The Owl Service (1967)
by Alan Garner (William Collins, 1967); audiobook read by Wayne Forester (Naxos, 2008)
Eerie, immersive but ultimately unsatisfying, as if Garner dreamed a novel idea while wintering in Wales, and when he woke up there was nothing to it, but he went ahead anyway. An unfocussed tangle of character, class, mystery and myth, laughably unresolved.
Treacle Walker
by Alan Garner (HarperCollins, 2021)
audiobook read by Robert Powell (Fourth Estate, 2021)
A slim, much-hyped novel, marketed as adult fantasy and shortlisted for the Booker Prize but actually an untethered middle-grade story where Garner’s personified childhood memories have a fever dream and repeatedly call a rag-and-bone man ‘daft’ (Garner’s pot calling Garner’s kettle black).
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
by Alan Garner (William Collins, 1960)
audiobook read by Philip Madoc (Naxos, 2007)
A dour quest fantasy for children, lent solemnity (if not consequence) by its very real sense of landscape—rural Cheshire—and in the audiobook by Philip Madoc’s Welsh inflections and portentous, almost reverent reading. Though trials are faced, nothing much actually happens.