1 00:00:01,930 --> 00:00:07,270 Alan Garner's family has been rooted in one particular place in East Cheshire, the village of Odali 2 00:00:07,270 --> 00:00:12,270 Edge since the 16th century. To the north of the village is an enormous 3 00:00:12,270 --> 00:00:17,590 hill made of red sandstone. Known as the edge, riddled with tunnels and mineshafts. 4 00:00:17,590 --> 00:00:22,620 And it was on this hill that Khan played as a child and learnt its stories. He came to think of it as 5 00:00:22,620 --> 00:00:28,390 a place of magic. Fergana, The Edge is always rooted in prehistory 6 00:00:28,390 --> 00:00:33,440 and anchored here not only to a social background, but through a personal mythology. This 7 00:00:33,440 --> 00:00:38,510 mythology is a recycling of energy through which the landscape of the edge and other places 8 00:00:38,510 --> 00:00:44,200 in Britain are given. Life in garden is novel. Donna describes mythology 9 00:00:44,200 --> 00:00:50,010 as a very condensed form of experience. It is very highly works material. He says 10 00:00:50,010 --> 00:00:57,730 it has passed through unknown individuals consciences until it has become almost pure energy. 11 00:00:57,730 --> 00:01:02,920 At the age of 11, he passed the entrance exam to Manchester Grammar School and later he won a place 12 00:01:02,920 --> 00:01:08,350 at Morton College, Oxford, to study Classic, only to drop out after a year 13 00:01:08,350 --> 00:01:13,420 and return to the edge with the ambition of becoming a writer. I became an 14 00:01:13,420 --> 00:01:18,460 author. Through no burning ambition, he writes. But through a process of elimination 15 00:01:18,460 --> 00:01:23,800 which lasted from the age of 16 to 21, rejecting everything until I had isolated 16 00:01:23,800 --> 00:01:29,400 the only occupation to offer what seemed necessary. 17 00:01:29,400 --> 00:01:34,800 Although Garner did not know any of them at the time, he is often grouped with the other post-war British children, fantasy 18 00:01:34,800 --> 00:01:39,870 writers such as Susan Cooper, Penelope Lively and Diana when Jones, 19 00:01:39,870 --> 00:01:44,970 all of whom attended Oxford in the 1950s and were participants in what is known as the second 20 00:01:44,970 --> 00:01:50,080 golden age of children's literature. Beyond the Oxford connexion that work 21 00:01:50,080 --> 00:01:55,180 in many ways follows J. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in their use of mediaevalism and 22 00:01:55,180 --> 00:02:00,310 myth. Although a more complex relationship with the contemporary world defines them 23 00:02:00,310 --> 00:02:05,500 as a group of writers apart. Many have gone as nobles combined his own 24 00:02:05,500 --> 00:02:10,720 deeply felt experience of a landscape rooted in childhood with an academic specialist 25 00:02:10,720 --> 00:02:15,910 knowledge of the geology of Chechnya. His first book 26 00:02:15,910 --> 00:02:21,130 to be published was The Way It's Done, A Single Man in 1960. And it is here that the legend 27 00:02:21,130 --> 00:02:26,280 of Odali first makes its appearance in Ghana's work. It is a version of the sleeping 28 00:02:26,280 --> 00:02:31,380 hero myth often connected to King Arthur and his knights, and Garner was first told it by 29 00:02:31,380 --> 00:02:36,890 his grandfather. The legend has kind of first heard it begins with a farmer 30 00:02:36,890 --> 00:02:42,560 from the village of Mobily riding across the edge to Mako's failed to sell his milk. White man. 31 00:02:42,560 --> 00:02:48,480 He has stopped the thieves home by a man with long hair and beard who asked to buy them their. 32 00:02:48,480 --> 00:02:53,900 The farmer refuses and on returning from Macclesfield, his horse unsold. 33 00:02:53,900 --> 00:03:00,520 He comes across the man for a second time and follows him to a great rock embedded in the hillside. 