"Boneland" by Alan Garner

 This novel purports to be the culmination of the trilogy starting with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath.

There were fifty years between the writing of the first book and that of the last.

Boneland is a very different book. The first two are children's books with magic and witches and dwarfs and elves and wizards and adventure. Boneland intercuts between the story of a scientist having a nervous breakdown and the story of a shaman in another time or possibly another star system who dances to keep the world alive and seeks a pupil so he can past the tradition on.While the first two are beautifully written simple narratives, Boneland is beautifully written in another way, but it is highly elliptical and hard to understand. 

The plot of the non-shaman bit involves Colin, one of the children of the first two books, now a scientist working on a radio telescope and trying, in his madder moments, to communicate with his long lost sister, Susan. If we puzzle through his dialogues with a mysterious psychotherapist we gain clues to what happened to Colin and Susan, but no definitive answers.

In fact, if Boneland is a sequel to anything, it is to Garner's Red Shift. In both there is a fear of blue and silver ("Her earrings. Blue, silver. Blue silvers. Lightnings. - No!" p 23; "Sky gone! Eyes! Old! Old eyes! Strong! Blue light! Silver! No! Gone!"; p 37); in both there is a handaxe; in both the dialogue fractures as the lead character descends into madness; in both there are alternative narratives that intercut and, at some level, connect. There is even a sequence in which Colin explains to Meg that the inanimate pebbles are moving: through continental drift, the rotation of the Earth, the orbiting of the Earth around the Sun, the movement of the solar system ... and so on. This is structurally identical to a scene in Red Shift in which Tom explains the same thing to Jan.

During the book (p 37) Colin references the Aeneid by Vergil book 6 lines 703 - 751 which is where Aeneas is in the underworld and his (dead) dad Anchises reveals that the souls of the dead return to earth three times in a version of transubstantiation, getting three goes to get things right so they can break out of this cycle and ascend to the Elysian Fields. Perhaps Garner is saying that it took him three books for Colin to sort himself out. Perhaps Colin and the shaman are supposed to be twin souls trapped in bodies many millennia apart.

There are other references to hell. In the Weirdstone, one of the more dramatic passages is when the children are fleeing goblins through a series of underground passages. The Shaman sections of the book are often set in cave systems, although the Shaman's whole world could represent a rather frosty hell. On page 55 Colin hears a voice, possibly that of Susan his sister, possibly that of Meg the psychiatrist, that says: "Don't turn around. You know what happens when men look back." (p 55) This probably references Colin as Orpheus who is attempting to discover and bring back from the dead his missing presumed dead sister Susan as Eurydice.

I found it difficult to read, especially the shaman narrative. 

But there were some marvellous moments:

• "What you've described is well recorded in the literature. It's known as Missing Twin Syndrome. It creates the illusion of another self. It can be pathological, but it often has a physical reality, where one embryo has absorbed the other, or aborted it." (p 64): Colin and Susan were twins, we discover, and now Susan is missing.
• "You can't beat a log fire ... It warms you three times ... Once fetching, once splitting, once burning." (p 74)
• "We're savannah apes. That's where our brains are at. Why should they need to be equipped to solve the most difficult problems the cosmos may throw at us? Isn't it likely there are areas as far beyond our comprehension as the theory of relativity is beyond that of an amoeba?" (p 86)

A fascinating addition to Garner's oeuvre. October 2020; 149 pages

Garner is author of a number of novels, mostly aimed at children, in which ancient legends and magical worlds impact upon everyday life:

• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and the distinctively different concluding part to the 'trilogy', Boneland.
• Elidor, a Narnia-style children's fantasy
• The utterly brilliant Owl Service (aimed at young adults)
• Red Shift, also aimed at young adults and perhaps the darkest of Garner's novels. A line in Elidor - "The legend says that there was once a ploughboy in Elidor: an idiot, given to fits. But in his fit he spoke clearly, and was thought to prophesy." (C 6) - seems to be a link with one of the characters in Red Shift.
• The definitively adult Thursbitch
• Treacle Walker: a hugely allusive book

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God