'He cut the veil of the rock; the hooves clattered the bellowing waters below him in the dark. The lamp brought the moon from the blade, and the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang.
He took life in his mouth, spat red over hand on the cave wall. The bull roared. Around, above him, the trample of the beasts answered; the stags, the hinds, the horses, the bulls, and the trace of old dreams. The ice rang. He held the lamp and the climbed among the antlers necks ears eyes horns haunches, the limbs, the nostrils, the rutting, the dancers; from the cave to the crack. He pushed the lamp at the dark and followed his shoulder, his head twisted, through the hill along the seam of grit, by the nooks of the dead. He slipped out; pinched the lamp, and crawled between slabs into the gash of Ludcruck on snow.
The colours and webs faded and he saw the world.'
Boneland
(Page 1-2)
My mum warned me about the finale of Alan Garner's trilogy.
I just didn't quite expect it to be as far removed from the previous two stories.
Gone are the menacing creatures, the stern wizarding folk and almost all the adventure.
The conclusion to the Weirdstone Trilogy feels more like a poetic exorcism of deep-seated psychosis.
And it's beautiful.
It truly is.
But i can't connect it with its predecessors.
The amount of time between the release of The Moon of Gomrath and Boneland is significant and the change in Garner's style is striking to say the least but this feels like a different writer altogether.
For many this was just the conclusion they were looking for.
Neil Gaiman perhaps said it best:
'Boneland is the strangest, but also the strongest of Garner's books. It feels like a capstone to a career that has taken him, as a writer, to remarkable places, and returned him to the same place he started, to the landscape of Alderley Edge and to the sleepers under the hill.'
But for me?
I still have so many questions.
Questions i fear will remain unanswered until i finally give in to the fact that Garner probably wanted to leave me hanging.
Of course he did.
What's more intriguing than a tale left unfinished?
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