34 00:03:00,520 --> 00:03:05,770 The rock splits apart and they descend into the hail. So. Did he find 35 00:03:05,770 --> 00:03:10,810 the sleeping king? And one hundred and forty nights in Silver Armour. And by the side of all but one, 36 00:03:10,810 --> 00:03:15,900 I know quite that as a payment for the horse. The farmer takes what he can 37 00:03:15,900 --> 00:03:21,060 off the old man's treasure. And this is gone as addition unwittingly removes the weird 38 00:03:21,060 --> 00:03:26,170 stone from its resting place. The book then tells the story of 39 00:03:26,170 --> 00:03:32,640 two children, Colin and Susan, who have been sent by their parents to stay on to the edge. 40 00:03:32,640 --> 00:03:38,220 Once there, they meet the wizard Catelyn Sova Prowl, the old man of the original legend 41 00:03:38,220 --> 00:03:43,620 and the dwarfs Fenno Dairy. And you're through with them. They must save the weight stones 42 00:03:43,620 --> 00:03:49,090 from the forces of evil. Only then will the sleeping nights under the Hill be safe 43 00:03:49,090 --> 00:03:55,640 for when Britain is in great peril. It is said that they will ride out of the edge and put the world to rights. 44 00:03:55,640 --> 00:04:00,680 Ghana transforms the local legend into a fantasy narrative to express what he believed to be the power of 45 00:04:00,680 --> 00:04:05,810 the edge. The names of the characters and places he uses names from Old Norse 46 00:04:05,810 --> 00:04:10,910 mythology, the poor Singham, and if the title, for example, is the name for the necklace of 47 00:04:10,910 --> 00:04:16,790 the goddess Freya, the little goblin creatures which the children encounter, other smart alpha. 48 00:04:16,790 --> 00:04:22,550 And the conflict between good and evil is referred to as Ragnarok. 49 00:04:22,550 --> 00:04:27,840 The sequel to the way its time was The Moon of Come Wrath, and for this, Ghana took inspiration 50 00:04:27,840 --> 00:04:33,180 from Welsh and Gaelic mythology and folklore. The names at the layoffs, alpha, 51 00:04:33,180 --> 00:04:38,550 the ounce of light all appear in the Welsh tale of colour. An old one, perhaps the earliest 52 00:04:38,550 --> 00:04:43,610 known story of King Arthur. Ghana's third novel 53 00:04:43,610 --> 00:04:49,340 is that both in the suburbs of Greater Manchester and the magical mediaeval world of little, 54 00:04:49,340 --> 00:04:54,450 which for children find access to the demolition site. Well, Bougon 55 00:04:54,450 --> 00:04:59,610 has always professed to dislike C.S. Lewis and his Narnia books, but they're poor quality 56 00:04:59,610 --> 00:05:05,400 and repugnant moralising. There is a clear parallel between both fantasy worlds. 57 00:05:05,400 --> 00:05:10,470 Ghana's Amazo is a dying wasteland. And it is up to the children to bring it back to life using 58 00:05:10,470 --> 00:05:15,480 four enchanted objects. The story is partly a retelling of the English folk tale 59 00:05:15,480 --> 00:05:24,000 of child Roland about a boy who must travel into elephant to rescue his sister. 60 00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:29,340 It was with the publishing of his fourth novel, The Owl Service. When Ghana began to be recognised 61 00:05:29,340 --> 00:05:34,650 as a writer of craft and it was the book which made his name amongst critics, 62 00:05:34,650 --> 00:05:39,900 it tells the story of three teenagers who were forced together in a house in an isolated Welsh 63 00:05:39,900 --> 00:05:45,420 valley. And after finding a set of old plates in the attic, begin to experience supernatural 64 00:05:45,420 --> 00:05:50,730 occurrences. The pattern on the plates, which looks at first like abstract 65 00:05:50,730 --> 00:05:56,460 floral design, is thought by the go Allison to look like elves. 