Boneland: Miscellaneous concordances
Scattered notes on connections and callbacks between Boneland and the earlier Alderley books (or other bits of Garnerata):
The Nightmare Susan
It’s shown long before the book’s conclusion that the encounters with Susan are imagined: they have a clearly pathological register, supply Colin with no knowledge he doesn’t already have, and their language and imagery are overwhelmingly composed from his own memories, fears and self-accusations. “Susan” is the form Colin’s torment takes.
The effect is generally horrific. She repeatedly appears or speaks only to re-enact abandonment. The lost child has become a possessive presence that Colin can neither recover nor escape. When she speaks, it’s pure nightmare logic. Her words never alleviate Colin’s uncertainty; they identify and intensify whatever hurts most in the moment. If he fears abandonment, Susan leaves. If he begins to trust Meg, Susan says Meg is dangerous. If he feels guilty, Susan calls him naughty and dirty. If he despairs, she sings about his death. She mocks Colin with Colin’s own voice.
And it’s noticeable that the Susan he seems to hear speaking to him sounds much, much younger than the blandly articulate Susan of the first two books. At its ugliest, Susan’s speech takes on of the kind of “nursery Gothic” register we find in numerous horror movies, where the language of childhood becomes sinister: pet names, childish admonitions, games and “pretty songs” made malignant. “Silly boy. Naughty. Need a smack” is childish intimacy curdled into the vocabulary of Colin’s self-loathing. This vile “Susan” uses similar words to say that Colin is dirty, punishable and dead. We know he takes it in earnest: “Me. I’m no good. Finished. Out. Dead.”
Our brief looks at “Susan” are also nightmare fuel: the distant figure in the adit tunnel initially resembles an adult woman, but becomes smaller as it approaches until “It was now the size of a girl,” and “Her small arms lifted.” Colin flees. The Susan-voice afterward voices rejection: “You say you don’t want me now. You say go away.”
The final encounter reverses this. After Colin’s breakthrough, a small black figure appears in the adit. This time, “As she came nearer, she grew.” Eventually “She was now his size,” although still black and featureless. Colin does not flee. They establish that neither is frightened, approach and clasp hands. Then:
“Who are you?”
“You.”
This is the repaired form of the encounter, but Garner pointedly doesn’t give Colin a repaired Susan who reassures or forgives him. The figure never becomes an imagined adult Susan and never supplies the impossible message Colin has wanted from his missing twin. Instead, Susan is recognized as himself.
Afterward Colin can say, “I’ve found her” — and, more importantly, “I’ve stopped the hurt.” Susan has not been recovered as an external person. The frozen, accusing child through whom Colin has spent years torturing himself has finally been reintegrated. The nightmare ends not because Susan tells him that everything is all right, but because Colin can finally recognize who has been speaking.
Therapy / Inner Time
i. Meg’s Method
Meg is pretty explicitly a fictional descendant of the psychoanalyst Bill Wadsworth, and Colin’s treatment reenacts Garner’s own account (in the essay “Inner Time”) of treatment received when filming The Owl Service. Much of Meg’s treatment of Colin is a fictionalized reuse of the Wadsworth’s “crash zoom” technique: the patient goes to the pain, tells what it says, and repeatedly narrates what emerges. During Garner’s own treatment, Wadsworth says: “Go to the pain … Go to where it hurts most, and say whatever it tells you.”
Wadsworth/Garner: locate painful image → “go to” it → say what it tells you → repeat → image changes → deeper associated image appears → repeat → eventually arrive at the underlying childhood event.
Meg/Colin: crow → black shining eye → black ink → black water → cave → sky → stars → galaxies → revelation; and elsewhere the same procedure drives Colin down through his apparently nonsensical fragments until he retrieves what happened at Alderley after Susan disappeared.
Boneland also reproduces the clinical mise-en-scène of the box of tissues and the therapist’s affect: holding silence, with a kind of compassionate refusal to do the emotional work.
And, of the Wadsworth sessions: “Then we shook hands, and I thanked him and said good-bye. ‘I never say good-bye,’ said Bill.”
Meg: “I don’t say goodbye.”
ii. Theory of Memory
More consequentially, Boneland takes the concept of inner time discussed in that essay and formalizes it in the narrative structure of the novel: traumatic memory, dream, myth and deep past occupy an apparent simultaneity; pathology arises when their coordinates collapse into ordinary waking reality; health does not mean abolishing that other mode of consciousness, but learning to enter it, recognize its truth, and return.
