She heard Jack again, but his was the only mortal voice, and even for him Nan Sarah could not move. Something was in the field. It grew from the mass, and was it, yet made it more, drawing the dark writhing into its own purpose, the yelling to its own tongue. What was there grew to reach the moon and gave one cry such as Nan Sarah had not heard in all her days: the cry of both man and bull. [p. 59]
A short (178 pages in print) but very dense novel: I've read it twice and suspect I will find new angles, new elements, when I read it again.
The setting is the valley of Thursbitch, a name which Garner has interpreted as either 'the valley of the demon' or 'the valley where something big dwells'. There are two parallel narratives, which may intersect but do not do so explicitly. In the eighteenth century, a jagger (salt-trader) named Jack Turner undertakes epic journeys, but always returns to his home. He has been chosen by the previous incumbent to be the focus of a religious ritual that occurs once every eighteen years: a kind of tauroctony, aided by hallucinogenic mushrooms and shared by a dozen or so families. Christianity does not seem to have reached this corner of Cheshire -- there is a delightful exchange between Jack and his father on the nature of sin: "Yon’s a word; same as, It’s long sin we had such a storm. Or, It’s a while sin you gave me this here thackstone to hold while you rambled and romped with your mither." (p. 101) -- and Jack, whose origins are mysterious, is pledged to the Bull.
In the twenty-first century (or the twentieth? this novel was published in 2003) two friends, Ian and Sal, visit Thursbitch. Ian is a Jesuit priest: Sal is a professor of geology, and is suffering a degenerative disease. She's convinced that the valley is 'sentient', and the two experience some oddities: a thrown cup, signs of a bull where no bull should be, a distant figure who vanishes.
Whatever happens to Jack is real, to Jack, and is recounted as stolidly (and in as dense a dialect) as his roof-mending or pack-leading. He's very much at one with the valley, with its elements (sun, stone, brook and cloud; fire, earth, air and water) and he accepts without question -- as must the reader -- that the massive stones come down to the brook to drink. (Sal determines that they all weigh about the same, seven-tenths of a ton, and posits that this was the maximum practical weight.)
I loved the rhythm and flow of the eighteenth-century scenes, even when the language was puzzling. Jack's faith is Mithraic, possibly a relic of Roman times (though I can't find anything in the text to support that). Jack himself is clearly a well-travelled character, speaking of the 'Red Erythræan Strand' and 'bog o' Mirollies' as easily as of Derby and London, and perhaps earlier travellers brought the Bull and the Snake back with them...
I would love to be able to talk to the late Maureen Kincaid Speller about this novel. I miss her.
Garner's lecture 'The Valley of the Demon'. From the same site, Thursbitch Tangents (warning! rabbit hole!).
Fulfils the ‘a book I meant to read last year’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 15 OCT 2022, prompt 'standalone'. I'd previously owned a paperback copy, acquired in 2013, and eventually discarded in 2019 as my deteriorating eyesight made me take a good long look squint at my shelves of physical books, which I would now struggle to read.
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