Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Treacle Walker front cover

This book is about a convalescent young boy, Joe Coppock, with a lazy eye, who seemingly lives alone in a big house in the country, spending his days reading his favourite comic, Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit, playing with his marbles and collecting objects from his walks for his private collection. He keeps time by the passing of Noony, the midday train. One day, a rag and bone man stops by the pear tree in his garden. Joe exchanges an old pair of his pyjamas and a bone from a lamb with the rag and bone man, named Treacle Walker, for a donkey stone and a cup with his name on it. The rag and bone man introduces himself as a healer and instructs Joe to shine his front door step with the donkey stone. When Treacle Walker is gone, Joe discovers a strange paste at the bottom of the cup and accidentally rubs it on his good eye. Doing these two actions opens Joe's eyes to the unseen in his world that he has been blinded to, or as Thin Amran describes it, Joe has the case of the "glamourie". He is introduced to Thin Amran, a naked bog dweller, who is also known in the book as an ancient spirit. With the mentoring of Thin Amran and Treacle Walker, Joe discovers that his bad eye uncovers a hidden power which releases his beloved comic book characters from their paper prison and through the use of mirrors in his home, has him chasing them through a parallel universe. At the end, Joe takes over Treacle Walker's job, which is revealed to be a "psychopomp", or a guide of lost souls to the afterlife, which is signified through the reburial of Thin Amran.

Like other reviews I have read, for example, as emphasised by Maureen Kinkaid Speller, I found this book quite difficult to follow as I did not understand all the symbolism that went with the story.

"To fully achieve its effect, the text requires the reader to be more than an average reader, though even extremely knowledgeable readers are struggling with it. This is not reading as a collaborative effort so much as reading as a full-time research project, and that is not how people generally read."

This did not help with the made-up words included, which, as biker buddy's review rightly says, gave it a Roald Dahl feel. It was only after reading the reviews and researching the symbolism of some of the artefacts used in the story that I began to understand. For example, how the donkey stone and the paste open Joe's eyes to the glamourie, the souls needing rescuing, or how the cuckoo signifies death.

"What the eye doesn't see,” said the man, “the heart doesn't grieve for.” Or does it? For at the very moment you have Now, it flees. It is gone." I would argue, is perhaps the key quote of the entire book as it perfectly sums up Joe's relationship with time. Joe struggles with his vision with his lazy eye as he says sees the world around him "skewiffy", this in a sense makes him retreat into his comfort zone of comics, marbles and artefacts as this is one world that he can see and is tangible. In this sense, he is not bothered about going outside and seeing the world around him. "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for." However, when he releases his comic book characters into his mirrors and creates a parallel universe, seeing a replica of him self with his house and gardens in a different arrangement, he begins to mourn the normality of his "skewiffy world" and wishes things back to normal. However, as Treacle Walker tells him, even that world will not be the same forever and will change with time.

After I understood what the symbolism meant in this book, I enjoyed it and, being an avid researcher, I wanted to go through it with a fine-tooth comb to try and understand all the symbolism and words used in this puzzle of a novel. I definitely want to read more of Alan Garner's works.