66 00:05:56,460 --> 00:06:01,550 They then read a tale of. The fourth in a series of old Welsh myths known as the Nap 67 00:06:01,550 --> 00:06:06,710 Enochian, in which a women per day with is created out of flowers as a way. 68 00:06:06,710 --> 00:06:11,720 But after having an affair with the Lord of Pentland and conspiring to kill her husband, 69 00:06:11,720 --> 00:06:16,760 she is turned into an owl as punishment. The teenagers realise they are stuck in 70 00:06:16,760 --> 00:06:21,950 an endless re-enactment of the myth, and it is uncertain whether Allison is made of flowers 71 00:06:21,950 --> 00:06:27,090 or is actually an owl and must go hunting. The map and I'll be on is very 72 00:06:27,090 --> 00:06:33,210 important material for Ghana, but the AL Service is the only one of his books to be sent in Wales. 73 00:06:33,210 --> 00:06:38,430 He learnt Welsh in order not to use it. He said through the language, it is possible to read the mind 74 00:06:38,430 --> 00:06:43,590 of a people and by learning the language. He writes, I hope to discover how a character would feel 75 00:06:43,590 --> 00:06:48,640 and think and hence react. The health 76 00:06:48,640 --> 00:06:53,650 service also represents the last but kind of right. It can easily be categorised as a children's 77 00:06:53,650 --> 00:06:59,110 fantasy. His next novel was Redshift, a book of three layered narratives 78 00:06:59,110 --> 00:07:04,150 revolving around the village of Moul cop in Cheshire Redshift deals with 79 00:07:04,150 --> 00:07:09,340 the elasticity of time, a pervasive theme across Guyana's fiction and likely 80 00:07:09,340 --> 00:07:16,120 the service. The echoes of emotion and action over different periods in a single place. 81 00:07:16,120 --> 00:07:21,280 It's price Dow is far more stripped back than any have gone on straight fantasy, but there is still 82 00:07:21,280 --> 00:07:27,660 debate as to whether it can be classified as a children's book. 83 00:07:27,660 --> 00:07:32,940 The fantasy elements have gone is fiction after redshift food almost entirely away and the books 84 00:07:32,940 --> 00:07:38,650 that follow First Pitch Strand Lopa and the third book in the Wasteland trilogy Townland 85 00:07:38,650 --> 00:07:44,130 are far more realist in tone and subject and concern ancestry, violence, destiny 86 00:07:44,130 --> 00:07:49,200 and, of course, the Chechnya landscape. The exception is the four books which make 87 00:07:49,200 --> 00:07:54,990 up the Stone book quartette in which Garner attempts to create a mythology or rather, 88 00:07:54,990 --> 00:08:00,080 to tell his own family history and mythic terms. His relationship 89 00:08:00,080 --> 00:08:05,240 to his family is one of the great conflicts in his work, as he believes that his time at grammar school 90 00:08:05,240 --> 00:08:10,250 and Oxford rendered him unable to communicate with them. And paradoxically, 91 00:08:10,250 --> 00:08:15,450 it made him able to understand what it was he had loved. As he writes of his life 92 00:08:15,450 --> 00:08:20,490 at Odali, in the best sense, as a family, we have always known our place. We 93 00:08:20,490 --> 00:08:25,630 handle this is mine isn't stonecutters. We called it's timber for houses and few and 94 00:08:25,630 --> 00:08:30,910 grow food on US soil. At a deeper level, we accepted that there was a hero king 95 00:08:30,910 --> 00:08:36,240 asleep in the ground behind a rock named the Iron Gates. Our water supply derived 96 00:08:36,240 --> 00:08:41,340 from the Holywell which granted wishes to tourists. At weekends, Ghana's 97 00:08:41,340 --> 00:08:46,860 writings about the edge have been an attempt to amend this conflict and fantasy mythology. 98 00:08:46,860 --> 00:08:54,253 And the tales told to him as a child have been his tombs.