The Owl Service & Red Shift
She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting…’ Alan Garner in The Owl Service
These two novels by Alan Garner always make it onto my list of favourites. I have read both many times now - starting in my teens right the way through to last week.
I first encountered The Owl Service as a child, when the adaptation was on TV. I vividly remember sitting on the floor, avidly watching and yet terrified at the same time. Too terrified to hide behind the sofa. So terrified I had to watch all the way to the end. It was the first series I felt that way about - where I made an effort to watch the next programme. In those days we only had the one chance.
It wasn’t until a few years later, after reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a set text at school, that I found The Owl Service and Red Shift and decided to read them.
I had forgotten that TV series by then, but the vividness of the descriptions in the novel, of the noises from the attic and then the patterns disappearing from the plate and becoming owls soon brought it back.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is very much in the tradition of fantasy stories - reminiscent of Lord of the Rings but really belonging with the Narnia Stories, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series of novels - it’s a battle of good against evil in which a group of children must play their part.
The Owl Service feels like it’s something quite different. It was awarded the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book, and the second Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize.
Of course, the best children’s fiction is almost always readable by adults.
There are many spoilers ahead!
Deeper and Darker
The Owl Service is deeper and darker than The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. It’s morally ambiguous, and full of real, living people, rather than stereotypes. Which seems odd, as it’s derived from folk tales and a kind of Jungian psychology. I suspect it has something to do with the exploration of personal wounds - and especially repeated patterns of trauma through generations. Dysfunctional family problems, and class and privilege are at the root of it.
It’s a powerful story and these themes held my attention long before I could articulate them.
Garner drew on The Mabinogion - in particular, the Welsh myth about a love triangle centred on Blodeuwedd - a woman who was created magically out of meadowsweet flowers, which ended tragically.
As it becomes clear in the story, this same love triangle has been repeated through the ages in this Welsh valley.
This time around, Alison is a rich girl who has inherited a manor house, Roger is her step-brother, the son of the rich man her mother has married. Gwyn is the son of Nancy the cook.
The three young people quickly become obsessed with the myth - possessed by it - and the whole story is a kind of psychodrama in which the characters are doomed to repeat a cycle of jealousy and pain and violence. There’s no escape from this deep seated psychological obsession - which seemingly erupts from the landscape.
Claws or flowers?
”She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”
“Talk sense, man!” cried Gwyn. “Please! I’ve got to know!”
“You do know,” said Huw. “Lleu, Blodeuwedd and Gronw Pebyr. They are the three who suffer every time, for in them the power of this valley is contained, and through them the power is loosed.”
I won’t summarise the story- the novel is short and worth reading - but in any case you can find the details on Wikipedia.
The ending, though - that’s what interests me the most.
Alison - as befits a girl who is a cipher, seems to exist solely to be possessed by the mythic Blodeuwedd. Apart from her obsession with the plates and the owls, she has no sense of direction. When Gwynn talks to her about his ambitions, she has none of her own - other than to please Mummy. As a teen I accepted this - now I just want to shake her.
Throughout the novel my sympathy is almost wholly with Gwyn. He is clearly intelligent, but vulnerable. He is described by middle class Roger, who is a bit of a snob, as having a chip on his shoulder. All the same, he is ambitious. He has clearly fallen for Alison, and he confides in her. If his mother won’t let him continue in education, he says, there’s always night school. And he tells her he has saved up for recordings of elocution lessons. He knows he will be held back by prejudice. He plans to lose his Welsh accent.
Alison betrays this confidence to Roger. She does it for the best of reasons, when Roger is mocking Gwyn. But Roger twists it into a weapon, and attacks Gwyn, leaving the chances of resolution even more hopelessly out of reach.
The other two have their own problems, of course. Roger’s mother walked out on the family - and he has been subjected to gossip and bullying about her. Alison’s mother, always off stage, seems cold and controlling.
At the inevitable climax, Alison is totally possessed by Blodeuwedd, and Huw - who failed this test himself, with Nancy, Gwyn’s mother, in the previous cycle of the psychodrama - tries to help Gwyn change the outcome.
“She is coming, and will use what she finds, and you have only hate in you,” said Huw. “Always and always and always.”
Gwyn’s jaw was fixed.
“Try,” said Huw.
“You didn’t say it would be this,” said Gwyn. “I can’t.”
“Try. Comfort.”
“No.”
“Comfort.”
