Published in 2021, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize the following year, this is by Alan Garner. He was 87 when it appeared, and thus became the oldest Booker-shortlisted author ever. (It was up against, inter alia, Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These, Elizabeth Strout's Oh William!, and the eventual winner, Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.)

I read Treacle Walker in the company of Simon Haisell's Footnotes and Tangents book group. Like William Golding's The Inheritors, it's a book I probably wouldn't have embarked upon off my own bat, and even if I had homed in on it, I don't think I'd have been able to make much of it without Haisell's abundant and fascinating notes.


My copy came from Douglas Library

***

The story -- well, yes, what IS the story...?

Our central figure is Joe Coppock, a young Cheshire lad who is mysteriously home alone with his squinty sight, his comics, and his marbles. Into Joe's vaguely 1940s world sails Treacle Walker, ostensibly a rag-and-bone man, but deep down, beneath his more than slightly smelly surface, a healer and wise man. The Booker reading guide tells us: "In the medieval period, the word 'treacle' meant 'medicine', and it soon becomes clear that the medicine man's purpose is to cure Joe's sight in more than one sense. Seeing the world is not the same as seeing what the world is..." Treacle Walker, by his own account, heals "all things; save jealousy. Which none can."

Joe, meanwhile, seems lonely, vulnerable, and reticent. He's often impatient, quick to dismiss things as "daft", but he's energetic, and he's perceptive.

Via Treacle Walker, Joe is introduced to the world of "glamourie" (enchantment and magic). It's all somewhat bewildering: Time hiccoughs (the epigraph is Carlo Rovelli's dictum that "time is ignorance"); the real and the imagined start to blur at the edges, and bleed into each other; language conceals as much as it reveals, inexorably drawn to riddles and rhymes.

So, a series of mysterious episodes befalls Joe, but there's an impetus to them, and you definitely get the impression you're in a kind of bildungsroman. But what exactly is Joe progressing towards?


The Church of St Philip and St James, Alderley Edge, a village not far from Garner's (and Joe's) home. There's lots more Garnerian magic to explore in the vicinity

Towards the end of the book, Joe asks: "Treacle Walker, am I dead?"

Aha... Death would explain why he's such an isolated figure, and why normal physical rules no longer apply to his environment. It would explain why Treacle Walker has been described by another character as a "psychopomp" (a shaman-like figure who guides the spirits of the dead to the afterlife).

Treacle Walker's reply is characteristically ambivalent: "I will not say that you are dead. Rather, in this world you have changed your life, and are got into another place."

Joe then asks his strange companion: "What is it you want for you? What is it you want most? For you. Not some wazzock else." And what does the rag-and-bone man want? "To hear no more the beat of Time. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years... Oblivion. Home." The close of the book sees Joe taking on the role of Treacle Walker. A rag-and-bone man. With the cart, and the horse, and the words that make the horse move.

This is not the only interpretation, Haisell is quick to point out. We could see Joe's journey as his irreversible progress into adulthood. Garner has spoken about his relationship with his father, and his perception that he was 'a cuckoo in the nest.' Education separated him from his family and his past. Perhaps Treacle Walker symbolizes that sense of loss.

Garner also argues that a text can never have only one meaning. In provoking a response in the reader or listener, it invites that person to join in the creative act -- to make meaning out of the words.


"He brought kindling of oak twigs and holly bark..."

***

The novel, though, is definitely also autobiographical: "Garner has long been preoccupied with time. As a child, he suffered from three long illnesses -- diphtheria, meningitis and pneumonia -- each bringing him close to death and confining him to bed for long periods. The ceiling he stared at became three-dimensional and time became elastic." The comic that Joe reads in the story, Knockout, is the comic Garner read when he was lying in bed in an isolation hospital in 1941. (You can see the original pages here.)

The place where Joe lives, with its strange chimney space, is modelled on a 450-year-old building called the Old Medicine House, which Garner rescued from demolition in Staffordshire, and relocated to sit alongside his own home near Alderley Edge, where Garners have lived since at least 1592.

