Treacle Walker by Alan Garner review – the book of a lifetime

Alan Garner’s novels are usually separated into his wildly successful books aimed at children – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor, The Owl Service and The Moon of Gomrath – and his adult writing – The Stone Book Quartet, Thursbitch and Strandloper, which are more difficult and quixotic, at least thematically (Garner is always an author of supremely clear and readable prose). I was speaking at an event with Ruth Ozeki and Karen Joy Fowler recently and, having mentioned Garner in my talk, was surprised that neither of them had read – or even heard of – him. They asked me where to begin and I suggested the wonderful, time-collapsing Red Shift, largely because I feel like it contains the best of each of Garner’s worlds: the magic of his children’s fiction and the emotional and philosophical complexity of his adult work.

Garner’s latest novel, Treacle Walker, also belongs in this hybrid space. It, too, is concerned with time. Indeed, it seems as though the subject of time is the theme that underpins much of his later work – how we experience it, how we might refigure or alter our relation to it. “Time is ignorance,” reads the book’s epigraph, from Carlo Rovelli, and the novel is essentially a response to this idea, seeking to ask how we would experience the world if we were able to step out of the straitjacket of time. Garner lives in a medieval medicine house on a site that has been inhabited for 10,000 years and is a stone’s throw from the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire. It should perhaps not surprise us that, again, he takes time as his subject.

Joe, our hero, is a child living a strange and circumscribed existence. He has been poorly, he says, and wears a patch to correct a lazy eye. His parents are not in evidence, and he measures out the days by watching the passing of Noony, the train, through the valley below. One day a rag-and-bone man appears, named Treacle Walker, and offers Joe a cup and a stone in exchange for an old pair of pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder bone. The cup has Joe’s name written upon it, the stone is inscribed with the picture of a horse. This is classic Garner territory: obscure but resonant objects, a present that feels wedded to a mythical past, a questioning child seeking to unravel the mysteries of an off-kilter world, a landscape freighted with meaning.

Joe wanders out into the marshy wood behind his house where he meets Thin Amren, a naked man with copper-brown skin and a hood made of leather. This bog-man informs Joe that his lazy eye is the result of “the glamourie” – a gift that enables him to see time collapsed, to perceive the eternal in the now. Joe’s adventures see him drawn into the mirror-world of a comic book, fighting alongside “Kit the Ancient Brit” against “Whizzy Wizard and the Brit Bashers”. He’s aided in these battles by the visits of the genial Treacle Walker, with his “green violet” eyes and face at once old and young, like “them knacky postcards that change when you look”.

The riotous energy of seemingly throwaway comics is shown to be in communion with the power of myth and both express truths found in the most cutting-edge science. This is a book about quantum physics as well as ancient lore. Garner has always suggested that there is essentially just one story, and this novel, published in his 87th year, contains all the exuberance and eccentricity, all the deep thought and resounding mythology of his best work. At the end of his life, Philip Roth wrote the extraordinary Nemesis, a book that felt like a conversation between the author and his younger self, an attempt to express in a single novel the concerns of a lifetime. Treacle Walker does something similar, cramming into its 150-odd pages more ideas and imagination than most authors manage in their whole careers.

• Treacle Walker by Alan Garner is published by Fourth Estate (£10). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply