Alan garner boneland ebook

A convalescent young boy is visited by a mythical wanderer in a deeply evocative exploration of storytelling and time. Over the following decades he honed his clipped, enigmatic style, and, with the exception of Strandloper, a foray into Indigenous Australian dreamtime, stayed in the environs of his beloved Alderley Edge, digging and deepening. In , half a century after the first two volumes, Boneland was an unexpected conclusion to his Weirdstone trilogy; the source material transfigured into an adult novel about loss, pain, knowledge and madness that reached not only across the chasm of a human lifetime, but back millennia into the stone age.

Garner is now 87; in , a fragmentary memoir, Where Shall We Run to? Few people expected another novel — and yet, like all his books, Treacle Walker feels as inevitable as it does surprising.

Everything he has read and seen. And then, finally, a new force enters his life, a therapist who might be able to unlock what happened to him when he was twelve, what happened to his sister. But Colin will have to remember quickly, to find his sister. And the Watcher will have to find the Woman.

Otherwise the skies will fall, and there will be only winter, wanderers and moon Media Boneland. Save Not today. Format ebook. ISBN He went on to read Classics at Oxford, the first generation of his family to go to university. Soon after leaving, he wrote Wierdstone, and Moon of Gomrath, and captured a whole generation of children. All of which is background to a book that is pages of sheer poetry. More than that, it is dreaming. Those of you who want to know about shamanic dreaming, who haven't learned it from the Boudica books and find the few unthreatening pages on my blog insufficient - this, this, is undiluted dreaming.

There's a difference and it lies in the power. Colin is an adult, and has lost his sister. That part of the book is written in the present day. It touches on the Singularity, and who we might become on its other side.

It touches on time and its linearity or otherwise: remember, this is a man who knows how to expand and contract time, if not obviously how to step outside it - except that he must have learned that in order to write this. It touches on physics, and archaeology and ornithology and folk lore. As several reviewers have noted, it is a Grail Quest, but it gives its own answer, and in any case, it is so, so, so much more than that.

The other half of the book, the part that makes it historical if you need some history in your books, is set in the pre-hominid, pre-ice age half a million years ago in which the Dreamer must dance and sing the dream of a woman into being in order that they can make a child, to dance the beasts into being, to grow the World.

This part is sheer, unadulterated shamanic dreaming. But what's so very special is the way that it links to the present. I leave that for you to find out, but what I am waiting to discover, having read it only once, is whether the dance behind the dream is happening, and the world is changing in the way it treads. Growing up is weird, and can seem quite sad, especially when you remember the things that used to ring and resonate and you can almost remember what the ring and the resonance sounded like but not why it set your nerves on fire and filled your head with light.

I suppose they were simple things in their way. Whether it's age or the world, such things don't quite hold the thrill they used to, or the thrill seems cheapened by camp and over-saturation and the acut Growing up is weird, and can seem quite sad, especially when you remember the things that used to ring and resonate and you can almost remember what the ring and the resonance sounded like but not why it set your nerves on fire and filled your head with light.

Whether it's age or the world, such things don't quite hold the thrill they used to, or the thrill seems cheapened by camp and over-saturation and the acute knowledge of how dreary reality can be. But maybe it's not supposed to be quite like that.

We assume as we grow that we put magic aside and sigh and set our shoulders and stride in the grey light of adulthood, and that fantasy and adventure and romance are now cheap escape routes from the grey. But there is more than one sort of knowledge, isn't there? As we grow, we acquire the tools we need to live.

They were wildly popular, and I know I wore my copies out with rereading. They were an odd mix; old-fashioned, inventive but somewhat conventional children's stories imbued with deeper, darker roots into folklore and landscape. The adventure narrative dominated, though, and they were quite thrilling and exciting reads, for all the slight tingle of unease they left when completed.

The conventional narrative was to shrink and the unease to grow through Garner's subsequent novels: Elidor and The Owl Service, until with Red Shift he broke with linear narrative completely and jumbled time and place and memory and history and myth and wove them into an extraordinary, disorienting form. Garner does not seem to have retained much fondness for Weirdstone or Gomrath, and has a tendency to disparage them.