Garner is intensely steeped in "place". As Nicholas Wroe points out, almost all his writing features the land visible from his home turf: "This microscopically attentive study of the region comes with a deeply-felt appreciation of its cultural history, which has won him many admirers. But it is in combining this almost claustrophobic sense of place with a prodigiously expansive handling of time that has given his work its instantly identifiable tone."

If Garner's land is the background, his characters are arguably also aspects of himself. Simon Haisell quotes an interview where the author maintains: "Joseph Coppock is the me I could have become if I'd not had the severe academic training that I did. Treacle Walker is what I could have become if I hadn't jumped ship at Oxford and got off the road to academia." Haisell glosses: "Joe is the sickly, unschooled Cheshire kid. Treacle Walker is the esoteric intellectual, intelligible only to himself."


The uncanny world at the edge of the park... Garner's magic is much less obvious, though

***

It's a strange book. Designedly so. Haisell also quotes one of Garner's essays (Achilles in Altjira): "The function of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables, we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. It is yet another paradox. Language, no matter how finely worked, will not speak the truth. What we feel most deeply we cannot say in words. At such levels only images connect; and hence story becomes symbol."

Garner, Haisell tells us, frequently reiterates "the need for both science and story, our intellectual faculties and our creative imagination, the literal and the numinous".

Thin Amren, the ancient bog man whom Joe is required to "re-stake" in his watery bed, is the essential dreamer. "Thin Amren dreams all that is and is not," Treacle Walker explains. "We are his dreams." For Haisell, "Thin Amren is our creative unconscious, all the long longings and laughings that slide under our waking self. In contrast, Treacle Walker is consciousness, thought and learning. Words are his trade." And we need both.


Artwork by Tamsin Rosewell: "Thin Amren. Sleep you on."

A constantly productive theme brings in ideas of doubleness; paradox; liminality; and thresholds:

"What sees is seen... What's out is in; what's in is out."

*

"'Axis mundi.'
"'Eh?'
"'The chimney. It is the heart of all that is. The sky turns on it. It is the way between.'
"'Between what?'
"'The earth, the heavens and the sapient stars."

*

"'Would you forego the gift of both?'
"'Call that a present?' said Joe. 'I'm neither one nor t'other with it.'
"'Or are you more?'"



***

In Garner's hands, language becomes something intensely, yearningly beautiful. Here's just one sample passage, which occurs when Joe wants to know the name of the mysterious rag-and-bone man:

"Outside, the iron ring handle of the door banged on the wood three slow times, sounding through the house.
"Joe went to the small window by the door and looked. He saw no one. Only the pony under the tree; and the bleach of heat.
"'There's nobody there,' he said.
"'Then no body wishes to come in,' said the man.
"Bang. Bang. Bang.
"Joe felt the door shake.
"'What must I do?' he said.
"Bang. Bang. Bang.
"Joe looked again. The pony. The tree. The heat.
"He lifted the latch.
"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.
"'My name,' said the man, 'is Treacle Walker.'"

And here's another example of the sad, elegiac quality that often imbues his writing:

"Joe dreamt he was dreaming and he knew he was... A pipe played. It was a tune he had never heard, yet he knew it... He woke from the drowse of the dream in the dream... 'Wait! Wait for us! Wait! Wait! Wait on!' Nothing. No one. Only loss."



***

Simon Haisell also takes us on a wonderfully educational journey, following clues from the text to explore time; Samuel Maggoty Johnson; bone flutes; bog bodies; Carl Jung; Heraclitus; the Bonacon (self-igniting faeces, anyone?); Taliesin; Manannan (yes!); Hermeticism...

Such a tiny book, and yet so rich. I read it, and re-read it. I could re-read it many more times, and still find beauty in it.

Again, I'm so grateful for this book group. What an experience this has been.