Brian Baker
The Hunter and
the Bull: (sky)walking with Alan Garner
This paper will consider two of Alan Garner’s later ‘adult’ novels,
both set in Garner’s signature territory of Alderley Edge in Cheshire: Thursbitch (2003), and Boneland (2012). Garner proposes a form
of ‘sentient landscape’ in both novels, in which the land is deeply implicated
(through and across time) with imagination, ritual, death and loss. Thursbitch has a dual time-frame, in
which two deaths in different periods, the 1750s and the present day, are
connected with the ‘demon of the valley’ of Thursbitch, which takes the form of
a bull, associated with the constellation of Taurus that appears over the hills.
In Boneland, a similar
double-narrative extends more deeply into the mythic: while one of the
narratives follows Colin, grown up from The
Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), now a Professor of Astrophysics
associated with the nearby Jodrell Bank who lives alone and attempts to recover
his lost memory, the other is focalised by an unnamed Neolithic male who, through
ritual and cave-painting, tries to bring forth other beings into the world upon
the loss of his female partner and child. In Thursbitch and Boneland,
the stars and the land are both mythic maps of consciousness and a means by
which to recover what has been lost: memory, subjectivity, loved ones. The
texts are invocations, shamanistic means by which to fold together time(s) and
space(s).
In a public lecture on Thursbitch,
Garner called his researches for the novel a ‘wild hunt’, a figure repeated in
both novels as the pursuit of Taurus by Orion westwards across the winter
Northern Hemisphere sky. This paper (also a wild hunt) will investigate
Garner’s formal experimentation and mythic overlays of sky, land and human
consciousness, and will also suggest a creative reading (and further
superimposition/ transaction upon) my own territory, the Vale of Llangollen,
where the presence of Orion and Taurus in the winter sky is also connected to
Christian and pre-Christian alignments.
Brian Baker is currently a Lecturer in English at Lancaster University, UK. He
has published Masculinities in Fiction
and Film (Continuum, 2006) and Contemporary
Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television, which will be published by
Bloomsbury Academic in January 2015. The Reader’s
Guide to Essential Criticism: Science Fiction was published by Palgrave
Macmillan in November 2014, and he is now working on Fuzzy Revolutions: Science Fiction in the 1960s for Liverpool UP.
