Treacle Walker

The Uffington White Horse, which appears on the cover of ‘Treacle Walker’

J.W.Dunne, born in 1875 at the Curragh army camp in Co.Kildare, was a soldier, aeronautical engineer, fly-fisher, and the author of An Experiment with Time, published in 1927. Based on years of investigation into precognitive dreams and hypnagogic states, the book claimed that our experiences are not confined to the present, and that we are also able to perceive events in the past and future. Our conception of time as linear, Dunne said, is an illusion; proposing that the past, present, and future are combined in higher-dimensional reality, he suggested that we only experience them sequentially because of our limited powers of perception. This theory, which he called ‘serialism’, appears to have had its origin in an exchange that took place with his nurse at the age of nine, when the young boy asked her about the nature of time; many years later, the book that he wrote on the subject became well-known and influential, with some of its ideas echoed in the work of writers such as H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.B.Priestley, Jorge Luis Borges, and Flann O’Brien.

Dunne’s thoughts have parallels in the novels of Alan Garner, if only because time and its implications are themes that run through them. They are perhaps most obvious in Red Shift, which first appeared in 1973. Nominally for young people - the TLS once called it ‘probably the most difficult book ever published on a children's list’- Red Shift entwined and entangled three narratives: one set among Romans in Britain, another in the English civil war, and a third in contemporary Cheshire. Two motifs, a stone axe head and Mow Cop, a village and ruined castle in Cheshire, appear in each period of time and hold the story together. The Owl Service, based on a Welsh myth, also focuses on the permeability of time, but it is more immediately engaging than Red Shift; like Garner’s first and most celebrated book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, it is an easy and enjoyable read, approachable by the younger audience to which it was marketed. The 1969 television series of the same name, although now stylistically dated, remains as moody and atmospheric as the book, and Garner wrote about it at length. The experience appears to have had a powerful and curious effect on him, because he suffered a mental collapse during its production. ‘In the process of film-making, time is fragmented and the autobiographical bits of the story, of which I am never aware at the time of writing, felt as if they had cut loose like a detached retina’, Garner explained. ‘Something from 1949 would be crashing into something from 1952 and then crashing into 1960. I had no temporal awareness and in the middle of a conversation with someone I'd suddenly not know who they were and become concerned that I'd be late for school unless I stopped talking’.

The oddness and emotional volatility of ‘The Owl Service’ were not unusual in British television of the 1970s; series such as ‘The Changes’ (1975) and ‘Children of the Stones (1977), both intended for younger viewers, as well as ‘Robin Redbreast’ (1970) ‘The Wicker Man’ (1973), and ‘Penda’s Fen’ (1974), explored challenging themes in a surprisingly blunt and direct way, without the suave technical sophistication and hints of irony that would be found in their equivalents today. The stories were layered and often dystopian, drawing on hidden histories, unsettling myth and folk legends, and on disturbing aspects of rural life. Most of their themes and ideas had their roots in the darker side of British 1960s counterculture, which had peaked and begun to decline a few years before.

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner’s recent novel, published in his 87th year, has much in common with their tone and ambience; its epigraph, borrowed from the Italian theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, is ‘Time is ignorance’. The tale is set in Cheshire, at Alderley Edge, where Garner was brought up, and not far from where he now lives. Loss and isolation are frequent concerns in his books, and they are prominent in Treacle Walker. Joe Coppock, the leading character, is a child with a strange and lonely life; he is convalescent and wears a patch to correct a lazy eye. Joe’s parents are absent and he appears to live by himself, marking the passing of the days by the regular passage of ‘Noony’, the train, through the valley below. One morning the enigmatic Treacle Walker comes to the house, calling ‘Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags? Pots for rags! Donkey stone!’ Garner actually heard this cry in his own childhood, while recuperating from severe illnesses, but in this story the incident is transformed into something magical: the donkey stone – a scouring block used to clean front steps - as well as an empty medicine pot, become talismanic objects, exchanged for a pair of old pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder bone.

The Middle English word ‘treacle’ was used by herbalists and apothecaries to describe medicine that was employed as an antidote to poisons, snakebite, and other illnesses; similarly, it is surely not coincidental that Garner once moved a 16th century timber-framed building called ‘The Medicine House’ piece by piece and rebuilt it next to his home, some twenty miles away. When Joe accidentally smears the remnants of the ointment from Treacle Walker’s pot on his eye, something remarkable happens; he finds that he can see beyond present time and reality. Wandering out into the marshy wood behind his house, Joe meets Thin Amren, a naked Iron Age man with copper-brown skin and a hood made of leather, who sits up in the bog and talks to him. The boy is told that his lazy eye is the result of ‘the glamourie’, a gift that allows him to see though time and to perceive the eternal in the now. On the penultimate page of the book, Joe questions Treacle Walker about what he most wants. ‘Never has a soul asked that of me’, Treacle Walker replies. Joe presses him for an answer. ’To hear no more the beat of Time’. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years’, says the rag-and-bone man.

For further exploration:

A review of Treacle Walker: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/30/treacle-walker-by-alan-garner-review-a-phenomenal-late-fable

The first episode of ‘The Owl Service’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh_Olq_W_Ww

The first episode of ‘The Changes’: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4amfot

The first episode of ‘Children of the Stones’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSIpkxMkT0M

‘Penda’s Fen’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJmrsRtCYxg

The Owl Service