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There's a door beneath the fire, a sword to break
I can't remember how our copy of The Owl Service (1967) incurred the water damage which is by now at least two decades old and causes its covers to look like flats of some sandy lichenous rock. It is sufficiently old and dry that it doesn't cause me any allergic problems, but the appearance is almost absurdly apropos, as if the book itself is in the process of falling back into pieces of the natural world. The pattern of the plates on the outer endpapers is lightly spotted as if with soot.
Having been away from the novel for a couple of years, this time around I found myself really struck by the technological language that I had taken for granted since childhood like the sound of the river rising constantly through time:
'I don't think it can be finished,' said Gwyn. 'I think this valley really is a kind of reservoir. The house, look, smack in the middle, with the mountains all round, shutting it in, guarding the house. I think the power is always there and always will be. It builds up and builds up until it has to be let loose—like filling and emptying a dam. And it works through people. I said to Roger that I thought the plates were batteries and you were the wires . . . The force was in the plates, but it's in us now . . . Red, black and green, is it? I wonder who's the earth.'
A hydroelectric discharge of myth is in the same class of metaphor as a stone tape of ghosts: that analog interface of the supernatural which I think of as coming to prominence slightly later than this novel whose narrative is nonetheless littered with classically hauntological artifacts of the failure to fix the inexorably reenacting story of Blodeuwedd into pigment on paneling and the glaze of a plate which contain her only in the sense of holding the charge, which rather than faithfully recording an action of the past are unnervingly subject to manipulation by it. The pattern disappears off the plates, the painting from the wall. Holiday snaps turn spirit photography when a view through the hole made in the stone by the spear with which Lleu Llaw Gyffes killed Gronw Pebr shows different iterations of its reenactment whether with the flint-leaf of an ancient spearhead or a motorcycle missing its brake blocks. It had not previously occurred to me to read the book as the obvious folk horror, but even the motif is there of the community so much more in the know than its outsiders about the ritual falling into place around them:
'One minute, if you please,' said Mrs Richards. She cut a lump of butter from a block on the windowsill. 'Is it to be the three of them again, Mrs Lewis-Jones?'
'Yes. There's the girl, too. Mister Huw says she's made it owls."
'We must bear it,' said Mrs Richards. 'There's no escaping, is there? Aberystwyth isn't far enough.'
'You've said a true word there, Mrs Richards. I'll have a packet of soap flakes.'
Even withholding the story can't stop it from playing itself out. From the first time I read The Owl Service, the character who most fascinated and disturbed me was Huw Hannerhob, not only because of his ambiguity of motives and meaning, but because he's the one who never got out of the myth. In his generation, as much as he tried to dodge it, he was Lleu who destroyed the man who stole his girl and now he's the fractured Gwydion who loses centuries in his family history and tells stories from the Mabinogion as if he performed them himself. "What do I know? . . . I know more than I know . . . I don't know what I know . . ." He tries so hard to talk the next Lleu into the actions that would turn the spear of the story aside and Blodeuwedd come as owls into flowers and he fails there too, but could he have done anything else? It's not just that the power has passed out of his triad and into the next generation, that just as in his time there's too much human pain and weakness channeled into the readymade pattern: it was Gwydion originally who turned the woman he had formed out of flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet into the owl and there's nothing in the Fourth Branch about him ever turning her back. I wonder as much about Huw after the sudden numinous stop of the book's ending as about the three adolescents who caught the story after him. (And in fairness, while she's not as fitted into the next shock of current through the circuit as her one-time man, I don't think that being owls ever left Nancy.)
I should see the Granada adaptation. It falls in the same category as the rest of the use of my brain. The real problem is that my copy of Red Shift (1973) is still in a box.
Having been away from the novel for a couple of years, this time around I found myself really struck by the technological language that I had taken for granted since childhood like the sound of the river rising constantly through time:
'I don't think it can be finished,' said Gwyn. 'I think this valley really is a kind of reservoir. The house, look, smack in the middle, with the mountains all round, shutting it in, guarding the house. I think the power is always there and always will be. It builds up and builds up until it has to be let loose—like filling and emptying a dam. And it works through people. I said to Roger that I thought the plates were batteries and you were the wires . . . The force was in the plates, but it's in us now . . . Red, black and green, is it? I wonder who's the earth.'