Gwyn is too hurt by Alison’s betrayal. He is just so hurt and angry that he cannot let go of it. Even when Roger reaches out, and explains Alison didn’t betray him, that it was all Roger’s fault, all Gwyn can do is lash out at Roger - calling him ‘Mummy’s boy.and taunting him about her nickname, ‘The Birmingham Belle.’
The story ends with Roger, the middle class snob, the boy I could not like, being the one capable of reaching Alison, and providing her with the comfort she needs. He somehow calls to her as flowers, and the room fills up with petals.
The pattern has changed.
But Gwyn is still broken, and alone. The ending is bittersweet.
Red Shift
Similar themes are repeated in Garner’s 1973 novel, Red Shift. This time set in his own landscape around Cheshire, it also explores painful adolescent love stories repeated in different times in history. Again the modern story is complicated by dysfunctional families and class differences - Tom lives with his parents in a caravan, and Jan’s parents are middle class doctors.
As with Gwyn, Tom is intelligent and wants to study - and his relationship with his parents, particularly his mother, is strained.
Garner has spoken of his own difficult relationship with his mother.
In technical psychological terms, she was what is known as a narcissistic parent. She was bringing me up to be what she had not been able to be. RS Thomas says it in a poem called Ap Huw’s Testament: “My mother gave me the breast’s milk/Generously, but grew mean after,/Envying me my detached laughter.” As soon as I started to develop my own mind, it was shocking to her. The all-embracing loving mother became the destroying harpy. That destroying harpy existed until her death.
In Red Shift the sexual tension is much more explicit - where in The Owl Service, it is a constant undercurrent, expressed by a kind of electric charge, and even poltergeist activity.
Both these novels resonate for me - probably because I share some of Garner’s life experiences. He was the first one in his family to be educated and go away to University, and felt, I think, that he belonged in neither world. Family relationships are made difficult by this kind of gulf. As a child, I was very close to my step-grandfather but a distance grew between us - not of my choosing - when I went to grammar school.
I found Gwyn, in The Owl Service, very easy to empathise with. His mother threatening to send him to work at the Co Op rather than support him in his education was very familiar. In my family, there was a lot of resentment about me staying on at school, and then going to University.
Tom was more difficult to like - his issues around sexuality and the obvious misogyny towards Jan when he discovers she’s had a previous sexual relationship were very alienating. Unlike Alison, though, Jan is a real person. We feel she has a life away from her relationship with Tom - not just that she has a previous lover, but that she can survive without him. She is more than a blank screen, for Tom’s feelings and needs to be projected on.
I was reconciled - rather late - by the ending of Red Shift. Not being capable of deciphering codes, it was only through the bounty of the internet that I found Garner’s ending, decoded for me.
“I love you. If you can read this you must care. Help me. I'm writing before we meet, because I know it'll be the last. I'll put the letter in your bag, so you'll find it on the train afterwards. I'm sorry. It's my fault. Everything's clear, but it's too late. I'll be at Crewe next time. If you don't come I'll go to Barthomley. I love you. The smell of your hair will be in my face.”
Alan Garner, in Red Shift
The writer who decoded this asks “Is this Tom, or Thomas, or Macey speaking? Should 'next time' be taken in its mundane sense (Tom and Jan's next meeting), or the cosmic sense the novel is imbued with (the next time-shattering meeting of mythic forces in this particular area of Cheshire)? I'll let you ponder those yourself.”
I don’t think we need to make a choice. It can be all of them, surely.
At the end of Red Shift, then, is the resolution I so much wanted for Gwyn. Tom - with his fears and angers and feelings of inadequacy, is somehow able to find healing for his psychological scars - even if it isn’t in time to salvage the relationship with Jan.
Loose ends, new endings, and a glimmer of hope
Although the use of language and myth, the people of these novels, and Garner’s exploration of these themes are generally praised, many people do struggle with the endings.
I touched above on the endings of The Owl Service and Red Shift. It was many years before I started to see that the ending of Red Shift provided what, for me, the ending of The Owl Service lacked.
The ending of The Owl Service I described as bittersweet. The pattern had been broken and there was some healing - but not for Gwyn - still angry and hurt and alone at the end of the novel.
Until I found the decoding of the message online, I lived for years with the uncertainty about the ending of Red Shift. Garner surely knew many of us would struggle with that - the uncertainty is surely part of the point.
