Book Review: "Treacle Walker" by Alan Garner

‘What’s amiss?’ said Joe. ‘I’ll tell you what’s amiss. I shall. I shall that. You come here, you and your box and your pots and your donkey stone, and fetch in enough to make me frit to death. You’re on about bones and all sorts; and then you’re off, some road or other, and I can’t tell where I am. I’ve got a pain in my eye. I can’t see proper. And I go down the bog and get stuck; and this chap with no clothes on and a daft silly hat, he sits up in the water and he makes no more sense than you do. He says I’ve got glammeritis, and then Stonehenge Kit, he’s gone, and so’s my best dobber; and Whizzy’s with a Brit Basher and they’re after Kit and the mirror’s all wrong then he’s back in the picture.

There are many books that I choose to read out of pure curiosity of why they are named the way they are. One of the examples of this is Alan Garner's book Treacle Walker. As it states in the book, nobody really knows why he's called that but out of my random books of the week, this one has to be one of the more difficult to read. I had to keep looking up references to things and reading around. For a short book, it did take me a few days to finish because of all the back-and-forth reading, referencing and writing down definitions I was doing. But, in the end, I'm glad I did. It made for a really entertaining, quite different and very interesting read.

As for the plot, I have to admit that at first I had no idea what was going on because of the way language was used. The place where time does not seem to exist properly comes to mind, or even that these characters exist outside some real sense of time we can understand. Joe is the main character who marks time by listening for a train at midday, he plays the bone flute and he is visited by someone called Treacle Walker. Joe's bone flute summons a bird and yet, it also does other things (you'll have to read the book to find out what). Wearing an eyepatch and realising that there are things his bad eye sees that his good eye cannot, Thin Amren (another character) states that Joe has a form of second sight. One of the lines I enjoyed in this book the most is when Joe asks Treacle what he wants more and he replies "Oblivion. Home." It is a fascinating but short conversation.

This book almost feels like one of those expressionist paintings, being coloured with some form of second sight, existing outside of time and space, imagery that doesn't quite make sense unless you lift the lid on the madness and supernatural stuff that's going on. There's a ton of symbolism in the mirrors, the seeing, the cuckoo and obviously our good friend, Treacle Walker.

I did not like the fact that many people wrote 'I did not finish this because I did not understand what was going on...' I mean, neither did I at first, but I made an effort to look up words and phrases in order to decipher what was going on. It's not every day that I do that and ultimately, I would rather do that than read another David Foster Wallace book. In all aspects, Treacle Walker was far easier, much more enjoyable and did not feel like an ego trip for the author.

It was a difficult read yes, and sometimes it was hard to know exactly what was going on but my advice to people is to give the book a chance, take some time with it and even listen to it if you need to - but don't give up on it. It is actually a really enjoyable book with some supernatural themes that make you realise how important sight is to everyone. It serves as a delicate but deep message about the intricacies of time, life and the experience of being outside of the regular linear world. A post-modern novel for the post-modern age, it has had a lot of effort put into writing it.