The title of Alan Garner’s 2003 novel, Thursbitch, comes from the name of a valley in the Pennines, usually taken to mean “the Valley of the Demon”, though Garner says a more accurate (and less pejorative) term than “Demon” is “Big Thing”, thus managing to incorporate awe and power, rather than just evil, in the word. Like so many of Garner’s novels, it’s a story told in two time frames, with occasional rare points at which they — present day and the 1730s — touch, or at least glimpse one another.

In the present day we have Sal, a geologist, and Ian, a priest and psychiatrist, exploring Thursbitch and its environs on a series of day trips. Sal is succumbing to Alzheimer’s, but finds her memory of the valley remains clear, and her response to it is increasingly profound. She talks of it being a “sentient landscape”, a phenomenon she says “most geologists agree about”, but don’t discuss in textbooks. Meanwhile, in the 1730s, we follow Jack Turner, a jagger — a man who makes his living travelling the country, transporting goods from one place to another — who was found, as a baby, in Thursbitch, a place which has religious significance for the locals. Jack is a sort of shaman of the valley, conducting an ecstatic rite in which the locals indulge in hallucinogenic mushrooms. There’s a sacred well where the stone head of the god Crom is kept, but the main spirit of the valley is the Bull, and it is when the local “land man” makes plans for building in the valley that the Bull is angered, and Jack’s life takes a turn for the worst. This coincides with his encountering Christianity, with its confusing notion of “sin”, for the first time.

Jack feels like a further link in the chain of Garner’s visionary heroes, who have developed from the “sensitive, imaginative one” of Elidor, and the “troubled young men with visions” of Red Shift, to the fully-fledged shaman of Strandloper. Jack is immersed in his visionary relationship with the “Big Thing” of the valley, but his life is balanced and grounded by his relationship with a woman, Sarah, and it’s when she’s taken from him, at a point that coincides with the wronging of the spirit of the valley, that things fall apart. (Once again, in this novel, there’s a sacred object — this time a cup made of “Blue John” stone — given as a love-gift and named with a nonsensical-sounding name (it’s a “grallus”, a grail), that crosses from one time to another, though it’s much less loaded with the ideas of abuse and betrayal than previous such objects in Garner’s work. Now, as with Strandloper, it’s the land that is the true sacred/abused object.)

Garner talks about his own experience of discovering and exploring Thursbitch in a lecture, “The Valley of the Demon” (which can be read here, though unfortunately without the photos he refers to). The novel could be said to be Garner’s response to the puzzle of that landscape — how it made him feel, how he came to understand the various peculiarities of its man-made buildings, its standing stones, its well, its church. But also, at the end, it’s about “a broken man as can mend”, a description that applies to both Jack in the 1700s and Ian in the 2000s. “But if I never went, how could I come home?” says Jack, of his work as a jagger; and by the end, “home” is as much a mental state, a balance and a sanity that needs to be returned to, as it is a physical place.

The pagan wildness of Thursbitch‘s gods recalls that first stirring of what I thought was the authentic Garner imagination in the “Old Magic” of The Moon of Gomrath. In fact, the further I’ve got through this re-read of Garner’s novels in preparation for his most recent, Boneland, the more I’ve come to see his first two books, which I at first thought of as prentice-piece fantasies, only marginally part of the main thrust of his work, as very much a part of the whole, perhaps even unconscious blueprints for it. Which makes the fact that Boneland is a continuation and conclusion of those first two all the more enticing. And it’s up next.

Strandloper, published in 1996, is based on the true story of Cheshireman William Buckley, who, transported to Australia in 1803, escaped, survived alone in the outback for a while, then was taken in by local tribesmen who believed him to be one of their own back from the dead (because he was white, and the dead are white). Thirty-two years later, he entered the camp of some prospecting Englishmen and prevented them from being massacred. This won him the King’s pardon, meaning he could, at last, go home. In Garner’s hands his story becomes an often hallucinatory exploration of the shared language of sacred rites and traditions on two sides of the world, as well as a continuation of many of the themes and preoccupations of Garner’s previous novels.

The actual William Buckley was arrested for “knowingly receiving a bolt of stolen cloth”, but Garner has him arrested for his key role in a folk fertility rite held in a local church. This first section, ending as it does with soldiers entering a church, is so full of echoes of Red Shift, particularly the Thomas Rowley/civil war sections, it could almost be a fourth strand of that novel. The young William Buckley, for instance, is tended by a young woman, Esther, when he’s “badly” (he has migraines and sees prismatic lights), and this young woman is at one point caught by William dallying with an educated man who is, like John Fowler to Thomas Rowley in Red Shift, teaching William to read and write. It’s as if, by this time, Garner has all the necessary ingredients of his primal drama, his hero’s origin story and originating trauma, and is remixing them to fit each story’s requirements. There’s even an object that represents William and Esther’s relationship, a crystal-covered stone he calls a “swaddledidaff”, which he keeps throughout his arrest, transportation, and time as an aboriginal shaman in Australia, to bring back, at the end, in a way young Tom (of Red Shift) never gets to with Jan’s stone axehead “Bunty”. (These relationship-objects’ nonsensical names seem to emphasise their preciousness.)

It was only at this point in my read-through of Garner’s novels that I realised just how prevalent this theme of an object that represents a promise, usually a love-promise, or an object that is sacred, and which is (in the early novels) lost or sold or mishandled, but (in these later novels) is (sometimes, at least) held onto, and kept, and valued as it should be, is. Blinded as I was by the similarity of the Weirdstone to Tolkien’s One Ring, and its role as a Maguffin to get the goblin-chases going in that first book, it was easy to overlook the significance of that sacred object in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and the Mark of Fohla in its sequel, and the four treasures of Elidor, and the ancient carved stone and cheap souvenir Alison and Gwyn exchange in The Owl Service, and the sacred axe head of Red Shift — all precious objects, either sacred or intimately personal, which can also be seen, shorn of their meaning to the characters, as cheap or worthless things, and therefore things that can be abused, mistreated, mis-valued.