It was a surprise, therefore, to discover that they were the first two volumes of a trilogy, and he was finally, decades later, going to complete it. Boneland is not an adventure narrative of heroes and magic. Boneland is, if anything, almost an apology for those first two books, addressed to the landscape they exploited, the myths, the people the community and the history they, perhaps, cheapened. It is an author coming to terms with his own beginnings, both as a person as an author.

And it is an offering to the reader, hopefully the reader who grew up with those two books, of a reading experience that is at once harsher, more difficult, less fantastical, much more uneasy and ambiguous, and yet also deeper, richer, broader, invoking the lost memories of deep time and the unfathomable vastness of the entire universe, while reaffirming the debt, the ties and the need for a deep rooting in a a home place.

In Boneland, Colin cannot leave Alderley Edge, cannot spend a night out of its sight or else it will vanish and the world will end. The wisdom of this book is that this is both something true and a metaphor for something else, and though we use different tools to examine the truth and the metaphor, they do not have to be divided.

And so Garner offers his readers, who thrilled as children to magic and adventure, a conception of the adult world that encompasses its dreariness and a form of magic and adventure that cannot be cheapened or made camp. View 1 comment. Sep 29, Raymond Just rated it did not like it. So disappointing. Can't really even begin to say anything other than - if you like the first two books, don't bother reading this one.

Apr 22, Jen rated it liked it. Although this is a short little book, there are so many big ideas and themes that my poor brain is reeling.

The overwhelming feeling, for me, is one of sadness. Sadness and loss. It is going to take me a little while to get my thoughts in order about this book as I think a lot of it may have gone over my head.

My initial reaction is, it deserves a reread,but I cannot face the sadness I currently feel to think of doing that anytime soon. One to ponder over. May 24, Courtney Johnston rated it it was ok. I'm giving this a two star rating because I really don't know if I would recommend it to a friend - especially not a fan of The Weirdstone of Brisingaman, for which this is the putative conclusion in the trilogy. Ursula Le Guin made a valiant attempt at making sense of the book.

In it, we swim between the tortured mental existence of Colin the Valiumally calm protagonist of The W of B, now an adult, ornithologist, star-studier, owner of multiple degrees and giant pain in the ass , who cannot rec I'm giving this a two star rating because I really don't know if I would recommend it to a friend - especially not a fan of The Weirdstone of Brisingaman, for which this is the putative conclusion in the trilogy.

In it, we swim between the tortured mental existence of Colin the Valiumally calm protagonist of The W of B, now an adult, ornithologist, star-studier, owner of multiple degrees and giant pain in the ass , who cannot recall anything before his 13th birthday, and an ancient shaman figure in the Cheshire landscape, tending the Edge and ensuring through his devotions that the world goes on turning. Colin is linked, atavistically, to this figure, though his devotions take place through study and giant telescopes.

Honestly, I found the book to be an often very beautiful arrangement of WTF. The relationship between Colin and Meg either a psychoanalyst or Bitch-Goddess, depending what light you shine on her was gloriously described and I wondered if 'Meg' was a nod to Meg Murray.

Meg's dialogue crackles - commonsensical, utterly accepting of everything, cheer-up-sonny-boy-and-embrace-the-psychosis. Colin the savant's bike ride to work: He reached the main road and without looking right or left or touching the brakes went straight from Artists Lane to Welsh Row.

He coasted past Nut Tree and New House as far as Gatley Green until he came to the bypass and the railway bridge and had to pedal, after two point seven eight four three kilometres of free energy; approximately.

Aug 24, Charlotte Bird rated it it was ok. I was utterly disappointed with this. It's supposed to be a sequel to two of the greatest books of my childhood; books full of magic and adventure and wonder. This was mostly dialogue between an unhinged genius and his psychiatrist. The book centres around a now grown up Colin who remembers the barest fragments of the events of the first two books and looks for his vaguely remembered sister Susan in the stars.

What he mostly seems to do, though, is shout at his psychiatrist for asking question I was utterly disappointed with this. What he mostly seems to do, though, is shout at his psychiatrist for asking questions he doesn't want to answer.

The ending didn't really resolve anything for me; I've seen a lot of reviews saying they 'didn't get it', and possibly there was something I didn't get because this didn't conclude anything for me. I gleaned that Colin tried to wake the Sleepers to find his sister just after the events of the Moon of Gomrath, and that Caladin was pissed about it and cursed him to forget and remember.