A hydroelectric discharge of myth is in the same class of metaphor as a stone tape of ghosts: that analog interface of the supernatural which I think of as coming to prominence slightly later than this novel whose narrative is nonetheless littered with classically hauntological artifacts of the failure to fix the inexorably reenacting story of Blodeuwedd into pigment on paneling and the glaze of a plate which contain her only in the sense of holding the charge, which rather than faithfully recording an action of the past are unnervingly subject to manipulation by it. The pattern disappears off the plates, the painting from the wall. Holiday snaps turn spirit photography when a view through the hole made in the stone by the spear with which Lleu Llaw Gyffes killed Gronw Pebr shows different iterations of its reenactment whether with the flint-leaf of an ancient spearhead or a motorcycle missing its brake blocks. It had not previously occurred to me to read the book as the obvious folk horror, but even the motif is there of the community so much more in the know than its outsiders about the ritual falling into place around them:
'One minute, if you please,' said Mrs Richards. She cut a lump of butter from a block on the windowsill. 'Is it to be the three of them again, Mrs Lewis-Jones?'
'Yes. There's the girl, too. Mister Huw says she's made it owls."
'We must bear it,' said Mrs Richards. 'There's no escaping, is there? Aberystwyth isn't far enough.'
'You've said a true word there, Mrs Richards. I'll have a packet of soap flakes.'
Even withholding the story can't stop it from playing itself out. From the first time I read The Owl Service, the character who most fascinated and disturbed me was Huw Hannerhob, not only because of his ambiguity of motives and meaning, but because he's the one who never got out of the myth. In his generation, as much as he tried to dodge it, he was Lleu who destroyed the man who stole his girl and now he's the fractured Gwydion who loses centuries in his family history and tells stories from the Mabinogion as if he performed them himself. "What do I know? . . . I know more than I know . . . I don't know what I know . . ." He tries so hard to talk the next Lleu into the actions that would turn the spear of the story aside and Blodeuwedd come as owls into flowers and he fails there too, but could he have done anything else? It's not just that the power has passed out of his triad and into the next generation, that just as in his time there's too much human pain and weakness channeled into the readymade pattern: it was Gwydion originally who turned the woman he had formed out of flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet into the owl and there's nothing in the Fourth Branch about him ever turning her back. I wonder as much about Huw after the sudden numinous stop of the book's ending as about the three adolescents who caught the story after him. (And in fairness, while she's not as fitted into the next shock of current through the circuit as her one-time man, I don't think that being owls ever left Nancy.)
I should see the Granada adaptation. It falls in the same category as the rest of the use of my brain. The real problem is that my copy of Red Shift (1973) is still in a box.
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You would have been much less irresponsible about a valleyful of banked power!
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(My back tweaked carrying the box of groceries out of the Aldi today and I remembered I was once the sort of spry, reasonably well-structured fat person who could go in and out of windows.)
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I shall climb in and out with the dynamite for you.
*hugs*
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Yes, but, if a person can go to Aber, they should go to Aber! XD
(Sorry, not the point.)
So glad you're enjoying your reread. I remember being powerfully impacted by this as a teen, but it's not one I've re-read properly since. I think I only ever read it out of the library. Flowers, not owls. ♥
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I would be very pleased to go to Aber! I have never been anywhere in Wales. My international traveling took a real hit after grad school and now there's this entire ongoing plague. (In which I have nonetheless begun cautiously to experiment with highly masked-and-vaxxed traveling and please wish me luck.)
So glad you're enjoying your reread. I remember being powerfully impacted by this as a teen, but it's not one I've re-read properly since. I think I only ever read it out of the library. Flowers, not owls.
Thank you! It is definitely for me one of the books which shows something new every time I read it, viz. this post. I still need to track down Garner's Thursbitch; it's the only one of his novels I've never read.
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Aww. I was mainly joking because I went to university there, and it is famously about 100 miles away in any direction from anywhere of comparable size and hard to get to. So if you go to uni there, you either get out in the first two weeks or love it and are homesick for it forever after you leave.
You will understand of course that I am extremely biased here, but Wales is the most beautiful place in the world, especially mid-Wales, and I am very sorry it is not likely you can see that for yourself. (Wishing you luck nontheless!)
I am not likely to be able to travel anywhere much more than 10 minutes away again for anything other than necessity myself, either, but I do have the compensation of knowing that I spent three years living here, and it really does look like that.
I never ran across it in a used book store and at this point I should just do the thing where you give the internet money and a book arrives at your door.
There definitely are times when you just need to do that. The universe sometimes won't do the work itself, or at least, not until you did it first just to be ironc.
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Thank you. I do hold out hope of traveling transatlantically again, I just feel my chances would improve if regular steamship lines were still a thing.
I am not likely to be able to travel anywhere much more than 10 minutes away again for anything other than necessity myself, either, but I do have the compensation of knowing that I spent three years living here, and it really does look like that.