Strandloper is full of sacred objects, not just the “swaddledidaff”, which becomes an object of magical power to the shaman Murrangurk (William Buckley’s name to the aborigines), but also stone axe heads, which are at one point stolen in an abuse of hospitality, another betrayal of the value of a sacred object. By the end, with white Europeans barging their way in, treating the land as one more object that can be valued (cheaply), bought, and abused, it’s obvious that it, too, has become another of Garner’s “abused sacred objects”.

Strandloper is also Garner’s most sustained treatment of the troubled/gifted hero-with-visions. Whereas the trio of Tom/Thomas/Macey of Red Shift all had fits, visions or troubled states they could barely understand, and which often left them desolate and confused, William Buckley passes through what can be seen as a full shamanic initiation-journey through hell, but made literal. Torn from his home, he endures an eight-month passage to Australia, confined within the cramped hold of a ship with too many other prisoners (which could be compared to the long, claustrophobic chase through the mines of the svart-alfar in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen), then slowly going mad with hunger, thirst and sun in the Australian outback. After these initiatory trials, Buckley becomes Murrangurk, a shaman perfectly at home in the mythically-infused world of the aborigines, a world in which everything is sacred and alive with stories, presences, rites, meanings, relationships. At the end, Garner even gets to bring this worldview back to his native Cheshire, as William Buckley (whose name has changed with every stage of his initiatory journey, and who is now Strandloper, one who is “ever to walk the boundaries, to be the master of them, and to guide the Dreaming in all Time”) quite naturally sees the English countryside as resonant with mythic meaning and sacred significance as the Australian outback.

I didn’t find Strandloper as affecting a book as, say, Red Shift, or The Stone Book Quartet, which conquer through, in the first case, sheer angst and, in the second, quiet meaningfulness, but I’d say it’s Garner’s fullest book, a summation of all he’s written so far. If Red Shift is about the initiatory trauma, and The Stone Book Quartet is about finding oneself and one’s place in the world, Strandloper combines the two into a single story, as William Buckley is torn from his home, becomes who he is, and then finds his way back, transformed but the same.

Once upon a time, there was a book about gnomes. It was called Gnomes. It detailed the lives and habits of these funny little creatures with plenty of colourful illustrations, just as you might explain the lives and habits of a woodland animal. It was rather fun and cosy. (One reviewer said it had a “a determined jolliness”.) When it came out in 1976, it was a bestseller, and US publishers Ballantine, who’d recently started publishing large-format paperbacks of fantasy artists’ work (including Frank Frazetta, Gervasio Gallardo, and one Brian Froud), decided to try for a similar success with a book about fairies. So they asked Brian Froud and Alan Lee (who were sharing a studio at the time). The thing was, Lee and Froud didn’t believe in the gnomely domestication of fairies. They knew them to be feral and free, defined — if they could be defined at all — by their very inability to be pinned down, diagrammed, explained or made merely fun, cosy and pretty. Fun they could be, but also naughty, sly and wicked; pretty they could be, but also ugly, strange, cartoonish, elegant, beautiful and horrific; cosy they could never be. If the gnomes of Gnomes were a garden creature, to be found in well-ordered & bordered patches of managed nature, the fairies of Faeries were the wilderness and the wilds, the tangles and briars, the wildflowers and toadstools, the crooked trees and marshy bogs. When it came out in 1978, the book proclaimed its inability to provide an accurate taxonomy of the various kinds of fairy:

“One species shades into the next, so it is difficult to state precisely where a Bogie ends and a Bogle begins… no sensible rules apply to terminology or, indeed, any other aspect of Faerie — it is a law unto itself.”

The result is a work of art rather than a merely amusing book. What Lee and Froud did was to provide a true picture of the imaginative fact of Faerie, the realm of the wild & weird presented in all its grotesqueness, playfulness, darkness and light. Brian Froud, in his introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition, talks of a “healing strength” people have found in the book. This may come from its frankness, as each fairy, pretty or ugly, invites you to see a little bit of yourself in it — only not the civilised, normalised bit. Unlike the chocolate box variety of fairy art, Faeries doesn’t present images of perfect, dainty ladies and children, beautified with gossamer wings and mystified with moonlight, it presents (oddly) something far more normal-seeming and un-idealised, though normal only in its strangeness, its reminder we’re all so different from the norm. Faeries belongs to the same tradition as Richard Dadd’s Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which may have depicted a gathering of oddball faerie types, or may have shown the inmates of the Bethlem Royal Hospital where Dadd resided after killing his father. (And, as a little bit of fairy magic, I’ll point out that Alan Lee was a classmate of Freddie Mercury at the Ealing College of Art, and that Mercury, with Queen, wrote a piece of music called The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke that’s as sublime as the original painting.)

It’s odd to think Faeries was made into a short-ish animated film, for kids, in the US (which you can watch, in three parts, on YouTube). It can’t hope to do more than hint at the spirit of the original work, but some of it’s there, in cartoon versions of the book’s illustrations, mostly to be glimpsed in passing, in the background — hints at the true realm of Faerie behind the inevitable TV compromises:

The Faeries cartoon. Some of it’s like this…

…not much of it’s like this…

…most of it’s like this

After Faeries, Froud and Lee got lots of film & book work, including a host of excellent fantasy films (The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Ridley Scott’s Legend, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings). So, it could be said, they lived happily ever after.