Treacle Walker

Alan Garner's new novel, Treacle Walker, has been nominated for the short list of the 2022 Booker Prize. I first discovered the work of Alan Garner when I worked as a children's librarian in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I later introduced his children's books to my children and last year my grandson and I read Weirdstone of Brisingamen. I have also read Alan Garner's adult novels.

Treacle Walker is another work of folk tale and fantasy which also explores time and dimensions. Joseph Coppock is a young boy whose vision of the world is flawed due to a lazy eye. His good eye is covered by a patch in an attempt to strengthen the problem  eye. Joe is also recovering from an illness. He wiles away his time reading comics (especially Knockout), collecting birds' eggs and playing with his marbles. Joe' favourite strip in Knockout is Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit whose characters Kit, Whizzy the Wicked Wizard and the Brit Basher make appearances in this novel. One constant in Joe's life is that each day Noony, the train passes his house at noon.

One morning the rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, appears and he and Joe swap a pair of Joe's old pyjamas and a sheep bone for an old jar which once held cure-all ointment and a donkey stone. A friendship develops between Joe and Treacle Walker. When Treacle Walker allows Joe to play his special musical bone it sounds like a cuckoo, a bird that Joe has wanted to find, and the whistle's call is answered by the call of a cuckoo outside. Joe's quest to locate the cuckoo leads him to pool of water where he meets Thin Amren, a bog creature.

Throughout the novel Joe experiences the intertwining of real and magical encounters, at times through the illusion of a mirror world.

Treacle Walker is a short novel - 150 pages - and readers of other Alan Garner books will recognise illusions to events and objects in some of his other works and also to events in the author's early life. This adds another dimension to the novel but Treacle Walker can lead readers into the fantasy world of Alan Garner without this previous knowledge. This is a book to read slowly and enjoy.

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner a phenomenal late fable - The Guardian 30 October 2021  

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner - the book of a lifetime - The Guardian  1 November 2021

The critic and the clue: tracking Alan Garner's Treacle Walker - Strange Horizons 5 September 2022

Knockout - UK  Comics Wiki

Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit - Yesterday's newspapers

Donkey stones - Eli Whalley & Co