In this framing, the mind “makes no distinction between an actual experience … and a dream” and gives “emotional truth” the status of “historical truth.” Traumatic memory does not remain safely “past.” Emotionally associated events coexist.
Compare Colin trying to classify the witch memory:
“Was it a flashback of something that happened or of a dream?”
“I don’t know.”
Meg’s therapeutic objective isn’t to establish historical provenance. The relevant category isn’t fact-vs-fantasy, but whether the image carries the operative truth of the experience. When Colin finally asks whether the Sleepers are real, she answers:
“Does it make any difference?”
It’s a fictional gloss on what Garner is saying in “Inner Time.”
This touches the culminating formulation of the Watcher narrative: “It is a true Story … It is a true Dream.”
When Colin reaches the childhood encounter with the Sleepers/Cadellin, his deepest retrieval, Meg says:
“You’re down in the collective now. Well down.”
In the context of a Garner book, that’s not casual “let’s have a dash of Jung” seasoning. The progression from personal memory to deep associative structure to myth is a progression he returns to again and again.
In the essay, Garner uses an astronomical analogy: looking at the night sky, we apparently see one simultaneous configuration, although its light actually comes from different epochs and distances. He concludes by calling the artist a cartographer who plots the “maps of inner stars.” Decades later, he makes an astrophysicist whose psychic problem is simultaneity. Structurally, the metaphorical apparatus of “Inner Time” has become Colin’s profession.
Meg reiterates the point: when Colin describes a quasar whose signal began its journey before our galaxy was fully formed, Meg replies “The impossibility of ‘now’. Discuss.”
Colin studies a universe in which looking outward is literally looking backward through different times. Boneland gives the reader a corresponding experience of inner time: Colin’s trauma, dream and damaged memory coexist for him; for us they commingle with the deep time of the Watcher. Distinct histories are made simultaneously present and allowed to cast their shapes across one another.
Character Notes
Various characters seem to function as modern manifestations or recombinations of the functions Colin’s damaged mind has lost access to. Meg occupies the Morrigan/witch position but transforms it: the terrifying devouring witch becomes the woman who forces Colin to confront and integrate the terror. The two Berts both occupy something of the Gowther Mossock position: the trustworthy Cheshire man with a caretaker function.
Bert / Gowther
The two Berts (taxi-Bert, groundskeeper-Bert) are both strikingly Gowther-like in affect: undemonstrative, practical, concerned, unwilling to interrogate.
All three men speak in the same Cheshire vernacular, with certain re-used phrases calling explicit attention to the fact.
All three occupy broadly custodial roles, and that custodianship extends to Colin himself. Gowther takes Colin into his household and care, while himself being deeply rooted in the land; taxi-Bert carries and looks after Colin as he moves through it; groundskeeper-Bert tends a place and holds its keys, but immediately extends the same practical care to Colin when he sees that something is wrong. None demands an explanation: they see what needs doing, and do it.
The Bert-Bert duplication is pointed. Before the workman gives his name, Garner has him whistling the tune already associated with taxi-Bert; only after he has sounded and behaved like the first does he finally say, “Call me Bert.”
The Gowther-Bert fault line also suits Colin’s changed circumstances. As a child he could be incorporated into the Mossocks’ household and community; as an adult he has almost no social world at all. The “care” of the Bertses is consequently intermittent: they appear, gets Colin safely where he needs to go, and depart.
Also, a tempting onomastic rhyme: Garner notes in Gomrath‘s acknowledgements that Gowther was inspired by real-life Joshua Rowbotham Birtles of Over Alderley, put into the book “straight and undiluted.”
Meg / Morrigan
Meg: black hair, black leathers, dark suits.Black, black, black is repeated.
The Morrigan: description more spare, but always includes black robes.
Meg’s constructed as rather elegant, sharply delineated figure: dark silk, black hair, pendant earrings, violet-green eyes. Nothing like the broad, heavy, grotesque Morrigan. But when she pushes Colin, he perceives her to have the “look” of the Morrigan.
It suggests, at least, Meg as an instantiation of a role or archetype. The original Morrigan threatens to consume Colin; Meg makes Colin return to the experience of being threatened with consumption in order to recover what he has repressed. The terrifying witch of childhood has become the adult figure who makes him confront the witch.
Meg’s House
Meg’s house also recalls the Morrigan’s house in The Moon of Gomrath. Both are large, isolated houses approached through rhododendrons, and both have an unstable relation to ordinary reality. In Gomrath, the Morrigan’s house exists by moonlight as an inhabited, intact building, but in daylight is an abandoned ruin; when the moon touches the ruins, they “shimmer” and resolve into the house again.