Ocean, rocks, if the bookstores are decent (and it's a university town, so they should be excellent) we're set, thank you, paging
Also, *hugs*
There definitely are times when you just need to do that. The universe sometimes won't do the work itself, or at least, not until you did it first just to be ironc.
The second I order myself a copy, the American edition will come out.
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I don't know what the bookshop situation is these days, but, don't worry, you can just go halfway up the hill to the National Library of Wales, which is a copyright library, so it has pretty much everything! (I say pretty much, because I used to order up things and they'd be, "Oh, sorry, that one slipped the net in the 1980s!")
The second I order myself a copy, the American edition will come out.
In my experience, the UK edition will probably be nicer, so it'll be fine! (Well, unless it was a hbk you wanted, of course.) ;-p
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I read it after I read Evangeline Walton's "The Isle of the Mighty," which burned itself into my brain and heart when I was in Grade 10. Technically, there are phrases that burned into me so deep that I've found versions surfacing in my own writing. And the sense of inescapable oncoming, flooding tragedy for everyone, and her love for all of the main characters, regardless of their shortcomings ... gah.
And then to read The Owl Service. They're both still on my bookshelves. Must reread them. I didn't know there was a filmed adaptation.
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I have those fossil traces in my own writing, too, of other texts and authors. I can usually point them out to people.
(I am afraid that as far as I can tell, I backed into the Mabinogion via Lloyd Alexander, then Susan Cooper. I knew the story The Owl Service was retelling by the time I encountered Garner, but I don't remember how I had found it. I didn't read Walton until college. I read The Winter Prince the year it came out.)
And then to read The Owl Service. They're both still on my bookshelves. Must reread them.
I can say nothing against this plan!
I didn't know there was a filmed adaptation.
It's an eight-part television series adapted by Garner himself! I've known about it for decades and I'm not sure it's ever had a North American home release. There was a Region 2 Blu-Ray a couple of years ago which I still feel bad about not pouncing on sight unseen since the company which released it has since folded. I was reluctant despite my curiosity to have anyone else's images of the words in my head, even the author's, but at this point I don't believe it would interfere.
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Whoa! Thank you!
If the series is something that I end up loving, I will be doubly annoyed about missing out on a hard copy, but this one does in fact stream in my country and I will watch it when I can manage that much TV. I appreciate the link no matter when that turns out to be.
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I do recommend it very highly.
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The timing of the ending has never angered me, but I am curious how the adaptation will handle it and also the general feature of Garner's fiction where so much of it is dialogue and so much of what happens literally between the lines is important. I don't know what a dramatization will do with all of those spaces.
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Pleased to meet you!
[rot13] V gnxr vg sebz lbhe pbzzrag gung gur GI irefvba gbhpurf ba gur arkg trarengvba bs gur plpyr?
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Lrf, irel oevrsyl! Vagrerfgvatyl V unq n qrongr jvgu fbzrbar nobhg gur raq bs gur GI fubj naq jr ernq vg va qvnzrgevpnyyl bccbfvgr jnlf fb vg'f nf ravtzngvp nf gur obbx va vgf bja jnl!
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Thank you! I see no reason you ever should.
Lrf, irel oevrsyl! Vagrerfgvatyl V unq n qrongr jvgu fbzrbar nobhg gur raq bs gur GI fubj naq jr ernq vg va qvnzrgevpnyyl bccbfvgr jnlf fb vg'f nf ravtzngvp nf gur obbx va vgf bja jnl!
I look forward to finding out if I have an opinion. What an interesting touch for Garner to have added when he could.
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I am sure it is mythologically hazardous, but I like it, too.
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I love the book. It's strange and spare and dense and really does feel like adolescence and deep time. It was my introduction to Garner as a novelist and I have never attached as strongly to any other by him, although Red Shift would be closest. I hope to be able to get back to you about the TV version at some point!
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How lovely that your copy is like leaf mould, part of the understory of the wood.
Cathy Butler screened the Granada adaptation for me in black and white. I've just found out that it was filmed in colour and broadcast in monochrome, which seems somehow fitting: it was flowers and they made it owls.
I heard Alan Garner speak at Cambridge University in (I think) 1975. He was glittering mad, and said that seeing the people in his head made flesh was excruciating.
Nine
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And you let people change their stories and move within them and not always come out the cruelest versions.
How lovely that your copy is like leaf mould, part of the understory of the wood.
Cathy Butler screened the Granada adaptation for me in black and white. I've just found out that it was filmed in colour and broadcast in monochrome, which seems somehow fitting: it was flowers and they made it owls.
