One of the lovely things about the first few weeks after Christmas, at least in my corner of the world, is having lots of new books to read. This year was a little different, however, because I found myself with an odd pair of books, loving both of them but unable to read either of them straight through.
There are places…
The yellow one is nonfiction. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist working on loop quantum gravity. The fact that a physicist could publish a book – any book – with such a title attracted me to him, and to it, immediately.
There Are Places turned out to be a collection of his newspaper articles, three to six pages each, on science, history, philosophy, religion and politics. Every single one was a pleasure to read – calm, lucid and enlightening – but I couldn’t read the book straight through.
My difficulty was that each essay gave me something to think about, which I like, but each was on a new topic, so each took up its own quota of thinking-space. After reading two or three in one sitting, I needed time to let them settle.
Treacle Walker
The black one is fiction, short-listed for the Booker prize – and how many fantasy titles can claim that status? And the author was a first-time nominee for the honour at the age of … 87! … after winning prizes for his YA fantasy way back in the 1960s. Treacle Walker only runs to 150 pages (and nearly 50 of them are blank because of chapter-title pages) but I couldn’t read the book straight through.
It was … too complex? Too concentrated?
But this is fantasy! It can’t be hard!
It was, though. I could only read two or three chapters (which are all short) before needing a break, and when I came back to it I needed to re-read the last of them before forging further ahead. And now that I’ve finished it, I think I need to read it all again to understand it.
I knew Garner was good. I didn’t know he was that good.
*
I rarely have two books on the go at once but alternating between these two was oddly satisfactory.
But perhaps not so oddly, because there are subterranean connections. The epigraph of Treacle Walker is a quotation from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli:
“Time is ignorance.”
Most novels’ protagonists are roughly the age of their intended readers: books for children have children at their centre, YA books have teenagers or young adults, adults’ books centre on adults. Treacle Walker and Garner’s earlier Stone Book Quartet (also excellent, by the way) break this rule. So does Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, also highly recommended here and perceptively reviewed on NPR at https://www.npr.org/2013/06/17/191346480/a-deceptively-simple-tale-of-magic-and-peril-in-ocean
Here’s a long critical essay about Treacle Walker, teasing out its connections to Garner’s life, preoccupations and earlier fiction. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-critic-and-the-clue-tracking-alan-garners-treacle-walker/
Read the book first!
David Sexton, a respected critic, introduced Kazuo Ishiguro’s books in The Guardian recently in an article titled “Where to start with Ishiguro?” When he got to The Buried Giant he called it “the weird one” (which is a big call, given the extreme individuality of the others) and had this to say about it:
I’m with Ishiguro on this. It’s a beautiful novel about grief and forgetting, not about Saxon Britain.
Like Garner’s Strandloper and Treacle Walker, and for the same reasons, it requires re-reading.