The first thought that occurs while leafing through the first few pages of Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker is that it is eccentric. The fantasy fiction, without bothering itself with the chore of establishing its setting, jumps straight into the action.
Garner doesn’t tread back in time to unspool the past. In fact, time is what this story is all about. Time is quite useless on its own. It is always matched against the passing of something else.
The novel opens with the titular character, Treacle Walker, a rag-and-bone man, bartering with Joseph Coppock, a young boy–– a jar and a donkey stone in exchange for a pair of unwashed pyjamas and
a lamb’s shoulder blade. The verbal exchanges that follow between the two are hilarious.
The town they are in seems to be empty. The narrative, too, is cloaked in eeriness. But readers won’t be able to acknowledge these seemingly trivial points until at least half the novel has been devoured. To that end, the chapters are diligently small.
The prose immaculately leaps from the lanes of a dialect that’s playful, making one wonder at the ever-expanding nature of a language. The mesmerising lyricism of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand which won the International Booker prize earlier this year comes to mind.
Novels such as these are best relished when read aloud––even if it’s just for oneself. And while one is at it, make a note of all the amusing words, such as tarradiddle and shufti. Treacle Walker opens up a world of possibilities in the realm of the here and now. It blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, and often, these two commingle at the altar of dreams.
Garner takes many strands from mythology in order to make Coppock’s encounters with the unnatural, shape-shifting scenery look like an adventure. He, ultimately, creates a timeless myth where the mystery is present in every nook and cranny, and shows that the ceremony of life is for everybody.
It is possible that Garner visualised Treacle Walker as a theatrical piece. The bizarre conversations that Coppock has with a man named Thin Amren about what he can see (for real) are ready-made materials for an avant-garde play. Somewhere along the plot, as Coppock begins to lose his way, he pours everything out in a long-winded cry to Walker.
The latter is, perhaps, the only friend he can trust and feel secure enough to share his worries with. But can there be a rational cordiality between a wanderer and a child who collects the eggs of birds?
For all the pomp and vitality of the novel, however, the characters seem to be lonely. They occupy conventional spaces in their own imaginations and are excluded from the wider society. The beans are spilt only in the final chapter, where all the doubts and knots hit a dead end––one will even find an echo of the opening sentence in the climactic reverie.
Garner, who has won many awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Carnegie Medal and the Phoenix Award, at 87, has become the oldest author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. For a novel that brims with the sounds and shivers of a malleable moment, this is indeed high praise.
If it takes more than eight decades of learning and listening to the oddments of odd magic to come up with a classic such as this, then all writers should cruise towards octogenarian with aplomb despite the
pain in the knee.
Treacle Walker
By:Alan Garner
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages: 160
Price: Rs 399
(This is second of a six-part series, featuring reviews of books shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize)
‘For all the pomp and vitality of the novel, the characters seem to be lonely and are excluded from the wider society’