“I'm for uncertainty”

As Alan Garner's Boneland (2012) begins, a man called Colin Whisterfield discharges himself from a Cheshire hospital, gets into a taxi driven by a solicitous down to earth guy called Burt, and goes home to Church Quarry and his kit-made hut, where he falls asleep. The story then shifts to an anonymous stone-age man watching stars, carving a bull in a rock, finding a woman and a child encased in ice and exposing them to the birds, and having visions of riding Grey Wolf. Is the man Colin's dream, or Colin's ancestor, or Colin time slipping, or simply (!?) a man doing things 10,000 years ago that are thematically equivalent to Colin in the present? Shifting back to Colin, the story depicts him trying to return to work during sick leave (he's an astrophysicist using a cutting edge radio telescope array called MERLIN and a computer nicknamed Arthur to investigate the Pleiades) and starting to see a psychologist called Meg, who has a quick wit, a warm sympathy, and an eclectic library. Colin has been diagnosed by his previous doctors as "an immature, uncooperative, hysterical, depressive, Asperger's, with an IQ off the clock," but Meg reckons his problems stem from missing twin syndrome and selective amnesia possibly due to some head trauma in his past. And when Colin starts hearing his long lost twin sister's voice while listening to the telescope and Meg starts asking challenging questions (like "have you ever been struck by lightning?") and giving scary advice (like, "go to where it hurts most"), and the stone age man starts realizing that he's aging and alone and better carve a woman into the world to bear him a child to whom to teach the vital dancing, singing, and stone carving to ensure the continuance of the world, the novel moves into intense terrain.

Boneland is the long-delayed (50 years!) concluding volume in a trilogy that Garner began with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), in which Colin and his twin Susan experience scary and exciting adventures involving an important stone, a quarry, a witch, a wizard, dwarves, crows, tunnels, Arthurian sleepers in a mountain, and the like. But the later novel is not a simple continuation of the plot and surely not of the style, genre, or narrative technique of the earlier ones. Instead, it feels closer to Garner's Stone Book Quartet (1976-78), in its terse, poetic, vivid, elliptical, and challenging style and narrative technique and its emphasis on the persisting power of place and craft and stone and stars. But Boneland is much more openly interested in psychology and psychiatry than his earlier Cheshire books.

As I read Boneland, in addition to the connection between the stone-age man and contemporary Colin, I wondered about things like, What happened to Susan, with whom he adventured in the first two books? Why can't he remember anything from before he was 13 (Garner's effective, if perverse way to avoid easy linking of this third book to the first two in the "trilogy")? Why did Garner decide to write this third book so many years after the second one? I feel that this novel cannot comfortably stand on its own, but also that it is so different from the first two that it seems another animal. It is bold to complete a children's fantasy trilogy by writing an adult third book about the child protagonist as a middle-aged man who fears he is mad and can't remember his childhood experiences!

The prose is amazing, especially in the hypnotic stone-age passages like this one:
“He sat up on the shoulder. The Grey Wolf struck the damp earth and ran, higher than the trees, lower than the clouds, and each leap measured a mile; from his feet flint flew, spring sprouted, lake surged and mixed with gravel dirt, and birch bent to the ground. Hare crouched, boar bristled, crow called, owl woke, and stag began to bell. And the Grey Wolf stopped. They were at the Hill of Death and Life.”
And there is plenty of great writing in the present passages as well: neat lines ("Similes are for cowards"), fine emotion ("Wrench by wrench Colin's tears turned to dew on his cheek"), savory Cheshire dialect ("You've got a right cob on"), and vivid descriptions ("Stone thrust out. Below the scarp was tumbled with boulders to the land beneath. The brindled fields stretched to the hills").

Garner's compact novel also features plenty of content, interesting ideas about science and art, mythology and psychology, memory and time, the connection between past and present and place, the truth of fairy tales (and legends and myths), the loss of something precious in contemporary life, and so on. In addition to the visionary poetry of the stone-age passages, there are many sublime moments in the present, like when Colin shows Meg some goblin gold or gazes into a half a million or so years old black stone axe that contains stars and creation and is the first step towards the radio telescope.

Colin, Meg, and Burt are all appealing characters.

The audiobook reader, Robert Powell, is superb. The audiobook production uses a slight echo effect for the stone-age passages, to make them sound sacred.

I recommend the novel, but warn readers who loved the first two books not to expect a typical trilogy continuation and conclusion. I did find the Stone Book Quartet more satisfying. It's as if finally in Boneland we're being told the adventures in the first two books may or may not have happened, depending on our viewpoint. Perhaps because Colin and presumably Garner are "for uncertainty," believing that "all discovery is play" that "never finishes," that "there are no final answers," that time is multi-linear, and that "faith is the only truth, belief the only reality," the ending of the novel is ambiguous and difficult (for this reader) to pin down.

But it does end with Meg's grail questions ringing in our ears: "What is this thing? What does it mean? Whom does it serve?"

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3 people found this helpful

What the Hell Was That?

OMG what a weird book. I'm not sure it's a 5, but I don't know what else to do with it. It's confusing. In fact, I was so confused for the first quarter of the book that it was pissing me off. How the eff did this quasi-mystical bullshit relate to the first two? Why did he write it so many years later (the computers and cell phones threw me right off until I saw the publication date.) What happened to the other beloved characters of Weirdstone and Moon? What kind of drugs is Garner doing?
But then the spell caught me. Colin's madness. How compelling a character is Meg. The strange mythos of prehistory and its shamanic persona.
I'm going to have to get the paperback and re-read it to even start to unpack it. I'm still not sure what happened at the end. Except that it FELT like the end and was satisfying on some level, even through the head-scratching.
I think what I just listened to was what a young fantasy novelist can become with time, and probably solitude, to go quietly mad. I wish I'd started younger, so I could be writing some of this crazy, fascinating, psychedelic crazy bullshit now in my dotage.

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Never finished because performance was so bad.

I reread 1st and 2nd book a lot as a child. The audible version was off putting. I quit it before getting any idea about what this 3rd book was about. I like and listen to many audible books. I could not make myself finish it past 3-4 pages in. A year later I am going to get the used paperback copy and see if I can read that. The performançe on this still puts me off.

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