Hints of discord
DAVID WADE
The Owl Service Alan Garner (Collins 15s) Alan Garner's latest novel has many of the qualities of his previous work. It is profoundly imaginative and written in spare, unsentimental style. At the same time it is quite different from any of its predecessors. To begin with it is based on one of the more forbidding stories from The Mabinogion, which tells how Gwydion creates Blodeuwedd out of flowers to be a wife for [dew Llaw Gyffes. She, however, betrays her husband and, with her lover Gronw, kills him.
Gwydion then puts a curse on her and turns her into an owl. As Mr Garner sees it, this curse has been played out ever since by succeeding generations; now the roles have fallen to three adolescents living in present- day Wales and to Huw, a fay old gardener who appears as the recurrent Gwydion. Since the inheritance of the curse is very much a matter of ancestry, the parents of the adolescents are also involved. Thus there is a very complex set of relationships to deal with and into this must be woven the legend in such a way that neither seems to be imposed on the other.
In some ways the result is brilliantly suc- cessful. The reawakening of the old spell and its gradual possession of its players is masterly; so is the climax when at last the curse is lifted. lust where the book does not succeed is harder to pin down. There are moments when it is over-literal—as when Huw declares himself to be Gwydion—others when it is im- precise, as if skating over a difficulty. Also the parental world does not quite blend in; it is full of hints of discord which seem to be important, but quite how they relate to the story is not clear. This is a pity, since its effect is to lift the book out of the children's world without, however, quite putting it in any other, nor yet bridging the child-adult gap.
Perhaps Mr Garner has set out to do more than at this stage he can quite encompass. If so, it is no matter for alarm, for his aim was far beyond anything he has yet attempted and so, with all its shortcomings, is his achieve- ment.
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