only with effort. Sal is dying. Ian is a carer - matter-of-fact, patient, the butt of Sal's wit. Maybe they once loved one another, but it's too late to admit it. They're intelligent people. By now their dialogue has the tiringly clever brittleness of a crossword puzzle, which, when it relents in the face of her emotional situation, collapses into bathos. They have none of the spiritual health of the book's 18th-century characters: curiously, they have none of the emotional depth either. Barred from Jack's certainties, they bitch and moan and make aggressively metaphysical statements. Where Jack's fall from grace leads to madness and divine regime change, Sal opts for mulishness. Where Jack narrates his land into being with the wry humour of the aboriginal, Sal can only make indefensible claims. "Most geologists agree about sentient landscape. If you do enough fieldwork you can't escape it. Some places have to be treated with respect, though that doesn't get written up in the literature." This is the rationale of the fantasist; it belongs in a less visionary kind of book. But maybe that's the point. Maybe that's why we are all in such need of saving. Change of use has emptied the landscape itself: Ian and Sal's reality is as drained as the text that contains it. Their encounters with the new agriculture - in which various public and commercial bodies farm the Sunday afternoon leisure activity of the moor - only point up the shallowness of contemporary life. For a moment this timeless snobbery looks as if it might sabotage the project - it would be easy for Sal's understandable bad temper to be taken for the author's own. But Sal is, of course, a word for salt, Jack's lifetime cargo. Somehow, despite the appalling pressure his opening line has put him under, Garner is able to relax and ease the knot of knowing too much and caring too much. The two stories connect, the arc of poetry is exchanged: the aboriginality of Strandloper is applied to the content of Red Shift or The Owl Service. In the last few paragraphs of this book the sense of an author healing himself almost incapacitates us, his readers. Garner, shaman and benighted salt trader, brings his horses home. He brings us home too, in some way we can't possibly understand any more. Lost in the bush.