Treacle Walker
I have read through Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker (2021) three times this fall. After reading a good chunk of it the first time through, I discovered that the slight novel (152 pages) begs to be read out loud. The rhythm of the language and the short sections (separated by untitled Roman numerals, eighteen in total) build in a genre-bending enchantment. Narrative becomes glamour becomes something beyond the stars: timeless.
Alan Garner, at age 88, has studied and written fairy tale, myth, and folklore for many, many years. In Treacle Walker he succinctly, magically winds all of that into the story of a solitary boy with a bum eye named Joe Coppock. Joe seems to live alone on a high spot overlooking a meadow and a bog amid an alder copse. His marbles and Knockout comic keep him company, it seems, until Joe responds to the call of ragtag Treacle Walker in the lane with his white horse and cart carrying a trunk. Joe answers by bringing items that Treacle Walker seeks and is gifted something in return. This exchange is both ominous and innocent: a paradoxical mood that weaves its way throughout Treacle Walker, reminiscent of dark fairytales or stories passed down from time immemorial.
The reader should pay heed from the start to the slippery nature of time. This slender novel begins with an epigraph in its original Italian and English translation; “Time is ignorance,” Carlo Rovelli, Italian physicist so said in L’ordine del tempo. Thus warned, Treacle Walker opens with the call: “Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!” and the maze of time and fascination whirls into being (3). Joe marks his time with the passing of the noon train (“Noony”). He engages with the world with a patch over his lazy eye, or at least he does before meeting Treacle Walker. That first meeting changes everything for young Joe. The exchange of bone and rag for pot and stone beckons back to long ago charms and deep magic. Yet juxtaposed with this ancient folkloric element is humor. In their first exchange, Treacle Walker corrects Joe’s grammar (“You smell”) with “Not I, Joseph Coppock [ . . .] You smell that I stink. Let words be nice” (5). I found this playfulness, its simplicity, alongside its ancient elements, makes Treacle Walker a delight.
Ultimately, Treacle Walker is a story to read slowly, out loud; to savor; to reread repeatedly. Because it is so short, it is easy to read it in one sitting, or to draw out over the course of many days. So far, I’ve read it three times, but I may reread it a few more times before the year ends. Unraveling it holds a certain allure to be sure. Like any good myth, I notice new things with every reread. The story’s modest eloquence, the otherworldliness of some of its characters, all but demand I flip back to the first page immediately upon completing the last. In fact, so much of this story explores perception: perception through sight, through time, through myth and glamour. It is a boy with an eye patch, after all, who sees Treacle Walker and Thin Amren of the bog. A boy with an eye patch searches out the cuckoo and collects a museum’s worth of odds and ends, egg shells and bones. Phrases like “What sees is seen” (47, 48) and “[Y]ou saw; yet you do not see” (63) become a sort of chant as one reads this story, encouraging reader and character alike to draw attention to perception. Then again, that playfulness resurfaces with constant reference to absurdity; were I to count the number of times “daft” is used, I imagine it would exceed twenty. This repetitious nature of so much of Treacle Walker’s language gives it all the more feeling of folk lore passed down through the ages.
This is book blends ancient British story and trope—think: white horses and bog people, elements reminiscent of Porter’s Lanny or Moss’s Ghost Wall—with a child’s mundane existence during what seems to be the last century—playing marbles, reading comics, wandering across meadows and through bogs. Garner’s prose is concise and lyrical, laconic and figurative; his story grips the reader by the throat at times and swirls us in eddies of time and space at others. It tells of healing, of seeing, of knowing, and of change. I imagine whole dissertations will unravel the many layers of symbolism and myth at work in this masterpiece; I am certain I missed many of its subtle references (cuckoos, pear trees, mirrors, chimneys, and willow, to name only a few). Treacle Walker is anything but a forgettable read; rather, it is a book to treasure, a story that transcends time while being firmly rooted into the bogs and mounds of England.
Bibliography:
Garner, Alan. Treacle Walker. 4th Estate: 2021.
