Boneland

Neil Gaiman said what words can say about this novel. It left me floundering intellectually as I too was looking for answers; a resolution of Colin and Susan's story, and was forced to empathize with Colin's enigmatic journey. To be honest I cried a lot. Put the book down in frustration and picked it up again time upon time. When I first read the earlier books I lived on the side of Winter Hill. On my extreme southern horizon, I could see the Cheshire countryside around Elderly Edge and if the telescope dish was pointing to the setting sun. a gleam of silver. Much closer and in my view from the heights, was the setting for the “Stone Book”. Still in my mind a masterpiece of storytelling and writing. Red Shift mesmerized me at the same time I discovered Jimi Hendrix and teenage angst. The Owl Service woke my reverence for my Welsh heritage it's mythology and story. So Garner has been an important author for me. I must re-read Boneland as in writing this review the thought comes to me that I am not yet quite ready for it. I have difficulty with star ratings why did I give this 4 and not 5 because I think I still have, like Colin, to pursue that lost star which is just beyond my imagination.

As a child I read, and loved, Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath. Many thought there should have been a third book, completing the stories, but Garner resisted and moved on to books aimed at older children and adults. I reread Stone and Moon a couple of years ago and they were as good as I remembered. Wonderful fantasies set in and around Alderley Edge in Cheshire.

So when I discovered that Garner had finally written a third book in the series I didn't know what to expect. A children's book in the same vein? Or something else?

What we get is a concise novel about loss and grief, about blame and self-doubt, about mystery and myth. This is not a children's book, but rather a book for the adults who remember the first two books. It is by turns oblique, poetic, strange and cathartic.

Colin Whisterfield, the boy protagonist of the first two books is all grown up, a professor no less, who works at a radio telescope. He is brilliant and troubled with mounting psychological problems caused by a childhood trauma that means he can remember nothing before the age of 13. Living alone in a hut in a quarry by the Edge, Colin is eventually forced to seek the help of psychologist Meg, who, with several doses of tough love, makes him confront his greatest fears and his deep sense of loss.

The tone of this book is very different. Mixing poetic, mythic passages of prose that read like a description of a dream, with vivid descriptions of the broken Colin, Garner creates a story that fills in some of the blanks and ties up some of the loose ends left at the end of The Moon of Gomrath.

The twist at the end is well handled, the finale both moving and satisfying. Alan Garner is one of our greatest, and probably most underrated, writers and this is a fine example of his work and a fitting end to the Weirdstone trilogy. Bravo sir, bravo.