There was also a parallel story, a la Red Shift, of a prehistoric shaman, possibly Lower Palaeolithic The whole thing is rambling and doesn't seem to go anywhere. It is mostly Colin trying, or trying not, to remember. Lovers of the first two books will be very disappointed. View all 14 comments. Oct - I read this book in three days flat and am still processing it.

It is everything that I love: place, myth, the interconnectedness of things, growing up. At one point Colin says, "it's not so much deep space that concerns me as deep place" and that seems as good enough a description of this book as any.

May - I just re-read this book and part of me wants to turn back to the start and begin all over again. It is heartbreaking, it's scary, it's funny and rich and truthful. There is s Oct - I read this book in three days flat and am still processing it. There is so much packed into it - so many strands to follow. After reading Simon Armitage's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight with facing original text I found so many more allusions than I had seen the first time round - whole phrases lifted from it pearl to a white pea, the description of hills with hats of mist, "I'm the governor of this gang" or ideas taken from it Colin's scar on his neck that he associates with shame, his green and gold hood, the order of animals the prehistoric man hunts deer then boar then fox , Meg lopping holly.

I can't explain what this book is to me - it feels real - it is a true story. Boneland is essentially the story of the psychoanalysis of Colin, the male co-protagonist of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath -- now an adult of indeterminate middle age, working as a radio astronomer at Jodrell Bank and living in a shack at Alderley Edge. Beyond a few significant flashbacks he has no memory of his childhood adventures, but he retains the trauma of them, especially the disappearance of his twin sister Susan.

Boneland takes place in the same landscape as the earlier Alderley books, but it is no longer the haunt of elves, dwarves and wizards. This book's fantastical elements arise more subtly from Susan's implicit fate only foreshadowed in The Moon of Gomrath , although Colin's reading of the outcome is convincing in the light of what we saw there , and what emerges as the unusual nature of his analyst.

There's also a series of time-hopping reversions to the prehistoric life of a man who turns out to be a Homo erectus shaman also inhabiting Cheshire, seeking a successor to his post of observing and thus maintaining the world, whose relation to the main narrative is definite but elusive.

Though of no great length, Boneland is a dense, slippery text which starts off close to incomprehensible but becomes crystal clear as one learns to inhabit the storytelling. That's the kind of reading experience I always find rewarding, but it's not the light read its predecessors were.

In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as the revisionist texts which reinterpret much-loved works of children's fantasy through a filter of adult understanding and knowledge: Lev Grossman's Magicians sequence and Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan" both dealing with the Narnia books spring most readily to mind, but one could also cite Alan Moore's Lost Girls Alice , Peter Pan , Oz or Geoff Ryman's Was Oz.

In most such stories, adventures are re-examined as traumatic, paradigm-shaking experiences which can neither be revisited nor fully shared, but which will colour the rest of the adventurer's life; child protagonists are followed into their problematic adulthood, with the psychological fallout of their pasts unflinchingly surveyed; and parental figures, even God-analogues, are interrogated and found wanting in benevolence and responsibility.

Boneland is exactly that kind of revisitation of past innocence with a cynical half-century of hindsight -- indeed, the Alderly books are of essentially the same vintage as the Narnia books, with less than half a decade separating Weirdstone from The Last Battle However, Boneland has the unique qualification that it's not a piece of sophisticated fanfic based around the Alderley books, but the authentic work of their original author.

If CS Lewis had survived until and suddenly written an eighth Narnia book at the age of , it would have been comparable. The original books are essential reading for fully understanding Garner's own Problem of Susan although there's one non-revelation which might have been more effective if read in isolation from them.

The primary source of Colin's trauma particularly makes no sense without such background knowledge: suffice it to say that what Colin thinks of as a curse may be, given its source, the nearest thing available to a blessing. The narrative is rife with this kind of unresolved moral inversion, however, and in the end the subjective ambiguity of Colin's childhood experiences grows to dominate the book.

My parents told me at the age of 10ish that they'd be too difficult for me, and I somehow never caught up with them later in life.

