Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Publisher - 4th Estate

Published – Out Now

Price – £8.99 paperback £3.99 Kindle eBook

An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. Living alone in an old house, he reads comics, collects birds’ eggs and plays with his marbles. When, one day, a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears, exchanging an empty jar of a cure-all medicine and a donkey stone for a pair of Joseph's pyjamas and a lamb's shoulder blade, a mysterious friendship develops between them.

A fusion of myth, magic and the stories we make for ourselves, Treacle Walker is an extraordinary novel from one of our greatest living writers.

Genre often requires a shared language. I say PI you picture a man in a raincoat solving crimes; I say warp-drive you picture a big spaceship and if I say wizard a bearded man who performs magic. The building blocks of story and their complex elements have evolved and often play a shorthand in author choices to help a reader work out what story you’re telling. A reminder that reading is a wonderful yet curious melding of a writer’s words with a reader’s imagination and own experiences. How far can you push it? How much shorthand can a story use so that a reader can have an amazingly dense waltz through fantasy and history or will it become too opaque to most readers? When I read Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, I found a very strange reading experience that I suspect will vary for every fantasy reader who tries it.

The plot is straightforward (in theory). Joe Coppock is at home navigating having an eyepatch to address his lazy eye when a rag and bone man is calling outside his home. In return for a swap of rag and bone this man who calls himself Treacle Walker offers Joe a paste that when it goes on his eye gives him sight of things that are not there. Joe is on a quest to meet a cuckoo; his eye test results spell strange worlds; he sees a man who claims he sleeps in a bog and Treacle Water continues to appear even when Joe’s comic book starts coming to life.

Now lets be clear upfront Treacle Walker is not a children’s book just because Joe is a child. Its more a new folk tale using a child as a character but and here is the strange bit of my reading experience it’s more a whistle stop collection of strange scenes all marginally collected. Very little is getting explained and I would think quite a few children will get very puzzled by Joe. We are not told when the story is set but there are a few clues that this is likely very early to mid-20th century, but nothing is confirmed. The language used is very very northern colloquial (and I understand linked to native Cheshire where Garner came from). Strange slang terms are used with little explanation so a very young reader is likely going to be asking a lot of questions which many adults will not know the answer to what is a ‘lomperhomock’ or a donkey stone? Why is Joe on his own and why does time skip so much without explanation?

But….what impresses me is Garner is very much relying on an audience who knows this period and more importantly the folklore to recognise the depths going on here. You should recognise the power of second sight being talked about; that a character is actually a ghost of one the famous Bogmen occasionally discovered in ancient bogland; that a Cuckoo is a bird and can on occasion be symbol of evil or chaos; that magic is a trade and Names are always important. In the story (and that cover) we can see how a few curved lines carved in a rock make up the ancient symbol for a horse that everyone recognises as its that distilled perfect amount of imagery for us to tell what it is. With Treacle Walker there are the carved bones of story to make the image of a fantasy story – but who will recognise them all?

For those readers familiar with all of these signs and hints then the story gets a lot more depth and a lot to untangle and I can see lots of little bits of myth and folklore throughout. There is also a meditation on life and death. As this whistle stop story ends we get a look at how roles change; people move on and it cannot be ignored that Garner a writer of many fantasy tales is now in his 80s and perhaps is looking both back and forward in this tale – the final chapter I shall leave you to read but is quite powerful I just wish we had had a bit more throughout the story than just strange event following strange event.

Overall though I feel its not 100% successful as becoming a lynchpin tale of myth. I’m 45 – I’m just old enough to recognise the time period through family, culture and all the media that I saw growing up that explained it. Older readers I think will definitely get these influences; younger readers I suspect will if they’re very familiar with the folklore aspects being used; but those just coming in a wet library for a good book like a young child I used to remember being I think would struggle and this feels less a future timeless classic than more a capstone on Garner’s work or even possibly a curio that people will read and move on from than return to. For me while it’s a smart puzzle box of a story and a testament to Garner’s writing skills its is not an accessible piece of storytelling and for that reason doesn’t make this a compelling read just more an interesting one to explore.