See previous comments:
I heard Alan Garner speak at Cambridge University in (I think) 1975. He was glittering mad, and said that seeing the people in his head made flesh was excruciating.
But then he did it again with the 1978 Play for Today Red Shift! Maybe he didn't feel as haunted by that one.
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I couldn't bear it otherwise.
Huzzah! Now that I've seen Penda's Fen, I want to compare them.
Brief perusal in order to make sure it wasn't region-restricted confirms that the color scheme of the wires is in play in the production design.
I love when film pays attention like that.
But then he did it again with the 1978 Play for Today Red Shift!
I must get hold of that.
Maybe he didn't feel as haunted by that one.
I hope so.
Nine
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It could only be more Garneresque if it were actually stone.
I must get hold of that.
*cough*
(There seems at one time to have been a BFI DVD, but since I cannot find it in their current shop I presume it is out of print.)
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And in fairness, while she's not as fitted into the next shock of current through the circuit as her one-time man, I don't think that being owls ever left Nancy.
Oh dear, that is very true—and I like your thoughts on Huw.
Red Shift is one I've never read—I must get round to it soon.
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Yes! That notion specifically is important to me. I can't remember: have you seen Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944) or have I already made this argument to you? It's one of the films I keep writing about and it thinks of time this way.
Oh dear, that is very true—and I like your thoughts on Huw.
Thank you!
(Mythologically, I understand that Nancy as Gwyn's mother is associated with Arianrhod who cursed Lleu and so their relationship on that level may always have been cast in antagonistic terms, but on the level of a human person who had the power of Blodeuwedd in her during a cycle which went particularly off the rails, Huw said it destroyed all three of them and I can't disagree.)
Red Shift is one I've never read—I must get round to it soon.
It's the other one of his novels I really love. Among its other virtues it's a splintered retelling of "Tam Lin," which Catherine Butler has an excellent article about.
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I have not, and I don't think so! Thank you for the links—I will investigate.
ETA, having read the first of your linked posts: Although I've never seen any of the films discussed (the closest I got was 'oh, Ronald Howard's dad, my fave Sherlock Holmes!'), that was a fascinating read. And, turning over the idea of 'once a thing has happened in a place, it is always on some level happening there, echoing forever in the land', it's appropriate that I've just been re-reading E. W. Hornung's Witching Hill, which funnily enough deals with similar things again. Witching Hill is less... deep? than The Owl Service—it's not an unserious book, but its genre is basically fun adventure fiction rather than disturbing fantasy-horror—but those ideas are definitely there, in a different form that's interesting in its own way in how it mixes ideas of 'modern times' and 'the past'. Hmmm.
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Thank you! Leslie Howard is one of my earliest important actors. I am afraid I have never seen Ronald Howard's Sherlock Holmes; I know him mostly for supporting parts in The Queen of Spades (1949) and The Browning Version (1951) and for writing/editing a couple of books about his father which I am still trying to find. What makes him your favorite in the part?
And, turning over the idea of 'once a thing has happened in a place, it is always on some level happening there, echoing forever in the land', it's appropriate that I've just been re-reading E. W. Hornung's Witching Hill, which funnily enough deals with similar things again. Witching Hill is less... deep? than The Owl Service—it's not an unserious book, but its genre is basically fun adventure fiction rather than disturbing fantasy-horror—but those ideas are definitely there, in a different form that's interesting in its own way in how it mixes ideas of 'modern times' and 'the past'.
I'll have to read it: I am obviously interested in this complex of ideas about time and I don't feel like I've seen this novel come up a lot in them. Thanks for the pointer!
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His Holmes is full of joyful liveliness and a sort of chaotic energy, which is a) something I think later interpretations often forget about the original character and b) utterly delightful to watch.
I'll have to read it: I am obviously interested in this complex of ideas about time and I don't feel like I've seen this novel come up a lot in them.
It is an obscure one (Hornung is seldom remembered for anything other than Raffles), but I like it a lot. I hope you enjoy it :)
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I agree about (a) and it sounds like it should (b)! The series seems to be fuzzily and variously available on YouTube, too. If nothing else, it should help me disambiguate its star's face. Ronald Howard did not look exactly like his father, but the resemblance was close enough to be surprising every time I've seen him. I maintain that his father was weirder-looking, which did not keep him from being beautiful.
It is an obscure one (Hornung is seldom remembered for anything other than Raffles), but I like it a lot. I hope you enjoy it
Thank you!
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(Garner’s draft is in red, in a clear hand with lots of page space)
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That's so cool! Even if you can't wrangle the photos, I'm glad you saw it.
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I cannot argue with her reaction, but I have found that it really, really holds up.