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Then I heard a voice talking inside my head. At the end of the oral history, there were so many fragments lying around that were valuable, and hadn’t got in, so I swept them into a kind of mental file, and let them gestate. And I realised that oral history was as unreliable as documentary history.
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“Doing the project, I found that talking to my contemporaries, we could all remember a given event, but when we compared notes, there were as many versions of that memory as there were people to remember it. And it is the manner of the telling that is important. “It was his truth, a part of him, which he passed on,” writes Garner. Garner’s contribution to the oral work was his memory of his grandfather’s account of the legend of Alderley Edge, in which a farmer sells his white mare to an old man who turns out to be a wizard and leads him to a sleeping army of knights inside the hill – the basis for Weirdstone. The idea had to “brew nebulously” for some time, derailed after Garner’s work on an oral history project with Manchester University prompted the fragmentary childhood memoir Where Shall We Run To?, elements from which appear in Treacle Walker. “But Walter Helliwell, a tramp, couldn’t have know that, and that was how I knew something was there.” What had snagged Garner’s attention was the original meaning of treacle: medicine. And I looked at Bob and said, ‘You remember last night? Well, just make a note that on the afternoon of Sunday 15 July 2012, you’ve given me an idea, and you’ve given me a book.” He was a healer, claiming to be able to cure all things except jealousy. “Just inconsequentially, Bob told me about a historical character, a local tramp called Walter Helliwell, known as Treacle Walker. The next day, they were walking together across Castle Hill, an iron age hill fort in Huddersfield. “He’s dealing with questions arising from the observed universe, and I could not get across to him that I didn’t know where I got the ideas from, that they sort of emerged, and that bothered him.”
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Cywinski had been quizzing Garner about where he got his ideas. The new novel has its roots in a conversation Garner had in 2012 with his friend Bob Cywinski, a particle physicist.
PICTURES OF ALAN WALKER TV
‘I carried the sole manuscript around with me – and there’s nothing more dangerous than that’ … Gillian Hills, Francis Wallis and Michael Holden in the 1969 TV adaptation of The Owl Service. Touching the remains of what’s left in the jar to his eye shifts the veil between the everyday and the strange – and he sees a man sit up in a bog to speak to him. In Treacle Walker, a spare, uncanny book, Joe exchanges a pair of pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder blade for a near-empty jar of medicine and a donkey stone, a type of scouring block. But when you’re 87, and average nine years a book …” “But a friend, who’s very cynical and very helpful, said I just have to come to terms with the fact that there will be something left undone. In the days before computers, I carried the sole manuscript to The Owl Service around with me, and there’s nothing more dangerous than doing that,” says Garner, once his wife, Griselda, has sorted out his Zoom. “This lifelong fear meant I did stupid things. “Given that it takes me between five and nine years to write a novel,” he said at the time, “the joke runs a bit sour when you’re in your early 80s.” Three years later, having just turned 87, Garner has written Treacle Walker, a slice of myth and magic that only he could have produced, in which a young boy, Joe Coppock, is drawn into the world of “glamourie” – which sits alongside and within his own world – when a rag-and-bone man comes to his door. He did it when his childhood memoir, Where Shall We Run To?, came out in 2018. He did it when Boneland, the haunting sequel to his children’s novels The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, was published in 2012.
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It means that this most beloved of writers – whose works feel chiselled from the Cheshire landscape of his home, and whose devoted fans range from Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman to Margaret Atwood – keeps joking that he’s written his last book. A lan Garner has always feared unexpectedly dying before he finishes the book he’s working on.