Dave's Book Blog: "Treacle Walker" by Alan Garner

Joe, a young lad with a Lazy Eye, who lives alone in a house, encounters Treacle Walker, a rag and bone man, and trades a pyjama jacket and the shoulder blade of a lamb for an almost empty pot of ointment and a donkey stone. Treacle and the objects usher Joe into a strange world where a body in a bog comes alive (Thin Amren) and cartoon characters

The prose is more like poetry; every word is precisely placed. There is use of repetition, like in poetry, especially mythic and folkloric epics. But the dialogue is sharp and often witty. Joe, the young boy, never indulges in very modern words but uses slang and lots of dialect words; Treacle and Thin Amren use some very strange and often old-fashioned words. There is an incomplete glossary below.

The book is also full of allusions, from the epigraph ("Time is Ignorance", Carlo Ravelli) to Jung, to alchemy, to Great Expectations, to Shakespeare to the Mabinogion, to ... In this sense it is like a very short Finnegan's Wake. Unpicking these allusions is, I think, the key to understanding the book. So I have tried to research some of them, and explain them below. Obviously this involves spoilers.

Treacle Walker

Treacle Walker is a rag and bone man who literally accepts a rag (Joe’s pyjama jacket) and a bone (lamb shoulder blade) in return for a pot of ointment and a ‘donkey stone’.

Alan Garner says: "Treacle Walker, real name Walter Helliwell, was a tramp who claimed to heal all things but jealousy'. He was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, near Huddersfield. Not much else is known about him."

'Treacle' used to mean medicine in the middle ages. Treacle wells (there is one in Lewis Carroll which was based on a real well near Oxford) are wells where the water is supposed to having healing properties. Therefore, as well as being a rag and bone man, Treacle Walker is an itinerant medicine man.

Later in the book he is also described (by Thin Amren) as a psychopomp, which is a spirit who guides the souls of the dead on their journey, and so one presumes that Treacle Walker is saying the death is the cure for all ills. In the final chapter, Joe asks Treacle "Am I dead?" and he replies "I will not say you are dead. Rather, in this world you have changed your life, and are got into another place."

In chapter XI, Treacle tells Joe that his home is “the Country of the Summer Stars” which is what Taliesin, the legendary Welsh bard, says in the Mabinogion.

Glamourie

The jar that Joe selects from the chest on Treacle’s cart contains traces of a green violet (which matches the colour of Treacle Walker’s eyes) ointment which is presumably sold as some sort of quack medicine cure-all; it is this, when touched (painfully) to Joe’s good eye, that enables him to see things that aren’t there. Thin Amren calls this ‘glamourie’; glamour is a word that derives from an archaic usage meaning a charm on the eyes to make them see other than what is there. In the first scene in the marsh Joe can see Thin Amren with his 'good' eye (which has the ointment in) but not with his lazy eye.

Noony or the Bonacon
‘Noony’ is Joe's name for the steam train that goes down the track at noon. It makes its appearance at the very start of the book (and two paragraphs of description in chapter one are repeated word for word in chapter three as if there is a new beginning, so that in chapter three Joe, awaking, thinks he might have dreamt the two previous chapters before discovering that the lamb's shoulder blade from his 'museum' has been replaced by the ointment pot and the donkey stone.

Bonacon is the name that Treacle Walker gives to the steam train. A bonacon was a mediaeval monster who attacked enemies with its deadly farts (according to A Brief History of Farting).

In chapter XI, Treacle Walker subjects Joe to a catechism regarding this train, which he uses to point out that (a) the train travels in a straight line rather than his cart which “runs by crinkum-crankums, crooks and straights” and (b) “Whither and whence the Bonacon? Where does it go to? Where is it come from? ... How does it return? ... Does it run nidgetwise [this means ‘like an idiot], as the sun?” Joe says he uses ‘Noony’ to tell the time: “When Noony comes I know its now” and Treacle questions “How can there be Now? ... For at the very moment you have Now, it flees. It is gone. It is, on the instant, Then. ... You, you know the moment and tell the time. But that is the doings, not the travel; not the wonder, not the sight.”

So the train is somehow symbolic of time.

