Boneland: A reminder that Alan Garner owes you nothing

Alan Garner’s hostility to fantasy wish-fulfillment appears early. Weirdstone is still broadly the sort of children’s fantasy structure that was readily available to a young writer in the late 1950s. Two ordinary children discover another order of reality, find themselves with a magical object, meet a wizard and become participants in a struggle vastly larger than themselves. The supernatural is dangerous, but contact with it can still broadly be experienced as an adventure.

Garner’s mid-career reflections on the Alderley books are… intemperate. Weirdstone is “a fairly bad book, but there had to be a start somewhere.” By the time he was writing Moon, Garner had already moved on, completing it under duress. Colin and Susan were “zeroes”; he was “up to my gills with loathing” for them. He writes a private ending in which Colin is simply strangled to death, The End.

The finished book doesn’t go quite that far, but the mood survives. Cadellin increasingly treats the children less as chosen adventurers than as a problem to be managed. Susan discovers that the Old Magic is real, irresistible, and magnificently indifferent to her personal fulfillment. Her reward for attaining visionary ecstasy is to be “left as dross upon the hill,” followed by a quick assurance that her time will come eventually. (And, in fairness, it does.) And tellingly, Moon is the superior of the two books.

Then comes Elidor. Garner called it his anti-Narnian book, and it betrays a certain vicious need to exorcise something. The premise is substantially, “Hey, you kids. Another world needs something done. You’re available. Hurry up.” The children aren’t chosen because the universe has detected their hidden greatness.

And the quest is accomplished. The children have been hunted, frightened, disbelieved and used. The magical creature dies horribly in a Manchester demolition site. Elidor is saved, they’re offered a glimpse of the wonder, and “it’s not enough.” The door closes. Revelation isn’t therapy.

Still, let’s not assume Garner has lost interest in enchantment. He merely repudiates the things that adults tend to imagine that children require from fantasy: lovable protagonists, comprehensible lore, benevolent mentors, a desirable magical kingdom, moral reassurance, reward, consolation.

But he leaves behind things children actually enjoy: danger, secrecy, ruins, unexplained rules, forbidden places, frightening images, fucking around in condemned buildings, and the conviction that something enormous is happening which no adults will properly explain to you. The appeal of Elidor isn’t the prospect of living in Elidor (or of spending more time with Roland and his irritating siblings). It’s that the letterbox is still there.

The subsequent books completely dispense with fantasy machinery while becoming more committed to myth, charged landscape, ritual and recurrence.

And then, fifty years after The Moon of Gomrath, he finally gives everybody the third Alderley book. What happened to Colin and Susan? Yeah, Susan’s gone. Colin is a profoundly damaged middle-aged astrophysicist who can’t spend a night away from Alderley Edge because he believes his presence is ritually necessary. He has arranged an international scientific career around this restriction. He conducts private observances around the landscape, having repurposed his full academic robes as the ceremonial regalia of his private mythology. He has spent much of his professional life trying to find his missing sister, amassing an alarming number of advanced degrees across the sciences, humanities and theology in search of answers. At present, this involves looking for her with a radio telescope.

This is tragic, and also very funny. Boneland takes the nostalgic request for another Alderley adventure with deadly literalness. Not: what delightful adventure came next? But: What if those children’s books really happened? What would it actually be like to grow up after them?

Colin has organized unbearable experience into a story in which everything possesses cosmic significance: his compulsion to remain on the Edge keeps the landscape “in balance.” Susan isn’t simply gone; there must be some branch of human knowledge capable of finding her. And the childhood catastrophe he eventually remembers wasn’t merely traumatic: Cadellin personally appointed him to guard the Edge “for all Time.”

Taken at its word, this is magnificent. An emotionally distraught eight-year-old attempts to wake an enchanted army because he wants it to find his sister. The punishment for annoying a wizard at eight is, he thinks, an immortal career in Cheshire landscape management.

But Boneland never asks us to conclude that the wizard wasn’t real. We can’t, in fact, ever conclude that: large swathes of the original narratives are told from outside Colin’s interior, even his physical presence. Colin can be wrong about what his childhood experience means without the experience being unreal. Susan can genuinely belong to the Old Magic without being a radio source in the Pleiades. Alderley Edge can genuinely participate in Story without requiring Colin to remain within driving distance every night.

Magic is real; Colin is deranged.

And eventually he manages to let go. The conclusion of the missing Alderley adventure is Colin finally ceasing to live inside the old one. But unlike Elidor, Boneland doesn’t simply slam the door. Garner can keep the magic while refusing the wish. That seems to be the constant: his objection was never really to enchantment. It was to the assumption that enchantment exists for our benefit.