[HPFGU-OTChatter] Alan Garner

[Neil Ward]

Michelle said, about Alan Garner's "The Owl Service"

<<I think you'll find that the book was written quite a long time ago. I
read it when I was about fourteen for English.  I have always loved reading
but tended to baulk at the ( in my opinion ) very boring choices of set book
at school. Until this. Oh, and A Traveller in Time !>>

It was written in 1967, which doesn't seem *that* long ago (okay 34
years...but I was born in 1961 and I never spoke like that).   Still, I like
books that leave words unsaid, scenes unplayed and questions hanging,
especially when there is a sinister undertone to them.  It's like the
difference between viewing a literal painting and something very abstract
from which everyone can take away something different.  "Fire and Hemlock"
is a bit like that as well, which is, for me, a major difference between DWJ
and JKR: JKR creates mysteries and twists, but she is not so inclined (if at
all) to abstract moments as DWJ.

<<Anyway, back to The Owl Service. There was a TV dramatisation in the
seventies that was repeated on Sunday mornings many years ago. Not much
good though.>>

It was my vague memory of the TV series that made me seek out the book; it
really scared me as a child.  Mind you, I used to think "The Tomorrow
People" (an old British TV sci fi series aimed at kids) was fantastic, but
recent repeats of that have exposed it as laughable and camp as a row of
tents (so now, of course, I enjoy it on a different level).

> Never read any of his other stuff strangely enough......

The other Garner book that sticks in my mind is "The Weirdstone of
Brisingamen," which we read at primary school.  I can't remember the
remotest thing about it, apart from a sense that it fascinated me.  I'll
have to rediscover that too.

Neil
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