Time and the Whirligig

The Noony/Bunacon as symbolic of time also links to Thin Amren’s image of the eddy in the brook, the Whirligig: “Do you see yon whirligig of water there? Thin Amren pointed to an eddy below an alder root by the bridge. He doesn’t move. But water, she goes by. Then what’s whirligig? ... Then what is brook? ... And brook was here yesterday ... And she’ll be here tomorrow. Whirligig stays. Though he’s not the same water. Then what is yesterday? What today? What tomorrow?” (IX) Later, Thin Amren describes Joe as the Whirligig, as if a person is somehow a thing that persists as time moves past it.

The epigraph at the start of the book is "Time is ignorance" a quote from Physicist Carlo Rovelli (who wrote Seven Brief Lessons in Physics)

The Donkey Stone
In history, a donkey stone was made from pulverised stone, cement, bleach powder and water. They were used to polish steps, they gave a non-slip finish. They were often given out by rag and bone men in exchange for old clothes etc.

Joe’s donkey stone is inscribed with a stylised carving that seems to resemble the White Horse of Uffington. Treacle Walker advises Joe to polish his doorstep with the donkey stone; this has the result of making it impossible for anyone to enter without being invited in (Joe frequently invites Treacle Walker in). Later, Joe will discover that the donkey stone has the ability to carry him through a mirror into an alternative (mirror image) universe.

The Latin that Joe 'reads' at the ophthalmologist

This inscription is translated by Treacle as “This stone is small, of little price; spurned by fools, more honoured by the wise.” It seems at first that this refers to the donkey stone but Treacle Walker has already referred to the jar of ointment as “it is small ... of little price”, so there is an ambiguity here.

The Latin phrase comes from the Rosarium Philosophorium, a sixteenth century alchemical treatise, and refers to the Philosopher’s Stone, an object which could supposedly effect the transformation of base metals to gold and, perhaps, confer immortality and/or eternal youth.

The Latin phrase is carved onto a cube of rock which Carl Jung set by a lakeside near the village of Bollingen in Switzerland. Other inscriptions on the stone read:

(In Greek) “Time is a child — playing like a child — playing a board game — the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.” The first sentence comes from Heraclitus and the last quotes the Odyssey (24.12) and refers to Hermes as a psychopomp leading the souls of the dead suitors away. There is a discussion of time in Treacle Walker, and Treacle Walker himself is described as a psychopomp.
“I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons” These statements are, apparently, taken from works on alchemy. Many of these could apply to Joe.

Thin Amren

Thin Amren is a man who is buried in a marsh. Presumably he is based on Lindow Man, the prehistoric body found well-preserved in a marsh near Garner's home near Wilmslow in Cheshire. When Joe, lured by the noise of a cuckoo (which is both the noise he made when he blew into Treacle Walker’s bone flute and a bird commonly associated with psychopomps), gets lost in the marsh, partly because he takes his eye patch off and so uses his ‘good’ eye (the one that has been touched by the ointment so that it can see what is not there) to try to locate landmarks, he wakes Thin Amren up. He can only see Thin Amren with the ‘good’ eye. It is Thin Amren who describes it as Joe’s ‘glamourie’ and also tells Joe that Treacle Walker is a psychopomp.

The cuckoo
A cuckoo associated with psychopomps. In the mediaeval English song 'Sumer is icumen in' there is a refrain of 'Lhude sing cuccu'. One of the lines in this song is 'bucke uerteþ' where the word 'verteth' means 'farteth'; perhaps the farting buck is is bonacon!

Joe through the looking glass

There are hints that there are two Joes, perhaps body and soul, perhaps live Joe and dead Joe:

In chapter VII, Joe has been “playing marbles against himself ... sometimes he let the other Joe win”.
In chapter XII he goes for a walk and when he returns he finds, in the chimney room Treacle sitting with another Joe. In chapter XIII, they both scream and, to the soundtrack of cuckoos, Treacle makes sure they do not meet: “Do not touch. Do not speak. Do not look in the eyes.”
In chapter XIV, Joe uses the donkey stone to go through the mirror into another world, where everything is, predictably, reversed. He goes into yet another mirror, and another, and another ... chasing the characters who have escaped from the cartoons in the comic.