Meg’s house performs a strikingly similar reversal. Colin first experiences it as inhabited and fully furnished, “at the end of a drive, among rhododendrons.” When he returns later, it is shuttered and apparently long abandoned, with the rhododendrons now “invading the front door.” Yet the interior of the abandoned house corresponds exactly to the house Colin remembers: he knows his way through it, identifies the library before it is opened, and recognizes the furniture and fittings beneath their dustsheets. Caretaker-Bert himself remarks, “You seem to know your way around.”
This can be read psychologically: if Colin has constructed both versions of the house, there is no mystery about how he knows its interior. But Gomrath supplies an older and distinctly Garnerian precedent for something stranger: a witch’s house whose inhabited and abandoned states can somehow occupy the same place. In either case, the echo strengthens the Meg/Morrigan correspondence beyond their appearance and function: Meg inhabits a house that behaves rather like the Morrigan’s.
Other Tidbits
Blue-Silver
One for the Garner bingo card: blue-silver light as the somatic prodrome of an altered state associated with pain, terror, amnesia, and violent action.
The usage in Boneland is a fairly direct reworking of Red Shift. Immediately before or during his berserk/dissociative states, Macey experiences the world as “blue and silver on the edge of vision.” Later, describing what happened, he says: “Blue. Silver. And red.” Asked whether he has experienced it before, he remembers it from childhood, associated with pain; “blue and silver” frightens him because afterward he cannot remember what he has done. Logan eventually learns to trigger the state verbally, simply by repeating “blue and silver / bluesilver.”
Boneland gives Colin a reprise of the whole psychophysical mechanism during the episode with the glass tumbler: “The tumbler flashed. … The diamond glass. Light. Blue silver.” The association immediately proliferates: the chandeliers become “Lightning”; Meg’s earrings, “Blue, silver. Blue silvers. Lightnings.” Colin smashes the tumbler, curls up protecting his head, and “The blaze from the fragments lanced his mind.” Later the same sensory vocabulary erupts again: “Sky gone! Eyes! Old! Old eyes! Strong! Blue light! Silver! No! Gone!”
I don’t recall Garner ever discussing this hang-up directly, but visual auras involving blue and silver lights have long been established in the neurological literature on epilepsy and migraine. The motif may simply be drawn from a clinical phenomenon he encountered and was animated by: it fits well with his larger interest in visionary or pathological rupture. He repeatedly explores the point where memory, altered consciousness and terror become entangled.
Claustrophobia — Weirdstone callback
In Weirdstone‘s Earldelving escape sequence (which is harrowing, but shorter than you probably remember), Colin’s heels jam against the tunnel roof, leaving him unable to move while a rock lip digs painfully into his shins.
In Boneland, he has no conscious memory of this but the event has survived as a somatic residue: he tells the MRI nurse that he sometimes dreams of being enclosed, specifically on his shins. Also: the MRI recreates the condition (Colin entering a narrow tube) under controlled, reassuring circumstances.
Rhododendrons callback
In Weirdstone and Gomrath, rhododendrons are repeatedly associated with obstruction and menace: dense, invasive thickets that swallow paths and places. This is especially pushed at the Morrigan’s house, where the rhododendrons have “suffocated the valley” and seem almost to possess a collective, animal awareness — millions of leaves forming “one green-celled body.”
In Boneland they remain embedded in the Alderley landscape: the woods searched after Susan’s disappearance are rhododendron woods, and Meg’s house features them in both its “living” and abandoned aspects.
And Colin is engaged in clearing them from his property with a vehemence that is plainly driven by repressed memory: “They’re alien. Wrong. Evil. They shouldn’t be allowed.”
Two anonymous walkers — probable Weirdstone callback
The text lingers over this detail for just long enough (and has Meg comment on it) that it feels “pointed-to.”
Weirdstone establishes apparently ordinary twosomes of hikers on the Edge as disguised morthbrood surveillance.
Boneland gives the mundane historical record of Colin’s lightning strike via the two walkers who found him, whose identities are conspicuously withheld.
Just sayin: this reactivates a reader’s distrust of the category “ordinary walkers.”
In Weirdstone, we get the answer: they’re undercover witches and warlocks!!
In Boneland, Garner reproduces the suspicious configuration but withholds the answer forever. It smells like another example of the movement from the epistemology of the children’s books to the epistemology of Boneland: same Alderley, same signals, but no ancient wizard available to give us pat answers.