I intend to rectify this soon. Sep 22, Brian Clegg rated it liked it. I loved Alan Garner's books as a teenager. And I'd still say that Elidor and The Owl Service are the best Young Adult fantasy books ever written for the younger and older ends of that spectrum respectively.

They were also gripping fantasy adventures, and I loved the setting of Alderly Edge, which I knew quite well. Even at the time, though, I had slight reservations about them.

So it w I loved Alan Garner's books as a teenager. So it was with some interest that I got a copy of Boneland, described as 'the concluding volume in the Weirdstone trilogy. I was already a huge Lord of the Rings fan and I couldn't help feeling that the svarts that the children discover down the copper mines are extremely derivative of the orcs in the Moria scene in LotR. I also felt that Garner flung in every tradition he could think of in a messy mix.

So we had witches, King Arthur and his knights sleeping under the hill to rescue England at its peril, a wizard, the Wild Hunt and even a chunk of Norse mythology. So what of the 'sequel'? First the good news. Boneland is an interesting book in its own right, I love the way Garner weaves in Jodrell Bank visible from his house , and the character Meg is superb.

Colin, one of the twins from the original books, now middle-aged, is less appealing and, I'm sorry, but Garner got his surname wrong. It just sounds wrong. But the claims on the cover are downright fibs.

Not only is there no way this is the concluding book of a trilogy - it has no similarity of feel to the first books - Philip Pullman's comments on the rear are highly misleading. He calls it a resolution of the stories of the first two books, and says those who were young when they came out as he and I both were 'won't be disappointed: this was worth waiting for.

The first books didn't need a resolution: the apparent cliff-hanger that links them and Boneland isn't in the original books. And this is anything but a resolution. Let me try to explain why have problems with this book. One is inconsistency. Having said that the original books were a real mish-mash of legends and traditions, at least there was some consistency of having a medieval English feel with a touch of Scandanavian to them. Apart from the use of crows, there is hardly any overlap with the mystical content of this book, which is all cod-Stone age.

And there is so much of that. I really had to fight myself not to skip over the huge chunks of mystical waffle to get back to Colin and Meg, because it is deliberately obscure and unsatisfying. It didn't help for me, and I know not everyone will agree, that it was cod-Stone age. I have real problems with this particular style. I found the same experience with Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother books.

The thing is, if you use an existing legend - like the Wild Hunt - you are tying into a true tradition, and that gives a story real resonance. But we have no idea what Stone age religion was like or even if they had any: it's all supposition. So people make guesses from cave paintings. But it always feels really false and strained to me. But most of all, as already mentioned, what we find here has nothing to do with the mythos of the Weirdstone books.

So, all in all, a disappointment. Not a bad book, by any means. But it doesn't do what it says on the tin. Review first published on brianclegg. Oct 02, Roz Morris rated it really liked it Shelves: wildness-and-natural-landscape. I was most curious about this novel as I grew up on The Edge.

Alan Garner was required reading in our school and we all knew the little cottage, shaped like a tea caddy, where he grew up. It was a great pleasure to revisit the landscape through an older narrator. The prose is smooth as a stream, the author holds you spellbound through the smallest details, as good writing does. I liked the idea of Colin becoming an extremely clever astronomy geek; even if the story resolution seemed weak and arb I was most curious about this novel as I grew up on The Edge.

I liked the idea of Colin becoming an extremely clever astronomy geek; even if the story resolution seemed weak and arbitrary, I admired the ideas Garner was playing with - time, simultaneous lives crossing in mathematics and the vast distance of the universe.

It was also a great pleasure to read the passages about Jodrell Bank telescope. This is a purely personal detail, but when I was small, that telescope stood on the horizon and I watched it obsessively. Through the character of Colin I was able to indulge in that wonder all over again. However, I do have to take issue with a few of the geographical details. He called to the woman, but she did not answer.

The bone of the Mother was pure, but his hand had not cut true. He had waited too long. Now he was not singer, not dancer, but the meat of pain.

He cramped on the rock of the Tor and wept. Then, because his head was low, he saw nearer, through the water of his eyes, the Hill of Death and Life stretching into the Flatlands. And from the Hill smoke rose in the still air. He climbed towards the Tor of Ghosts from where he could see all the world that was. He pulled himself by the holly to stand and look again. It was the smoke of one fire.