The Owl Service [Paperback]

When I read this in my early teens, I don't think I even vaguely understood it, but somehow it clawed its way under my skin and stayed there. I returned to it, ahem, quite a few years later, to find it a fascinating portrait of taut family dynamics (children adjusting to 'new' family structures), unspoken rivalries and generally the horrible hormonal tensions of adolescent change. It wasn't about owls at all!

It's a stunning, sparsely written and fast-paced read, underscored with a creepy, scary atmosphere that could well put you off family holidays in Wales for ever.

Some books go beyond being mere stories, tales with which to while away the hours, and become far more central within one's life. The Owl Service, which I first read at the age of about ten, is one such book for me. In my youth I was only concerned with the story of Alison, Gwyn and Roger and how the mythical past of a Welsh legend was reaching out to play itself out once again in the present day world, but with each successive reading, and there have been several, new meanings and layers of thought have revealed themselves. Around the age old tale of rivalries in love Garner has managed to weave comments on class (for example Gwyn's attempts to conform and lose his working-class Welsh roots, which he sees as a hinderance, are set against Roger's smug superiority, safe in his comfortable position as heir to the family firm); ambition (how far do we set our own parameters for what we can achieve, simply by settling for what is expected for us rather than holding out for what we really want) and the way the events of the real, everyday world run parallel with a much older world of imagination, myth and legend.

I probably discovered more about the possibilities of well-written fiction from this book than I did from any other. There are beautiful, haunting, descriptions such as Gwyn's nocturnal walk through the wood, spooked by phantom flames which he unconvincingly tries to reason away as marsh gas; there are moments of intense drama such as the attempt to escape from the valley during a torrential downpour and there are beautifully deft character descriptions: Gwyn's mother Nancy's fear and panic as she sees the past inevitably reaching out to the present for example, or the way Alison unknowingly plays the coquette. Above all perhaps it's the way Garner leaves the reader to work out the patterns and connections for themselves that impressed me. What you discover for yourself has a much greater dramatic impact than anything the author bluntly spoonfeeds into your mouth.

It's a clever, fabulous, wonderful book. Beautiful narrative drive, clever observations about themes which affect many children (being in a single-parent family for example and feeling that you don't quite belong, but being unsure whether that makes you special and clever or else something of a misfit) and haunting descriptive, subtle writing. It's glorious.

Two English teenagers, Alison and Roger, have been brought to a quiet Welsh valley by Roger’s father Clive and Alison’s mother (who remains offstage throughout the novel and interestingly, becomes one of those characters of whom we can only draw a picture from the conversations of others) to stay for the summer in a house which once belonged to Alison’s Uncle Bertram.
The house is also home to the mad gardener Huw, the surly and possessive housekeeper Nancy and her ambitious son, Gwyn.
It’s an impressive novel originally intended for a juvenile readership but, as these things tend to do, ended up being just as popular with adults.
The style is fast-paced, sparse, and doesn’t patronise the reader with pages, or even paragraphs of scene-setting. The reader learns all they need to know from the action, the language and the conversations. The name of the valley is never mentioned, nor even the village, yet within a few pages we are able to find our feet and things immediately start getting weird.
Alison, ill in bed seemingly with stomach-ache, is plagued by scratching noises from the attic above. Gwyn, sent to investigate, discovers only a dinner-service with a complex floral design around the edge of each piece.
Alison discovers that when she traces the design and cuts it out, elements of it can be folded to produce the stylised body of an owl.
The paper owls disappear as she creates them, and with them, the design from beneath the glaze of the plates.
It transpires that an ancient power is still bound by the valley and an emotional and physical triangle is repeating itself down through the ages, finding candidates in each generation to re-enact an old drama in order to release the power stored in the valley.
Huw, Nancy and even long-dead Bertram have secrets of their own which are not fully revealed until the final chapter.
The structure is interesting, in that it is based on the interpersonal dynamics of two sets of triangles, the background triangle being that of Clive, Huw and Nancy whose differences seem irreconcilable, set across divides of class, sex and race, and the secrets Nancy refuses to divulge and which Huw is incapable of explaining lucidly.
No doubt this is why Alison’s mother is kept ‘off the page’ as she is involved in neither triangle and would upset the balance.
Some of the language seems a little archaic now, but I can’t help feeling that it gives the book a kind of period charm.