Garner explores the mental breakdown that occurred on set in Wales as his discomfort with the process culminates in a near-assault on one of The Owl Service cast because of the actor’s inability to take a scene seriously. He retreats from the set and finds himself in the office of a psychotherapist to explore this breakpoint more fully. Garner uses his case to wander through an exploration of the modern condition and how it has created a humanity utterly disconnected from spirituality. This in turn creates an inability to deal with hidden traumas, which Garner calls “engrams.” Garner offers the theory that his connection with myth through his work made him more sensitive to this disconnect: “A writer of fiction, willy-nilly, plants encapsulated engrams in his characters.” Garner’s further work with the therapist brings up a pair of deeply-buried childhood traumas around his childhood illnesses and a fearful first visit to the cinema as a three-year-old (where young Alan was filled with terror at the sight of the Wicked Queen in Snow White). Trauma, buried childhood memory, unaccountable anger, and the threat of death: all linked through the power of a child’s mythic imagination, a man’s attempt to grapple with his life-narrative through storytelling, and buried trauma’s sudden reappearance upon seeing those stories acted out in the real world.
I think Garner’s experience of therapy is the very reason for the uncertainty, the lack of resolution, the patterns or trauma repeated through time.
People are not, in the end, problems which can be solved. Not our families. Not ourselves. And yet it is the human condition, that we try. We go round and round in circles. We try to find a healing of trauma. We try to find our own meanings.
But there is movement. There is hope. We can break the pattern - even if only a little.
From The Owl Service to Red Shift there’s a progression, a move towards hope, optimism, real connection.
Garner isn’t just drawing on myth - he is creating new ones.
What writers can learn from these novels
It would require real writerly courage to follow Alan Garner’s path in writing - the kind of courage it would take for a young person to face up to their trauma in either of these novels.
After The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Garner clearly put away the simpler themes of the external battle between good and evil, the light and the dark, and moved on to stuff deeper and darker - within the psyche. Of course, adolescence is often a time for us to grapple with these kinds of issues.
Garner's interest in myth, folklore and fantasy is due to the significance he sees in this form of storytelling. In his words, "Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallisation of experience, and, far from being escapist, fantasy is an intensification of reality"
Quote from Literary Atlas
I am often drawn to stories arising from myth and fairy tale, and I like this explanation of why - they are not an escape from reality, but an intensification of it. Think Jung, and Joseph Campbell, Ursula Le Guin and Neil Gaiman.
These stories, like the myths they arise from, have a strong personal element, but they also touch on the universal. This is reflected in the repeating patterns in the stories, which also seem to resemble the patterns which come up in therapy, which are so hard to resolve.
Perhaps, in fact, it is the deeply personal, and the particular nature of these stories which also makes them universal.
Elements of the psychotherapy he received after he "went seemingly mad in less than three months" following the adaptation of The Owl Service for television – "Go to the pain," he was told by his therapist, "go to where it hurts the most, and say whatever it tells you"
If we do want to follow in Garner’s footsteps, in even a minor way, I suspect we could do worse than to take his therapist’s advice.
“Go to the pain; go to where it hurts the most, and say whatever it tells you"
Ann
Down the Rabbit Hole
1. The Owl Service on Wikipedia
2. Ah. We can still watch the TV adaptation of The Owl Service which terrified me when I watched it back in 1969 - years before I read the book
Apparently The Owl Service was the first British TV series to be broadcast in colour - but I would surely have seen it in black and white.
3. Ah, and there’s more here about the TV series - it wasn’t shown in colour until 1978!
Very much a product of the 1960s, the serial used a contemporary source novel (Garner's book was two years old when adapted for television) that dwelled upon class struggles and adolescent permissiveness, albeit within a supernatural fantasy framework. Then-fashionable jump cuts and psychedelic imagery were used for the all-film production. This was the first fully-scripted drama to be made entirely in colour by Granada Television, although it was shown in black and white on its original runs and not seen in colour until its 1978 repeat. This ruined the visual joke of Alison, Gwyn and Roger always wearing respectively red, black and green outfits - the colours of electrical wiring at the time - hinting at the power the three could unleash.
4. This is an interesting piece, on the Literary Atlas web site - the sense of place is central to the story, through both myth and landscape. This is usually a feature in Garner’s novels - the Alderley Edge of Brisingamen; Cheshire, in three different time periods, in Red Shift - another favourite which again plays with different generations playing out the same tragic pattern.
5. A fascinating piece on Alan Garner’s memoir, discussing his concept of the engram which appears to inform these two novels
6. Like Garner , Le Guin is not interested in large questions about moral certainty- her interest is in the personal
As for my stuff, how anybody can call it a Battle Between Good and Evil is beyond me. I don’t write about battles or wars at all. It seems to me that what I write about — like most novelists — is people making mistakes and people — other people or the same people — trying to prevent or correct those mistakes, while inevitably making more mistakes.