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Strandloper
William Buckley was transported to Australia in 1801. He escaped and lived as an Aborigine for 31 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.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
12 people are currently reading
457 people want to read
About the author
Alan Garner
81 books749 followersAlan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.
Born into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. Garner completed a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973).
Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Born into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. Garner completed a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973).
Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
August 31, 2008
Strandloper is a masterwork from one of the English language's most important writers. After reading this one, readers are advised to go on to Thursbitch and the allegedly-for-young-readers Owl Service, Stone Book Quartet and Red Shift. Garner is far more significant than our literati have yet realized.
January 24, 2014
A short novel very loosely based on the experiences of William Buckley, a British man transported to Australia who lived among the Aborigines there.
It's an impressive piece of literature; but the ways in which Garner's tale differs from the historical events is very illuminating of Garner's concerns.
One of the main themes of the book is drawing a parallel between the 'primitive' rituals and beliefs of the Aborigines and those of rural Britain - this is done masterfully. It's the sort of goal that, described briefly, sounds doubtful - but Garner describes individuals whose ignorance, from a modern perspective, is shocking - but does so in a way that gives a sense of a deep and abiding respect for human dignity.
(This theme of rural ignorance tempered with an ancient dignity is also found in Garner's novel, Thursbitch.)
Does it reflect reality? That's another question. Garner is deeply interested in linguistics and the power of language. In his tale, Buckley's 'crime' is accepting lessons in reading and writing from a local aristocrat's son. (In truth, he was accused of receiving stolen goods, and was illiterate throughout his long life.)
Garner is also a folklorist, specializing in the traditions of the British Isles. The English village that he describes is suffused with 'pagan' rituals, coexisting with Christianity. The rhymes and language of these traditions, as well as the dialect of the villagers, is vivid - the reader can practically hear the songs and the speech of the people. This depiction's convincingness depends on showing a remote, isolated population. Buckley is described as never having been 10 miles from the place of his birth. History records that, on the contrary, he'd been in the army, fought in the Netherlands, and was arrested in London.
This is not to say that I appreciate any less a story which is in large part about the magic of words. But Garner's 'wise fools' are, in a way, as mythical as the folkloric legends he studies.
The bittersweet romance of the story, with Buckley being sustained by the token his sweetheart gave him, and his dream of returning home to his true love, is heartbreakingly effective. The truth, of course, is that Buckley never returned to England (nor was he ever so naive as to think that he would walk home through China). But it makes a good tale; and rings true, in the way that folk tales can often be more true than history.
It's an impressive piece of literature; but the ways in which Garner's tale differs from the historical events is very illuminating of Garner's concerns.
One of the main themes of the book is drawing a parallel between the 'primitive' rituals and beliefs of the Aborigines and those of rural Britain - this is done masterfully. It's the sort of goal that, described briefly, sounds doubtful - but Garner describes individuals whose ignorance, from a modern perspective, is shocking - but does so in a way that gives a sense of a deep and abiding respect for human dignity.
(This theme of rural ignorance tempered with an ancient dignity is also found in Garner's novel, Thursbitch.)
Does it reflect reality? That's another question. Garner is deeply interested in linguistics and the power of language. In his tale, Buckley's 'crime' is accepting lessons in reading and writing from a local aristocrat's son. (In truth, he was accused of receiving stolen goods, and was illiterate throughout his long life.)
Garner is also a folklorist, specializing in the traditions of the British Isles. The English village that he describes is suffused with 'pagan' rituals, coexisting with Christianity. The rhymes and language of these traditions, as well as the dialect of the villagers, is vivid - the reader can practically hear the songs and the speech of the people. This depiction's convincingness depends on showing a remote, isolated population. Buckley is described as never having been 10 miles from the place of his birth. History records that, on the contrary, he'd been in the army, fought in the Netherlands, and was arrested in London.
This is not to say that I appreciate any less a story which is in large part about the magic of words. But Garner's 'wise fools' are, in a way, as mythical as the folkloric legends he studies.
The bittersweet romance of the story, with Buckley being sustained by the token his sweetheart gave him, and his dream of returning home to his true love, is heartbreakingly effective. The truth, of course, is that Buckley never returned to England (nor was he ever so naive as to think that he would walk home through China). But it makes a good tale; and rings true, in the way that folk tales can often be more true than history.
