Standloper

..and perhaps the most rewarding. Definitely NOT for children of any shape or size, STRANDLOPER is an amazing experiment in writing in which Garner mixes a variety of styles and languages to tell us the story of a young man from the Midlands who gets transported "upon the seas and over the seas" to Australia in 1799. Once in Australia he escapes and is adopted by an Aboriginal tribe with whom he remains for more than thirty years before returning to his home village. The ending is sheer poetry, and will stick with me long after other details fade. This may be a tough read for some, but stick with it!

Strandloper is an almost unbearably beautiful book which repays every moment of the fourteen or so years the author took to write it.(You can read about that process in The Voice that Thunders) Every word is in exactly the right place, every phrase consummately crafted. As a result Garner's novel reads like the purest essence of distilled prose. It may be an acquired taste, but it it is truly worth the effort to acquire it. If you are familiar with Garner's previous work you will know that he is concerned with the impact of legend and myth on human life, and with the links that exist across time and culture. In Australia, to say you've got 'Buckley's chance' is to hold out almost no hope at all. Garner's depiction of William Buckley, convict, setting out across the Outback with only the paper sketch of a compass to guide him is one of the most poignant scenes I've ever read. How Buckley survives... well, read it for yourself.

Alan Garner's books for children were always favourites of mine (some kids do understand them!) - dark, edgy and able to fully immerse you in the textures of the worlds he created. He never patronised, never apologised, just created and allowed the reader to enter.Strandloper manages to do the same for 'adults'.This is a phenomenal book. He pitches the reader into an Eighteenth Century world that is like nothing we know but seems to resonate subconsciously within us. Language, thought patterns, religion are at once strange but understandable at the margins of the modern mind. After a few pages the reader is inside, immersed, before this perspective is upended again, first with the desperate, fearful passage on board a convict ship, and then with the deep mythic and symbolic language and imaginings of the native Australians. The resolution is elegaic, sad and full of a sense of the destructive change to come with the onset of the modern world. Garner's writing is utterly sparse, economic; there is no fat or wastage. Yet there could be no better evocation of not one but two cultures, which while they are superfically as different as could be, share a basis in that they both possess symbolic languages connected with the places and landscapes wherein they exist. These are both at odds with the soul-less, disconnected, modern world at which the ending points.My vote for english novel of the 1990s if not the entire Twentieth Century, it was criminally ignored by almost every major reviewer.

This is, quite simply, the most astounding book I have read. In many ways it is a logical extension of Alan Garner's previous writing, but even so, to see someone reach the heights that he has with this novel is a spellbinding experience. From the Wierdstone onwards, Garner's books have increasingly shown confidence in the reader's ability to reshape a seemingly basic narrative into the full picture Garner seeks to convey, whilst consistently dealing with themes such as dislocation and the repetitive nature of history and folklore. I remember struggling as a child with Red Shift and The Owl Service, but each time managing to infer a little more from the rich but stark prose. And now, after over thirty years of writing, he is able, with little more than dialogue, to take the reader through the four stages of one man's journey, from bricklayer in 18th Century Cheshire through to Aboriginal spiritual leader in ... 18th Century Cheshire. The gaps are deliberate, they require perseverance to fill, but by doing so the reader has to see the world through Buckley's eyes. Maybe the Kirkus reviewer was busy that day, or maybe they just couldn't be bothered. I could be bothered, and I will never look at a book in the same way again.

Alan Garner, who for many years has been publishing "children's" literature that no child could possibly understand, has finally given the world a full, frank "adult" novel. It's contrasting narrative voices - which are handled with the skill of a latter day William Faulkner - are all the more impressive for the fact that the novel is written in the third person. At every twist of the tale, as the title character journeys from 18th century England to penal colony Australia and back again, the emotional and intellectual changes that take place within him are expertly mirrored in the narrative voice. This is already one of the greatest of modern novels, and were it not for the fact that it languishes under the critially frowned upon genre of "fantasy", then it would become a staple of every university's curriculum. Well, ignor the critics, and ignor the genre heading - this is Faulkner not Tolkien.