2022/116: Treacle Walker — Alan Garner

'Why live in a bog?’
‘And if I didn’t,’ said Thin Amren, ‘should I not rot?’
‘And all that dreaming stuff.’
‘What else should a body do when he sleeps?’
‘How long have you been there?’ said Joe. ‘In the bog.’
‘A honeycomb of ages.’
‘How long’s that?’
‘From then till now.' [loc. 461]

This is very short, 131 pages in the print edition, and very dense: I'm not sure that I understand it yet. It's the story of Joe, who likes comics and marbles (so may be a child) but seems to live alone (so may be an adult) and at one point wonders if he is dead (so ..."I will not say that you are dead.") Regularly, just after noon, a rag-and-bone man calling himself Treacle Walker shows up outside the house. On his first appearance, he trades with Joe: a donkey-stone (used for whitening doorsteps) and a chipped Victorian medicine-jar in exchange for Joe's old unwashed pyjamas and a lamb's shoulderblade from his 'museum' of natural findings. This trade seems to set something in motion. Joe has a lazy eye (there's an odd episode with, presumably, an optician) and wears an eyepatch over his 'good' eye: but his good eye enables him to see what he would otherwise be blind to, for instance the edges of the bog, and a man named Thin Amren sitting up out of the water, copper-skinned, naked except for a hood over his head, and disinclined to dry out.

There's a deeply mythic feel to this novel, from Treacle Walker's 'this Middle-Yard' (= Midgard?) to the region of the summer stars, from the unseen cuckoo in the wood to the whitening of a doorstep to keep out malign influences. But there are also comics -- Knockabout, featuring Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit, turns out to be a real comic from Garner's own boyhood -- and mirrors that can be portals (but so can the pages of knockabout). There's a round meadow with three sides and a mound in the middle: a tomb? There are forgotten words (slutch, mools). Joe meets himself returning from a dream: but who's the dreamer? There's circularity, on several scales, and a sense of recursion: perhaps there's nobody here but Joe, and maybe the cuckoo he unwittingly summons. When you (I), the reader, start counting the cuckoo's cries, it's time to stop and draw back from this perplexing, beautiful, unsettling novella. For now.

I'll close with a quotation from an interview with Alan Garner, published in 2012 when Boneland came out: I think he might have been talking about the genesis of Treacle Walker.

"something's going on, and the shape it's taking is interesting in that it's complete at whatever stage I finish it. In other words, provided I get a few paragraphs down and then I just drop dead, it's still complete. It's intriguing me. It's making me think here we go again, perhaps, but in a quite different way," says Garner.
Source: Alan Garner: a life in books. Interview by Alison Flood. Guardian, 17AUG2012 (retrieved 11SEP2022).