The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner

When you browse through a bookshop, you’ll see certain types of writers filling the shelf space. There are the currently big writers. The ones who, for better or worse, are firing out at least a book a year. They’ll have stylised covers, very flattering reviews. They’ll have been mentioned on at least one TV, podcast or radio book club. They are, for the moment, in with the in crowd.

   Then there are the important writers. They win awards. They present award shows. They look worthy, and they nod when people in places like bookshops debate their books. Even if the debate in question is basically,

   “Really, that won? Didn’t you find it pretty dull?”

   You also have your classic writers. They might’ve written entire bookshops worth of books, but you might only find one or two of their books on their shelves here. The established pillars of their back catalogue. The well-known ones, which have made into TV shows, radio shows, movies, or podcasts.

   Around them, you have the indie writers, just gathering momentum. The poets, kept in their own little section. The humour books, which don’t always look that funny, and the celebrities, who are either releasing their first autobiography or whatever book they can think of next to fulfil their contract – it normally helps if they’ve lost a parent. A lost parent can get their spine on display under self-help if they get the tone right. It’s either that or an illness.

   Somewhere in amongst the chaos of popular publishing deals, there is another type of writer. They’re not flashy. They’re rarely discussed on TV. You don’t often come across a movie based on their stories. Not that this sort of writer is bothered about that sort of thing. They are simply working their craft. Weaving their stories. Letting them out to the world, one at a time, to the joy of their dedicated fans. I’m fairly sure Alan Garner is one of these writers.

   Garner’s stories are rarely long or overly complicated or engaged in the hunt for the current zeitgeist. They feel honed. Wired into his landscape and the people who populated it before him. He writes phenomenally clever books for readers of all ages without ever feeling like he’s talking down to anyone. (If I’m being honest, I’m still a little jealous that books like The Owl Service completely skipped me by when I was younger. He goes on the list with Susan Cooper and Ursula K Le Guin.)

   So far, I’ve only read a couple of Alan Garner’s books. Red Shift, which absolutely tangled my brain with just how complex the story is and just how precisely and patiently and lovingly it’s told. It’s a book for younger readers, in a sense, but it’s a tale of three very different young men, split over three periods of history, who are all suffering for a similar affliction during a complicated moment in their starkly different lives. It also ends with a page or so written in code - just to keep you on your toes.

   His autobiography, Where Shall We Run To, is again simple and effective and deeply engaging. It’s a memoir that’s far less interested in nostalgia than you’d expect. It’s a book that wants to capture stories from his past and share them with an ability to take you back to an exact time and place, warts and all, in order to tell a tale.

   Last year, I read Treacle Walker, which is absolutely fantastic. It’s a weird, wild, and heartfelt fable for any age who cares to read it. A short, smart, at times melancholy trip back through history, taken by doing little more than walking, talking, and believing. It’s also about old British comic strips, loneliness, bog men, and the power of reflections. God, Treacle Walker is some vital and brilliant writing.

   I’d heard The Stone Book Quartet was one of his finest books and, let me tell you, the hype was not wrong. In a world where it feels like a lot of major publishers are currently checking on which comedians are having epiphanies that can fit in a hardback book, or who can write crime fiction most like a gameshow host, it can be so refreshing to read Alan Garner.

   Although that comparison is a little unfair. Comparing him to the books I’ve already read this year, or really most other books you’ll find in any other bookshop, Garner’s work always feels like it’s been reclaimed from somewhere else. His books aren’t necessarily striving for attention. It doesn’t feel like he writes them for anything other than his own pleasure, his own education, with each one fuelled by his own interests. He’s just so captivating a writer that it’s hard not to be drawn into the journey.

   It helps that his books aren’t worried about drowning you in historical detail. He rarely loses you in the facts and language. You won’t ever find yourself having to scramble to the internet for clues. Instead, Garner tells his stories with a kindness. An open, human interest in his characters and his settings, and our shared history.

   Much like Alan Moore, Alan Garner has focused a lot of his writing in the area where he has lived for most of his life. The Stone Book Quartet is all set in that one small village, over a period of years, travelling through the generations of one family. And it does all of this without straying into purple prose or any brand of author’s subtext vitriol. It feels more like a historical document told through poetry.

   As you move through the four generations, and their stories, you find echoes moving between them. Lost items are found. Histories are retold, regathered into myth. The seasons change. The church clock keeps ticking, even when they have to make sure it keeps time with the station clock. The stones are worked and stand through wars, through loss, through lessons skipped and lessons taught by the side of rough roads. The families in each story pull together and hold together, even when they clash with each other, giving themselves and their lives purpose in a world which is changing them. We meet each generation through the eyes of a younger member, who is starting to wonder where they will fit into the approaching future. With them as our guides, and with their elders waiting to show them what the land or their work holds for them, you’re quickly swept into each story. Each one holding a little magic and a little truth for you.

   Garner’s writing is a joy to read. There’s no pretension. No meandering. Every line, every word, every piece of punctuation feels like it’s in exactly the right place. It feels like it comes from the same crafts that you see grow and change through the quartet. You feel like you’re reading to the rhythm of tradition.

   So, yes, you might not be enjoying the fabulous tales of heroic battles or the woes of some ill-fated travellers, but you are being carried away into far more real, down to earth lives. The tilled earth, where the stones are removed by hand. Some of those stones holding treasures. Some of them put in place elsewhere, with a name carved so only a few can see it. It's a very personal tale told on the grandest of scales about the most human of daily experiences, and some of the seemingly quiet and simple revelations are flawless.

It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Incredibly well written. Incredibly well told. The dialogue and the people ring true throughout and, like I said, it might not be anything that will have Joseph Campbell scholars rushing to update their understanding of the hero’s journey, but it is powerful and rooted deeply in our past, and in ourselves.

   I just hope we get a lot more Garner released onto the shelves of our bookshops. Whether it’s his magical fables for children, or something with the overpowering soul of The Stone Book Quartet.