flemmings | (no subject)

Decided to tackle the garden today. Lower back immediately spasmed at The Very Idea!! Gave lower back a stiff g&t and then a glass of wine. Back subsided into mumbling complaints. I banged a garden waste bag open (the real reason I don't garden is having to deal with garden waste bags) and went out with a single cloth gardening glove because I couldn't find the other pair which were on the counter ffs exactly where I'd left them and tackled the cherry pits and creepers near the house. Did get most of what was growing in and around the AC compressor and some of the branches of the damnable mulberry still growing there. Must try a saw and bleach on it. Then checked out the waist high weeds growing by the cherry. Which aren't all weeds: are some kind of tree/ bush with thorny spikes on the stem, never seen before. Got some of that down too but must apply saw, bleach, and good gardening gloves to it eventually. Bag was full by then and I didn't want to bang another bag so left the slain bodies of my enemies piled up by the cherry and came in. My exercise for the day and not too bad, given that I haven't been out back in at least eight weeks.

I find the Charles Lenox mysteries vaguely annoying, for no good reason, but having finished one, all I want to do is read another. Ce qui est un grand preuve de la mélancolie de vivre. Upstairs I'm rereading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen which is... not suck fairy exactly, but not the book I read at 15. Always thought Garner was mad to say he found the first two books unsatisfying, and I will certainly not read the third, which sounds like Garner at his most 'unkind to the naive reader.' But I sort of see what he was on about. Mind, these are kids' books which really shouldn't be all twisty 'I'm not here to entertain you, you gotta work to understand what's happening.' But evidently Garner thinks different.

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I think Garner said something like The Weirdstone was the worst book ever published. Putting aside the hyperbole I rather agree. The Moon of Gomrath is better. Boneland is an attempt to correct everything that was wrong with those first two books and tie up loose ends. I didn't find it terribly "unkind"

Then we'll have to agree to disagree on the merits of Weirdstone. It's a perfectly good children's book in the tradition of Nesbit and Lewis.

Garner is unkind to naive readers like me who can't fill in the blanks the author refuses to clarify himself. I'm sure his dissatisfaction with the first two books was that you could actually tell what was going on in them. Unlike Boneland, which had people trying to figure out what the first eight lines were about, let alone the rest of the thing. 'Show don't tell' only works if you're on the author's wavelength. If not, it's just an exercise in frustration. Later Garner frustrates me extremely.

I suppose I must be on his wavelength ....

I haven't read Weirdstone for a long time, but I loved it in my teens. I thought The Moon of Gomrath was even better. Elidor was my favourite because parts of it are set where I grew up, i.e. the Manchester city centre scenes with the spinny map and the slum clearance area with the ruined church. I had never, until then, read a fantasy (or any children's book) that was set somewhere like that, a place that was familiar to me and not rural South of England or London.

In my view The Owl Service was his best book because after that, beginning with Red Shift I felt he started to be "clever" rather than concentrating on telling a good story.

See, The Moon of Gomrath was a letdown for me because there was so much less of it than in Weirdstone. What there was, was very resonant, but I wanted more. But Garner, I now see, was getting into his lapidary less-is-more style. And of course I was reading Tolkien about the same time, who gave me lots and lots of the more that I wanted: elves, dwarfs, magicians, sensawunder. Garner was never going to compete with that but I wanted him to.

Owl Service was the last of his I enjoyed. Red Shift was not only him being clever clogs/ make the reader work, Tom was such a horrible person I couldn't be having with him.

Tom was such a horrible person I couldn't be having with him

Yes, there was that as well. Actually, in recent years I went right off Garner. In my teens, as a project for a Ranger Guide badge, I went and explored many of the locations in Weirdstone and Moon of Gomrath. The events all happen in real places. I therefore assumed that Owl Service was also set where the incidents in the original legend took place. It's very clear in the Mabinogion where things happen. I therefore spent many years staring at the OS map trying to track the action and it didn't really fit. I eventually learned that that was because Garner had taken a legend that very clearly belongs further north and had shifted it to the valley where he spent summers in house owned by friends. That seemed so disrespectful.

Oh yes, I tromped all over the Edge when I wass there in '75 and have the photos to prove it.

I didn't know he'd moved the setting of The Owl Service, but then I didn't read the Mabinogion with a map handy. You're right: you don't get to meddle with other people's trad stuff for your own convenience. If he'd wanted to play around with the geography of Cheshire, more power to him, but Wales isn't his stomping ground. And I was a mite annoyed at the suggestion that the Welsh need an English person to solve their problems because clearly they're prisoners of their past and can't do it themselves.