(no subject)

[rymenhild]

I read a book today about some children on summer holiday in rural Wales. During this holiday, the children discover that they are linked, in ways hitherto unsuspected, to supernatural events recorded in medieval Welsh texts. They see some significant standing stones, meet a farmhand who knows far more than he should, and encounter or hear mention of symbolic ravens, harps, sheepdogs, foxes and owls.

I have never read this book before.

Did I mention that Alan Garner's The Owl Service was first published in 1967, a year before Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising?

In a way, The Owl Service is grimmer than the Dark is Rising Sequence. The darkness of the book comes from its lack of a moral center. Where Cooper's Simon Drew can say, "[W]ell, there's a good side and a bad, and those two are absolutely without question the good side," there is no good or bad anywhere in The Owl Service. Every character is human and severely flawed. The interaction between the modern humans' errors and the errors of Gwydion, Lleu, Gronw and Blodeuwedd in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi creates the tension of the plot. The class distinctions separating Gwyn, the cook's son who dreams of educating himself out of poverty, from Alison, an English future society lady who technically owns the house in Wales, and her stepbrother Roger, bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, help drive the narrative and create its underlying bitterness. While Garner tempts readers to favor Gwyn, the authentic Welshman, over the intruders Alison and Roger, Gwyn is no better than the other two, and his failures threaten Blodeuwedd's valley more seriously than anyone else's mistakes. In its unflinching portrayal of interlinked failures, The Owl Service is true to its source materials in the Mabinogi.

Comments

[prosewitch.livejournal.com]

Ooh, sounds like a good book (especially so now that I've read the Mabinogi). And damn, I still need to read the Cooper books.

Oh, btw, one of my Bton friends just posted an academic call for RPG-related papers, in case you're interested. :)

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Sounds fascinating -- I'd be interested to see what the papers look like. It's not a call for me, even apart from my lack of sociological training and my desire to avoid papers on topics that might threaten the arbiters of academia before I get tenure. I know very well that studying an RPG which one frequents is subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- by becoming part of a game, especially as freeform a game as Milliways, one changes it. (Studying a game which I do not frequent would frankly bore me, I think.)

Yes, you must read the Cooper books.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

I've always been interested in hearing about/reading participant-observer research. Too bad. Shall have to do it myself instead someday.

[prosewitch.livejournal.com]

Ah, good point about studying a game you're a part of.

And Cooper... one of these days... maybe the next time I'm on a plane would be a good time to pick them up, if I'm not swamped with schoolwork...

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

I must read The Owl Service.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Clearly.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I've always loved The Owl Service. Have you read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, where Garner is just as freakily wonderful with Norse myth? Or Elidor? Great stuff, all of them.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Not yet. I was only informed I should read The Owl Service in the relatively recent past. (Well, a few months ago, but I forgot.) I look forward to the other books.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

You must read them! I always think of one scene in Gomrath which shows the difference in what used to be seen as acceptable in kids' books from then to now (not a spoiler): one character gets to cast a spell, a long, detailed spell - that Garner cheerfully notes is real, taken from a magical manuscript; he left out one line lest his readers wanted to try it out and he didn't want any bad repercussions on them, should it actually work.

Would a children's author do that today - especially the statement that, yes, this was from a real magical tradition? I'm not sure. The HP wand+bad fake Latin seems the more usual route.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

L. Frank Baum, of course, does almost the exact same thing in The Magic of Oz, in reference to the magic word the shape changers use. He gives a very similar note when the word is first used. I'd go get the quote, but that volume I believe now resides with my cousin in CA.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! I haven't read many of the Oz books - only the first two, I think.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I have the vague sense that the motif of the magic word with a piece left out comes from Eastern folklore... I think I might possibly remember magic words with missing pieces in the Sephardi Jewish folktales I read when I was very young.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

They're very, very worthwhile overall. I'd stay away from the ones written by anyone other than L.F. Baum- those are lousy. But the original books- are excellent, they were critical parts of my childhood, and convinced me that reading was one of the most wonderful things on the face of the planet.