Other allusions
“Every why has its wherefore” is from the Comedy of Errors (has in the original is hath)
At the end, as he is returning to his bog, Thin Amren says to Joe, “what larks”. This is a quote from Great Expectations (another book where a man rises from a marsh); Joe Gargery says it to Pip, the protagonist-narrator.
At the end (chapter XVIII) Joe asks Treacle what Treacle wants for himself. No-one has ever asked that of Treacle but he replies: “To hear no more the beat of Time. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years. ... Oblivion. Home.” So Joe takes Treacle’s place as the rag and bone man.

An incomplete glossary

Amblyopic = having an eye problem that does not have an obvious cause
Bonacon = a mythical beast with a deadly fart. In Chapter XI, Treacle describes the noonday train as ‘Bonacon’
Carnaptious = bad-tempered and argumentative
Catalectic = of a line in poetry, lacking a syllable in the last foot
Clout = cloth
Coptank. A copintank is a type of sixteenth-century high hat in the shape of a sugar loaf. Hermes, a psychopomp from Greek myth, wears a winged helmet.
Corr Bolg = a ‘crane’ bag, an old Irish bag from myth. In chapter XIII, Treacle takes items from his Corr Bolg. In chapter XVIII, Thin Amren asks Joe is Treacle (whom he describes as a bad-tempered ‘coptank’ has snatched (Joe) in his Corr Bolg, suggesting that Joe’s soul has now been taken by Treacle who is guiding it into the underworld.
Furibund = frantic, frenzied
Glamourie = glamour is a word that derives from an archaic usage meaning a charm on the eyes to make them see other than what is there. In chapter VI, Thin Amren says that Joe has the glamourie in the eye that has been touched by the ointment.
Glim = eye
Hurlothrumbo. In chapter II, Treacle describes the winter as hurlothrumbo and the night as lomberhomock. These seem to be nonsense words. Hurlothrumbo is an eighteenth-century Cheshire nonsense play, Lomberhomock is a character in it.
Macaronics = poems that contain words of more than one language
Mirligoes = dizziness or giddiness
Mools = soft crumbly earth or mould, or earth from a grave
Nidget = fool, as in ‘an eejit’: In chapter I, Treacle describes the sun as “the craven nidget who flees the dark and will not come back till morning”; in chapter XI he says that that sun travels across the sky ‘nidgetwise’, in the manner of an idiot.
Nominees = a Yorkshire dialect word for ‘children’s chants’
Nookshotten = a nook is a recess but nookshotten is a dialect word meaning, apparently, jutting out at all sort of angles
Pickthank = a sycophant
Psychopomp = one who guides the souls of the dead through the afterlife
Scapulimancer: In chapter I, when he receives from Joe the lamb’s shoulder blade, Treacle calls Joe a scapulimancer, who is someone who foretells the future from the pattern of cracks on a burning shoulder blade.
Shufti = a quick look
Stramash = fuss, noise
Tarradiddle = pretentious nonsense

Selected quotes

“A wind threw the door onto him, shoving him against the stack. And night spilled in. Snow stung his face. He forced the door against the wind and the latch clanged shut. He clung to the chimney post. But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joists and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering silence; and on the floor snow melted to tears.” (I)
“It was a tune with wings, trampling things, tightened strings, boggarts and bogles and brags on their feet; the man in the oak, sickness and fever, that set in long, lasting sleep the whole great world with the sweetness of sound the bone did not play.” (II, repeated in XIII)
“Unfound bones sing louder” (II)
“It was a blue-grey day; no use to anyone.” (VII)
“I have been through Hickety, Pickety, France and High Spain ... by criknkum-crankums, crooks and straights. And I am at your pear, with my ears in my hat, my back in my coat, and two squat kickering tattery shoes full of roadwayish water.” (VIII)
"Why the gawk of a throttled earwig?” (IX)
“I’d not trust that one’s arse with a fart.” (IX)
“I’m weary. Weary of dreaming, Whirligig. I’m a shadow in a bottle with the weight of it.” (XVIII)
“If you won’t dream ... I can’t be. Ever. At all. But if you dream, I can.” (XVIII)

References

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-critic-and-the-clue-tracking-alan-garners-treacle-walker/

Other novels by Alan Garner which have been reviewed in this blog:

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