Donoghue, Emma (28 January 2011). "Book Of A Lifetime: Red Shift, By Alan Garner". The Independent. Alderley Edge, Macclesfield, Mobberly, Lindow and Wilmslow are all real places in Cheshire. Most of the places mentioned in the book along the Edge; The Wizard's Well, Goldenstone, the Beacon and so on are also real. Although Garner is describing the Alderley Edge of fifty years ago, when it really was an isolated farming village in Cheshire a long way away from the nearest city, a long time before it became popular with professional footballers and other people with lots of money and no taste. South Manchester has also encroached vastly in the fifty years since this book was written. The Stone Book (1976), first in the Stone Book series, [51] won the 1996 Phoenix Award as the best English-language children's book that did not win a major award when it was originally published twenty years earlier. [52] The Elves have come upon hard times and are gathering their strength in Fundindelve, but an ancient evil, The Brollachan has been accidentally released and rumours abound of the return of the Morrigan. When walking through the woods the children glimpse a dark shadow moving inside the old quarry and as they hurry away, they are accosted by Atlendor, King of the Elves and then meet the dwarf Uthecar Hornskin and Albanac, the last of the Children of Danu.

Academic specialist in children's literature Maria Nikolajeva characterised Red Shift as "a difficult book" for an unprepared reader, identifying its main themes as those of "loneliness and failure to communicate". [25] Ultimately, she thought that repeated re-readings of the novel bring about the realisation that "it is a perfectly realistic story with much more depth and psychologically more credible than the most so-called "realistic" juvenile novels." [26] The Stone Book series and folkloric collections: 1974–94 [ edit ] Gratuitous Latin: the dark spells fired and chanted by the Morrigan are in Latin. Word of God is that these are partial extracts from a real mediaeval grimoire (see the author's appendix to the book). And yet, and yet … "something's going on, and the shape it's taking is interesting in that it's complete at whatever stage I finish it. In other words, provided I get a few paragraphs down and then I just drop dead, it's still complete. It's intriguing me. It's making me think here we go again, perhaps, but in a quite different way," says Garner. "I cannot conceive of not writing. Because everything is so interesting. I've got lots of other things I could pretend to retire into, such as doing more on the academic side, doing more archaeology, doing more historical research, but there are other people who can do that. And I am actually quite haunted by this idea of having to do what only the individual can do." 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. [21]Whew. I'm out of breath just writing it all down. The book would have to have been twice as long to have any hope of pulling all of this together in a coherent form, and even then I'm not sure it would have been possible. It's not a bad book, just not nearly the book it could have been with a little discipline applied to it. In the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published by HarperCollins in 2010, several notable British fantasy novelists praised Garner and his work. Susan Cooper related that "The power and range of Alan Garner's astounding talent has grown with every book he's written", whilst David Almond called him one of Britain's "greatest writers" whose works "really matter". [20] Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, went further when he remarked that: In a 1989 interview, Garner noted that although writing The Stone Book Quartet had been "exhausting", it had been "the most rewarding of everything" he'd done to date. [3] Philip described the quartet as "a complete command of the material he had been working and reworking since the start of his career". [24] Philip, Neil (1981). A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner. London: Collins. ISBN 978-0-00-195043-6.

Philip offered the opinion that the "essence of his work" was "the struggle to render the complex in simple, bare terms; to couch the abstract in the concrete and communicate it directly to the reader". [27] He added that Garner's work is "intensely autobiographical, in both obvious and subtle ways". [27] Highlighting Garner's use of mythological and folkloric sources, Philip stated that his work explores "the disjointed and troubled psychological and emotional landscape of the twentieth century through the symbolism of myth and folklore." [35] He also expressed the opinion that "Time is Garner's most consistent theme". [24] Garner provides a sidelight on his authorial approach by including an appendix of books which inspired him, along with a brief discussion of his approach to mythology. I've been eye-balling this book on my shelf, wondering if I actually want to read it, and since I've been having a hard time reading anything lately, I naturally thought it was the perfect time to try this. At the very least, I thought, it would be really easy to put the book down if I didn't like it, given my current mood. Except that this was so short and nostalgic, I ended up reading it in a single afternoon. Light wendfire on the mound on the Moon of Gomrath, and these tropes may be freed to walk the Earth:In a paper published in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Maria Nikolajeva characterised Garner as "one of the most controversial" authors of modern children's literature. [25] Well, she undid her bracelet and slipped it out of mine, and we walked along the beach, and she said her name was Celemon and we were going to Caer Rigor. I didn’t feel there was any need to ask questions: I accepted everything as it came, like you do in a dream. I re-read this in preparation for Boneland! It was a wonderful re-visiting of a past pleasure. This second book is perhaps the more writerly, edgy (no pun intended) and sophisticated book, but I have to say the first book still stands out for its unbelievably gripping underground scenes and great storytelling. As for Boneland.... have read it now :-) It goes further again from traditional storytelling and more towards edgy and sophisticated... but it's not a kids' book, so must be looked at differently. I'm inspired to read more Garner fiction for adults now. Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.

Shown Their Work: There is a long postscript/appendix to the novel, in which Garner discusses folklore and mythology and explains the roots of many of the characters and situations in the age-old stories. He is keen to show that none of it is made up, even explaining that the Latin spells are taken from a medieval grimoire but are only partially reproduced, for safety's sake. The book has received high praise from numerous other fantasy writers. [26] Young adult fantasy writer Garth Nix indicated its impact on his own writing, saying "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is one of the most important books in children’s fantasy. It has been an enormous inspiration to me and countless other writers, and is as enjoyable and fascinating now as it was when I first read it, wide-eyed and mesmerised at the age of ten." Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. Pitts, Mike; Garner, Alan (2014). "Colouring the Imagination with Facts". British Archaeology. Council for British Archaeology (139): 14–15. The Moon of Gomrath is not only powerful but full of wild, whirling adventure...the reader is drawn right into the midst of it all’. GuardianWakeful are the sons of Ormar! Wakeful Maedoc, Midhir, Mathramil! Ride Einheriar of the Herlathing.’ In the 2011 BBC Radio 4 adaptation Robert Powell played the narrator; he has known Garner since he was a schoolboy at Manchester Grammar School. Struan Rodger, who played the dwarf Durathror, was in a radio production of another Garner story, Elidor, when he was thirteen years old. [29] This adaptation was broadcast again in November 2012. Upon publication it was a critical success, [9] [18] but later Garner had begun to find fault, referring to it in a 1968 interview as "a fairly bad book" and in 1970 as "one of the worst books published in the last twenty years... technically... inept". [2] Literary critics [ edit ] Garner pays particular attention to language, and strives to render the cadence of the Cheshire tongue in modern English. This he explains by the sense of anger he felt on reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the footnotes would not have been needed by his father.

A. I don't plan. Images appear, unbidden, which suggest areas of research. The research develops its own pattern, and when there's no more research to be done I "soak and wait", as Arthur Koestler expressed it. Then, subjectively, the story starts of its own accord, and I write as it unfolds. But it's probably complete in my unconscious, as a result of the soaking and the waiting, before I can be aware of what's happening. This could explain why I get the last sentence or paragraph of the book before I know what the story is. The history of creativity is littered with examples of the artist, or scientist, or mathematician "seeing" the answer and then having to spend years in discovering the question.

In this book, the goblin role is taken by bodachs, creatures from the far north (Scotland) who are likened to humanoid lizards. Bodachs organise as warbands, wear minimal armour, and fight with spears. They are supported by palugs, supersized wildcats.