'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'

     I've just finished reading Alan Garner's 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'.  A bit of a mouthful that.  I remember my brother reading this to me as a child, and I think it was also read to us at school but I have a notion that for some reason it was abandoned.  Either way, I have no idea now how the book ended.  A year ago I dipped into the Granada adaptation of 'The Owl Service'.  And what a strange, baffling thing that is.  Anyway just before Christmas, in the our local bookshop, and looking for something to read, I decided to revisit the Weirdstone, it being the sort of book to have a cult following.  Rather like HTV's 'Children of the Stones', it shares some themes with the wider 'Folk Horror' genre.

    The Weirdstone is Alan Garner's first published novel.  The debt to the Inklings, particular Tolkien, is obvious.*  The novel is populated with dwarves, trolls and wizards. And other beings some of whom are from Norse mythology and others, one suspects, that are Garner's own creation.  Not only that, but the protagonists embark on two arduous journeys, (one underground), that bare resemblance to the journey of the Fellowship of the Ring.  It is also a conflict for the possession of an object, in this particular case a jewel called the Weirdstone, which amongst other things, like the One Ring, facilitates access to the Unseen. The setting is not however a fictional world but Northern England - the county of Cheshire and that strange outcrop of rock in the midst of the Cheshire Plain known as Alderley Edge.  A place that has given birth to legends** and a place that Garner knew well as a child.  That specificity of geography brings it close to the artist John Piper's definition of Romanticism.

     Like 'The Owl Service', it is a dizzyingly complex novel.  I gave up trying to remember who was who.  Sadly, it suffers from a lack of characterisation.  We know, for instance, next to nothing about the two main protagonists, the children Susan and Colin, but for all of that there are scenes incredible drive and intensity.  Some of them quite unforgettable; haunting and unsettling. At times I thought it wasn't really for children at all.

     

* I think there is an influence of too of Tolkein's fellow Inkling Charles Williams.

** It is said, amongst a number of other locations in the UK, to be the sleeping place of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.