[gramarye1971]

*is very, very intrigued*

*adds book to reading list*

*looks at reading list in its entirety and moves book several places higher up*

[genarti]

*does likewise*

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Yes, both of you must absolutely read it.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

I will happily expect to start seeing refernces to this book show up in Milliways soon, between the three of you. =)

[gramarye1971]

*examines reading list again and goes to order the book from Amazon.co.uk, because, well, why not*

*also picks up an Inspector Morse soundtrack, just for the heck of it*

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Dude. Totally looking forward to reading it.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I'll lend you my copy, if you wait until summer.

Of course, there are libraries.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

We shall see. If the libraries here have it, I would indeed not have to wait.

[sovay]

The Owl Service was the first Alan Garner I ever read, in elementary school sometime, and I love it. Particularly the idea that people can become trapped in the shapes of stories, unwilling incarnations of the myths soaked into the land: reenacted over and over again unless someone can break the pattern. Alison, Roger, and Gwyn are made suspectible through their own emotional configurations to the triangle of Blodeuwedd, Gronw Pebyr, and Lleu Llaw Gyffes, but then again so was the generation before them. "They are the three who suffer every time." Myth is predatory, in this valley; it's parasitic; and it's as indifferent as sunrise or genetics. "I think the power is always there and always will be." Whether you will or no, it will drive out its prescribed arc through you: and the best you can hope is not to die of it. But alongside all of this inexorability exists also the idea that the human participants are to a certain degree complicit in their co-option, and that fascinates me: "She wants to be flowers and you make her owls and she is at the hunting—" How much do you allow, through anger or ignorance or despair, the myth to possess you? Will you have her owls or flowers? There are no happy endings, but there may be ways out.

Red Shift and Strandloper are my other two favorites of his, though the Stone Book Quartet is growing on me. And his book of trickster stories, The Guizer, is absolutely worth reading if you can find it.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

I love Owl Service very much. Red Shift is the most obscure of the Tam Lin retellings I know, but dear despite that. (Fire and Hemlock is my favorite TL.) Strandloper taps into a different sort of tradition. One can ILL Stone Book Quartet. :P

There, I've managed not to repeat what sovay said better and at greater length. :)

Moon and Weirdstone--not so much my cup of tea, since they feel deliberately Tolkienesque in a vaguely useless way.

[sovay]

For Tam Lin retellings, I have a very hard time deciding between Fire and Hemlock and The Perilous Gard. I really liked Pamela Dean's version all through college—especially since I did in fact major in Classics—but it hasn't held up quite the same way. Although it did augment my love of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning, so it was not a total waste of brainspace.

I have never read The Moon of Gomrath, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, or Elidor. (I did read Mary Gentle's A Hawk in Silver, though, which is the most Tolkienesque and least characteristic thing she's ever written. Not a swordswoman in sight.) I think I have a very skewed picture of Alan Garner . . .

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Elidor--forgot about that one. It uses the Four Treasures, but we start in Manchester....

Re: Tam Lin, that's really interesting. I read Perilous Gard quite late, so though I'm fond of it I haven't the same weird sense of rightness and familiarity when I reread snippets. Dean's reworking is where I started, just before college. It became the floating experience I never had access to because my two best friends went off to small liberal arts colleges and I went to a large state institution. :)

Would you recommend A Hawk in Silver? I think the only Gentle I've read is Architecture of Desire, which I enjoyed but lacked time to think about; a copy of Ash is somewhere in the to-read stack.

[sovay]

I would recommend A Hawk in Silver, but it's entirely different from her later work: it's about two schoolgirls in a coastal British town who find an antique silver coin and become drawn into a centuries-old war between two factions of Faerie-in-exile. You can see her particular writing style beginning to develop itself, as well as some of the grittiness and her fascination with characters who betray, but otherwise it's very much in the tradition of that specific kind of fantasy. I'd recommend much more Rats and Gargoyles, which is part of the same cycle as The Architecture of Desire and Left to His Own Devices—all of which I believe can be found, along with two earlier short stories about Valentine and Causabon, in the Gollancz omnibus White Crow—as an introduction to her work. Also her recent collection of short fiction, Cartomancy.

Ash is absolutely worth reading.