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I sing the eagle.
"Bone of the Cloud. The Clashing Rock.
The Hard Darkness."
It hangs above the grave mound.
I sing, dreaming...
William Buckley was transported to Australia in 1801. He escaped and lived as an Aborigine for thirty-one years. In this visionary novel, Alan Garner is true to William the Cheshire bricklayer and William the Aboriginal spiritual leader, as William is true to his fate. The result is extraordinary.
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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 decade, if not the century.
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