Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Novel of the Century?, 23 Aug 1999
By A Customer
Alan Garner's books for children were always favourites of mine - dark, edgy and able to fully immerse you in the textures of the worlds he created. He never patronised, never apologised, just created and allowed the reader to enter.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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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strandloper, 18 Mar 2004
Alan Garner, steeped in the atmosphere and lore of his Cheshire birthplace, has over the decades produced a series of books that touch the soul at a deep level, awakening powerful emotions all but forgotten by modern man. His much loved children's books succeeded in evoking both a rare beauty and blind terror (who can forget the spine-chilling Mara in the Weirdstone of Brisingamen?), inspired by a profound respect for the existence of a potent "something other" within nature. In Strandloper Garner plunges deep into that primal mystery through his powerful evocation of the extraordinary life of William Buckley, a farm labourer whose own deep link with the "old ways" of his fellow villagers is rudely severed by his transportation to Australia. First forced to leave family and fianceé, he subsequently faces extreme hardship and near death to finally lose his identity as an 18th century English farmhand. The myths and sacred symbols that made up his world in the past are his connection into a new life, harsh and numinous, in which man is restored again to his primordial relationship with nature.
Garner skillfully works in the grand themes of time and eternity, the nature of religious worship and true wisdom, the value of education, linear and cylical time, the role of nature and the purpose of existence. He is a weaver of magic, gifted with the skill of the true poet, who is concerned with the soul of man. Buckleys's life is revealed as an exquisite web woven from his own archetypes and truths where dream shapes reality and makes it meaningful. The conclusion is sublime, moving this reader, for one, to tears. I would unequivocally recommend Strandloper as one of the most powerful and extraordinary books you are ever likely to read.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant melting pot, 13 Jul 2006
Alan Garner, who for many years has been publishing "children's" literature that no child could possibly understand, has finally given the world a full, frank "adult" novel. It's contrasting narrative voices - which are handled with the skill of a latter day William Faulkner - are all the more impressive for the fact that the novel is written in the third person. At every twist of the tale, as the title character journeys from 18th century England to penal colony Australia and back again, the emotional and intellectual changes that take place within him are expertly mirrored in the narrative voice. This is already one of the greatest of modern novels, and were it not for the fact that it languishes under the critially frowned upon genre of "fantasy", then it would become a staple of every university's curriculum. Well, ignor the critics, and ignor the genre heading - this is Faulkner not Tolkien.
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