Thursday 14 April 2022

I loved The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a child, especially as it was set in a Cheshire landscape that was familiar from Sunday runs in the Austin35 (five children crammed in the back!). I remember reading it, sick with excitement ... and would have been baffled that Alan Garner later rejected it as a 'fairly bad book'. Do children still read it today? I don't think they do; none of the children I know,anyway - it's all Harry Potter. I hadn't realised that 50 years later Garner wrote this sequel to round off the Weirdstone/Moon of Gomrath trilogy that he had abandoned - but it's a sequel for adults, not children. Colin, the child-hero, is now a brilliant but brain-damaged astro-physicist at the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, traumatised by his childhood adventures. Reader ... I hated it! I lost the will to live - and it's only 150 pages. If it baffled Ursula le Guin, what hope was there for me? I don't have much patience with fantasy and myth, but I don't see what's so clever in being obscure.

4 comments:

Vronni's Style Meanderings said...

I'd never read 'The Weirdstone' but always meant to. How disappointing for you to find it was so awful. I'm not a huge fan of fantasy or sci fi either with some honourable exceptions...

Mary said...

I think I was eight when I read The Weirdstone, Vronni - which is about the right age! But this later one is far too woo-woo for me, just irritating.

Pam said...

The Owl Service was the fashionable children's book when I started teaching and I did read it but found it a bit of a struggle. I thus didn't introduce it to the not-hugely academic kids I tended to teach. Maybe I'll try reading it again. It won prizes but let's say the film is yet to come out... Mind you, I read the first Harry Potter and didn't go any further in the series, so what do I know?

Mary said...

The Owl Service is our book group book this month, Pam - I'm not sure I'll bother! It baffled me as a child and I tried again a few years ago and didn't much care for it. It did make a Sunday tea-time TV serial - which is on YouTube, very wooden and very much of its time.