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A review by misslezlee
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley Edge by Alan Garner
5.0
The perfect book for a late December sick bed. I got the flu for Christmas this year.
The copy I read is old and falling apart, its pages brittle and yellowing. It was purchased, according to the inscription on the inside cover, at Southend Market in July 1975 by the young man whom I would later meet, marry and eventually divorce. Lord knows why I still have his book.
I didn’t read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a child, but I’m pretty sure I read it aloud to at least one class of nine and ten year old children in the 1970s. I’m pretty sure I must have terrified them because it’s a really terrifying story, vividly and expertly told.
Tolkein’s The Hobbit had been published a few years previously and while there are echoes of that magnificent tale, they are merely echoes of classic folk story memes, referenced in Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. Weirdstone is based on a myth the author was very familiar with, since the setting is his home, Alderley Edge, in Cheshire. And that’s the difference between Tolkein and Garner - the latter sets his tale in a real place, includes maps even, and the protagonists are human children, aided and abetted by dwarfs and a wizard.
Wikipedia has this to say: Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, remarked that:
"Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful... Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street-names. But that's the way with us: our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires. I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration."[38]
Another British fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman, claimed that "Garner's fiction is something special" in that it was "smart and challenging, based in the here and the now, in which real English places emerged from the shadows of folklore, and in which people found themselves walking, living and battling their way through the dreams and patterns of myth.”
So, in the waning days of the year, I read a dark, terrifying, yet gripping fantasy tale and enjoyed every minute of it.
The copy I read is old and falling apart, its pages brittle and yellowing. It was purchased, according to the inscription on the inside cover, at Southend Market in July 1975 by the young man whom I would later meet, marry and eventually divorce. Lord knows why I still have his book.
I didn’t read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a child, but I’m pretty sure I read it aloud to at least one class of nine and ten year old children in the 1970s. I’m pretty sure I must have terrified them because it’s a really terrifying story, vividly and expertly told.
Tolkein’s The Hobbit had been published a few years previously and while there are echoes of that magnificent tale, they are merely echoes of classic folk story memes, referenced in Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. Weirdstone is based on a myth the author was very familiar with, since the setting is his home, Alderley Edge, in Cheshire. And that’s the difference between Tolkein and Garner - the latter sets his tale in a real place, includes maps even, and the protagonists are human children, aided and abetted by dwarfs and a wizard.
Wikipedia has this to say: Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, remarked that:
"Garner is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien, because deeper and more truthful... Any country except Britain would have long ago recognised his importance, and celebrated it with postage stamps and statues and street-names. But that's the way with us: our greatest prophets go unnoticed by the politicians and the owners of media empires. I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration."[38]
Another British fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman, claimed that "Garner's fiction is something special" in that it was "smart and challenging, based in the here and the now, in which real English places emerged from the shadows of folklore, and in which people found themselves walking, living and battling their way through the dreams and patterns of myth.”
So, in the waning days of the year, I read a dark, terrifying, yet gripping fantasy tale and enjoyed every minute of it.