| Alan Garner |
An Interview with Alan Garner |
Introduction: Alan Garner needs interviewing for the readers of elimae for two reasons -- first, because he is quite clearly one of the few great writers of English to emerge after World War II, and second, because most American readers either know nothing about his work or only remember reading his work in childhood. (Worse yet, some may have encountered his novels in paperback in the early '80s, when they were ghettoized as adult science fiction and fantasy.) But while one can fairly easily argue that his first three novels are clearly "children's books," the next three -- The Owl Service (1967), Red Shift (1973) and The Stone Book Quartet (1976-1978) -- are nothing of the sort: they are instead work which share with Alice in Wonderland or Grimm's Fairy Tales the ability to appeal to, and have meaning for, adults as deeply as children. His seventh novel Strandloper (1996) is "officially" an adult novel, but one which is obviously built upon the stylistic foundation of his so-called children's work. |