The Voice That Thunders

By -
The Voice That Thunders, by Alan Garner

Remember last month, when I posted about Four British Fantasists and there was quite a bit about Alan Garner, but I didn't really love Boneland?  Well, the book also quoted a collection of Garner essays, and I ILL'ed it for fun.  I really only expected to skim through it, but to my surprise...

I enjoyed this book of essays so much!  It turns out I like Garner's essays better than his novels, maybe.  They are, of course, still wildly obsessive about his corner of Cheshire, but he's so much more descriptive that it winds up being a lot of fun; it invites the reader in instead of closing out.

These are actually mostly speeches given at various meetings, with the odd essay thrown in.  Garner produces this nice mixture of discussion about his family history; Cheshire language, history, and folklore; archaeology; and his writing.  And also his struggles with his mental health; what he thought was depression turned out to be bipolar disorder, and he has an interesting talk about that.

As with any collection like this by one author, it hits certain themes over and over, but actually it's not too bad.  There's a nice variety here and a lot of highly entertaining stories.  My favorite was the one about how, as a teen, he was reading some old articles about local archaeology* and saw a drawing of a battered wooden shovel, which he knew he'd seen before -- but of course he couldn't remember where.  A few days later, the lightbulb went on in his head; he'd seen it as a little boy in the classroom, hanging on the wall.  So he ran off to the school, but the shovel was gone, either thrown out, or perhaps stuffed under the stage?  So under the stage he wriggled, and searched, and found the wooden shovel, which he kept with him for years until he found somebody he could convince to look at it and take it seriously as a prehistoric artifact, which indeed carbon dating proved it to be.

So, this was a surprisingly engaging collection that I enjoyed and read completely, instead of skimming it as I'd planned.


_____________________________________
*The mere fact that a teen boy would read Victorian articles about archaeology for fun shows you what kind of a person Garner is...kind of like M. R. James, who, while at Eton, spent most of a term's pocket money on "the four volumes of John Albert Fabricius on the Apocrypha."

Comments

  1. NanJanuary 10, 2020 at 10:49 AM

    I found you via British Isles Friday. I love the sound of this book. I will definitely look into this. Such an interesting person. Ilove that kind of passion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanJanuary 10, 2020 at 12:48 PM

    Thanks, Nan! I appreciate you stopping by. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Joy Weese MollJanuary 15, 2020 at 8:42 AM

    This does sound more intriguing than the novels -- especially if a trip to Cheshire were in my future, either for real or in fantasy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more