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Notes toward a Survey of Thursbitch by Alan Garner |
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Introduction I've read Thursbitch twice now, but Alan Garner's latest novel is so sly and subtle and full that I can't pretend to have gotten my mind around most of it yet. It is, as Garner has said, a Moebius strip. And so, rather than a proper review, I offer these notes.
Time Time matters to Garner and has from his earliest books. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963) weave the archetypal characters of folktale and legend -- elves, dwarves and wizards -- into the modern English countryside along with sports cars and the ill effects of the Industrial Revolution. In Elidor (1965) a parallel and apparently earlier world invades the suburbs of Manchester, injecting "magic" into a milieu of commuter trains and poor television reception. The Owl Service (1967), the most notable book of his early career and his first masterwork, posits the re-enactment of an ancient legend among two almost maddeningly contemporary and mundane families. By Red Shift (1973), however, time has almost become a character: here three separate times in England's history twine themselves through and around each other, and the inhabitants of second century Britain speak and think in a fashion as thoroughly modern as their twentieth century counterparts. The Stone Book Quartet (1976-78), in counterpoint to the narrative fury of Red Shift, turns an apparently bucolic face to the reader: four stories, each elaborating one pivotal day in the progress of four generations of one English family and demonstrating without commentary how past and present explicate one another and make each other whole. Eighteen years passed before Strandloper (1996) appeared -- a tale in which the aboriginal Dreamtime comes to live in an exiled English "convict" of the early nineteenth century, a man so circumscribed in his exposure to the wide world that we all imagine we live in that he attempts to walk home to England after escaping from the Australian penal colony. And now we have Thursbitch. Garner's time is, it seems, the eternal Now of the theologians. Or, better perhaps, the Moebius strip of the physicists, fluid, pliable, beyond beginning or end.
The Unhorrifying Past In stories as divergently similar as Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home, the survival into the present of ancient fertility or earth-cult customs is always a sort of horror: a burst of darkness into an otherwise incandescent and modern world. Ancient evil is a staple of horror fiction. But in Thursbitch (and to a lesser extent in Strandloper as well) the ancient ways are good ways: and they are ways -- trails, paths, directions taken -- as well as manners of keeping the stars in their courses. As he is dying, Jack Turner, Garner's prophet -- if you will -- of Thursbitch valley, delivers a speech to his dog that "explains" more clearly than a dozen sociologies why so-called traditional and ancient peoples tend so strongly to both astrology and reincarnation. Jack's speech becomes almost a liturgy in itself, a holy recounting of what everyone in his world perceives to be true. Likewise the advent of evangelical Christianity into Jack's eighteenth century world -- a world one would have presumed long since evangelized, except that there, in the valley of Thursbitch, the vaccine didn't take -- comes not as a peace-bringer and a bearer of light (yes, that phrase translates into Lucifer), but as an eruption, an interruption, a vivification of Horror (in the form of Hell and the God who consigns his children to Hell). Bull, on the other hand, and his standing stones and the bees who make the honey with which the people anoint the stones are order, healthy and safety. Strength. Eternity, not in Hell, but in the cycle of life.
Names Jack Turner is a jagger: he goes on jags across England, returning to the valley of Thursbitch with news and goods. As a turner, he makes sure that heavenly bodies remain in or are restored to their orbits. He makes the full revolution himself as well: from the natural religion of Bull and earth, to Christianity, and back again to Bull. He turns from servant and priest of Bull into incarnation of Bull before returning to his earlier status. Jack is also and always Everyman: nursery rhyme Jack, Jack Tar, John Doe, Jack-of-all-trades, Jack the giant killer. The priest or oracle loses his identity in identifying with the deity he serves; and Everyman loses his identity by being every identity: not the particular, but the general.
Disease Garner links his two time periods and the two couples who center them to two emblematic diseases: the Great Mortality of the eighteenth century, apparently plague, and Sally's degenerative condition which afflicts both mind and body. In each case the disease is a marker of its age: the frighteningly unmedical eighteenth century in which disease comes from without, attacks and conquers; and the deliberately "scientific" present, in which everything is presumed explicable and everything can be conquered except the human body turning on itself, itself deforming and turning against itself. But in each case the valley of Thursbitch intervenes -- the valley itself, the heavenly bodies which wheel about it, the quiet which inhabits it cannot halt either disease but can offer the sufferers a home in which to belong and accept whatever happens, as though "All shall be well" as long as Bull watch over it.
Wholeness Thursbitch is, at one level, a book about being whole, or becoming whole, or losing wholeness -- which is of course health. The valley of Thursbitch is ringed about, protected, held together, kept whole by standing stones which are themselves named deities of a sort. If the outer world into which he jags infects and dismantles Jack's wholeness, Thursbitch re-establishes it. If the relentless degeneration of Sally's disease renders her slowly incapable of remembering what she said three minutes earlier, in the valley of Thursbitch her own past as a geologist -- her ingrained knowledge planted so deeply that it survives the disease's depradations -- ties itself to her new discovery of the geology of the valley and bestows upon her the only new information she is able to hold onto. In the valley she not only sees again for herself but she is also cognizant of being seen. Against the faith that Ian's Jesuitism represents but does not deliver, Sally's science argues that the valley is sentient and that no geologist would dispute that. Ian's modern Christianity is more nearly whole, more nearly alive than the horrifying visions of Hell offered by Jack's evangelical period, but neither intellectual nor emotional Christianity has, in Thursbitch, the depth, the living roundedness of the worship of the Bull or the enormous vista of geologic time. Change is a part of the valley, as geologic strata make clear, but change as an organic process. Drastic or sudden change -- change on a human scale -- is negative: the eighteenth century "land man" who wants to reorganize the valley, build walls, and so forth; Christianity which wants to obliterate or supplant ancient traditions; twenty-first century hikers who come to Thursbitch to "do" the trails. Sally's advent is an escape: from the doom which her own body and medical science represent, from the fatuousness of the hikers who are so eager to be done that they see nothing while they walk, from Ian's commitment to a morality that would dictate that one die in the most prolonged and horrifying way that modern medicine can arrange. For Jack, however, Thursbitch is always a return to what he already knew -- what Sally and Ian have to find.
The Trail When Jack's father and brother, Richard and Edward Turner, along with other men of Thursbitch valley, find Jack's frozen body in the snow, at the very beginning of the novel, this initially baffling (but later to be illuminated) incident occurs.
None of the men of Jack's time could ever learn why that footprint was there, but the reader can. And should.
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1996 © 2004 |
Jack's reflection, in the present, is Ian, a Jesuit priest. Ian is, of course, merely a linguistic variant of John: he too is Jack. But whereas Jack's religion embodies the natural cycles of the earth and commits its people to a place among the beasts and crops they tend and consume, Ian's Catholicism is intellectual, sharply critical, and well-defined: an imposition upon the natural order. Even so, as Jack both finds and loses his heart (I use this not simply as a romantic figure of speech -- Jack finds and loses his inmost self) in his relationship and marriage to Nan Sarah, so is Ian opened by his care of and love for Dr. Sally Malley, dying of an unspecified degenerative disease. Sally only feels alive and progressive -- literally moving forward on springed hiking poles -- when Ian brings her on jaunts to Thursbitch in which the two of them both follow in the steps of Jack and Nan Sarah geographically and also glancingly intersect with their predecessors' world, a wrinkle in time, as it were. Sally hears the bells jingling on the gear of Jack's pack horses, while Ian on another occasion sees Bull, or a bull, where no bull should be. Sally Malley is, to be sure, another perfect nursery rhyme name, and she and Ian have to cross crooked stiles more than once.