‘Feel Free’ by Alan Garner

I came across this story in Garner’s recent collection of essays, Powsels and Thrums. Garner says it is his only short story, and unlike his novels it is not a magnificent piece of writing: the pace is quite badly off, and the sting in the tale relies on being able to recognise a thumbprint without any specialist equipment; but it carries the same preoccupations with ancient histories and lives and how they can cross over into the present as his other work. I had read only a couple of pages when I realised that I had read it before, just once, probably more than 45 years ago, and that I remembered the ending vividly. And it is still as clever as I remembered it, despite the scientific nonsense.

First published in Powsels and Thrums, 4th Estate, 2024

‘Introduction’ by Alan Garner

This is an intro written nearly forty years later for a reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift. It’s also a story, in a personal vein, in which Garner investigates the process of creativity, describing how ideas, memories, and events pile up then tug at your sleeve. He’s explaining how he came to write the book, and it involves a meeting with a neighbour: “A descendant of an old Mow Cop family told me a story she’d heard from her grandmother, who could neither read nor write.” But she had retained the oral tradition that some Spanish slaves, being marched north to build a wall, escaped and established a dark-haired community in Cheshire. Garner is “startled” to realise that this old, local folk tale is a version of the story of the Legion of the 9th, lost to Roman history in 120 AD.

He describes this meeting as an illustration of how he works, gathering scraps of stories, repeating and reworking them. And though he lights on the final line very early on in the process, he then has to “leave it and let the rest of the story write me.” Garner is a very distinctive writer. I wouldn’t say I even like his stories, not most of them, (though his retelling of the Russian ‘Bash Tchelik’ is fabulous) but they are completely haunting; they don’t let you go.

First published in the NYRB reissue of Garner’s own 1973 novel Red Shift, 2011

‘The Stone Book’ by Alan Garner

I got into Garner as an adult, when I was thinking more and more about English vocabulary, and how our decisions to use Latinate or Germanic words in our writing profoundly alters its effect. Garner’s understanding, and control, of language, is astounding, and The Stone Book Quartet is a masterclass in how to draw the reader’s emotions straight from the gut with even a simple tale. Alongside almost pure Germanic (or Anglo-Saxon) vocabulary, Garner also freckles these stories with local dialect, including words now entirely lost to most of us. This does not hinder understanding, but enhances it. At the beginning of ‘The Stone Book’, we watch Mary take her father’s lunch to him at work, which means climbing the scaffolding right to the top of the new church spire. ‘“You’re not frit?”’ he asks her. She is not, and so with one heft he has her up sitting on the golden weathercock at the spire’s pinnacle, which he then spins, round and round, as Mary whoops and gazes out at the green world spread beneath her. If you can read this without gulping, from fear and heart-swell, you are a hard reader indeed.

In The Stone Book Quartet, Flamingo new edition 1999, first published 1979