The Owl Service

Mabinogion myth meets the 'modern' day in this tale of recurring rivalry in a Welsh valley. Three young adults start out as friends until a curse of love and revenge from unknown eons ago descend upon them. Time and time again, century after century, one man kills the other for the affection of the woman. Will it be the same pattern for Alison, Roger and Gwyn? I must admit to reading the Owl Service twice, as I could not fathom it the first time. Welsh legend combined with language from four decades ago left me frequently perplexed. Take the title, for one. I thought it was about owls delivering messages. My fellow philistines, it pertains to a complete dining set decorated with stylized floral owls. (With this tip, this review is already helpful!) The atmosphere of the book is heavy, brooding, eerie and leads you to expect, like the Welsh villagers, that something is coming down from the mountains. Alan Garner weaves magic that you suddenly realize you are at the center of a storm. Let this story blow you away.

Reading Alan Garner is not a spectator sport. You have to participate quite energetically: be alert to pick up on all the clues. He doesn't do explaining. That's why some readers have been left feeling bewildered. With that in mind, let me set the scene for The Owl Service, especially for American readers who don't have some of the background needed to pick up on the small hints he drops in the turn of a phrase. All this is established in the early chapters, but not spelt out. The central figure is the young teenager Alison. Her father died and her mother remarried. Clive Bradley is a well-meaning but emotionally clueless man, though of course he is aware of the typical issues of stepfatherhood. He has his own son, Roger, about Alison's age. So they are an upper-middle class English family on holiday (vacation) in a house that Alison's mother (or strictly speaking, Alison) owns in a deep isolated valley in Wales and where they have a local Welsh woman, Nancy, who works for them as cook and housekeeper. Nancy has a son, Gwyn, about the same age as the others...and attracted to Alison. Then there is Huw Halfbacon who is - or appears to be - a slow-witted garden servant (why do all the villagers address him with a title of great respect?) Now already you have three tensions established: first, the UK class thing of the householder and the servant, with differing levels of money, speech, and education. Nancy is conflicted about her "Welshness" and wants Gwyn to get out of it: she actually prefers to be in the English world, where she says "I know my place" lowly though that place is. Although she has sent Gwyn to the best local school, she doesn't like that they teach him Welsh language and history. This leads to the next tension: the Welsh/English thing, with all its past memories of the Celtic resentment of the down-to-earth, practical, invading "English" who pushed the dreamy, poetic, magic-believing Celtic nations, with their Gaelic languages, to the western fringe of Britain, and from the 5th century onwards often treated them as tiresome eccentrics. And finally, do I need to stress the tension of having two teenage boys and one girl. This is what brings to life the ancient curse of repetition that hangs over this remote Welsh valley, known and understood by the locals talking Welsh amongst each other in the shops: the ineluctable repetition of an ancient drama of magic, jealousy and murder. OK. Now let's develop the characters a bit. Clive, the stepfather, is a "rough diamond." He's made a lot of money and has no patience with nuance. Wants money to resolve everything. His first wife left him - they don't talk about that, especially the son Roger. Alison's mother was criticized for remarrying so soon and possibly for money. Nancy the cook grew up in the valley but left it following a tragedy and spent most of her life in the nearby town, Aberystwyth. Now she has returned, full of a sort of inverse snobbery and tremendous conflic

I love Alan Garner's books. His amalgam of ancient myth and topical fantasy always fascinates me-- and this one the most of all.Other reviewers have captured the plot line perfectly, so I'll not repeat that here. I would like to point out one aspect of the book that no one else seems to have noticed-- the symbolism.Alison is a girl on the cusp of puberty. When a girl is that age, one always begins to wonder how she's going to turn out. Is the emerging surge toward independence and autonomy going to take over and turn her into something cruel and horrific, or will she grow beyond that to mature into something beautiful and wise, if still perhaps slightly scary. OR-- to put it in terms of this book's central question-- will she come out 'feathers or flowers'?The hidden portrait in this book that forces itself on people, causing them to discover and notice it, is the perfect parallel to the emerging character of Alison. When the book begins she is still a little girl. By the end, she isn't. And the ending [which I won't give away] is symbolic of which way she'll go as an adult.As to some of the reviews on this site written by young readers who fail to understand what the book is about, I can only say that here is further proof that learning to 'read' is no guarantee of literacy, sad to say. Kids who actually know how to understand what they read, including my own two, love this book and aren't put off at all by its unusual and enigmatic style. In this case, to paraphrase Marshall Macluhan, the mystery IS the message.

I first read this book almost 30 years ago, when I was about 11 or 12, and, much like another good book I've reviewed here, Shadow Castle, Alan Garner's The Owl Service has stayed with me. It's an amazingly sophisticated read for youth fiction. It was this book that lead me to further explore ancient British mythology (check out Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood series of novels). The characters are sharply drawn and feel real, and the story itself is so intriguing. I highly recommend.

The Owl Service is an amazing book. It can be read on a series of levels as it explores everyday life, social injustice as well as offering an insight into Welsh mythology. To top it all, it is a phenominally good read and very hard to put down. Garner, as always, researches his background material well and those familiar with his work will know he always relates his novels to some aspect of British folklore. This book still creates the same mental imagery for me that it did 15 years ago when I studied it at college. It deserves every one if its 5 stars.