February 22, 2012
I very much enjoyed Strandloper. Other readers might have trouble with the dialects in this novel. I was able to decipher them without much difficulty, but the author gives no explanations or assistance to readers. Garner’s radical divergence from history might disturb those who prefer their historical fiction to be closer to verifiable facts. When historical figures are fictionalized, it’s delightful when the result speaks to me on a personal level, and is congruent with my own values. This is a lovely fiction from my perspective. It reminds me of all those very compelling Pagan martyr fictions about Hypatia of Alexandria. It’s too bad that the truth about Hypatia is more complex. I am someone who tends to research historical fiction when I’m interested in the subject it covers. So I proceeded to uncover the truth about William Buckley, the historical protagonist of Strandloper. Please note that if you are searching for him on the internet, you should add Australia to your search terms to avoid being deluged with results related to the conservative pundit William F. Buckley.
Even though Strandloper can't be considered historically accurate, it was an amazingly good story. It also led me to learn a bit more about Australian history through the research I did on William Buckley after reading it. I'm glad I selected this book as my Australian read for the Around the World challenge.
For the complete review including discussion of the real William Buckley and historical resources about him, see the latest post on my new book blog at:
http://maskedpersona.blogspot.com/
Even though Strandloper can't be considered historically accurate, it was an amazingly good story. It also led me to learn a bit more about Australian history through the research I did on William Buckley after reading it. I'm glad I selected this book as my Australian read for the Around the World challenge.
For the complete review including discussion of the real William Buckley and historical resources about him, see the latest post on my new book blog at:
http://maskedpersona.blogspot.com/
April 30, 2025
Alan Garner does not believe in giving his readers an easy time and Strandloper certainly makes you work hard. Starting from strange folk traditions in C19th England, it takes you through the stages of William Buckley’s life, from earnest young man to Aboriginal ‘feather foot’ to a curious amalgam, a sort of shaman in his native land. I’ll admit that I struggled until the dark humour of chapters 10 and 11 won me over. Like much of Garner’s work it’s mythic fiction, difficult but rewarding.
October 20, 2013
This may be the most baffling novel I’ve ever read. I don’t know how to describe it, much less critique it. I can certainly say that it is a singular reading experience, and for that I am greatly appreciative. It is a book that requires, at least on the first reading, the surrender of one’s faculties, especially one’s critical faculties. Not that it wouldn’t be interesting to criticize, but it would get in the way of the experience. This novel requires what Keats called “negative capability.”
My one Goodreads friend who has reviewed the book, Abailart, says one must remain “alert” to the book’s qualities. That’s a good way of putting it. Alert and accepting, letting oneself go with the flow, wherever the author takes you.
I can’t say I “enjoyed” reading the novel, but it is a special, valuable experience with many rewards, especially in its rhythms and language, from Cheshire dialect to Aboriginal spiritual language.
My one Goodreads friend who has reviewed the book, Abailart, says one must remain “alert” to the book’s qualities. That’s a good way of putting it. Alert and accepting, letting oneself go with the flow, wherever the author takes you.
I can’t say I “enjoyed” reading the novel, but it is a special, valuable experience with many rewards, especially in its rhythms and language, from Cheshire dialect to Aboriginal spiritual language.
August 30, 2011
Apart from reading some of Garner's books to classes of kids many decades ago, have not looked since. Chance put it in my hand. Wonderful at every level. You have to be engaged and
hear
the text. Hear the words, the dialect, the music, the animality and sounds of a myriad nature. You have to be alert to, to hear, an intense authorial voice that pulls together in what is a very short book vast sweeps of history and space. You need to go down in the convicts' quarters, follow the sea imagery, the rivers and streams, the bushland and plains, verdancies and aridities, fire and growth. Paganism and Christianity, time-loaded and timelessness, the routine quotidian of human injustice and fun in causing pain, love, togetherness, aloneness. It's a palimpsest. You have to try to match the author, and be aware of it at every level.
September 7, 2022
When I saw "Alan Garner" on the long list for this year's Booker Prize (and now it's on the short list!) I thought I must be missing something. I still have the copies of Moon of Gomrath and Weirdstone of Brisingamen that I read in the 70s, and I enjoyed them, but I didn't remember them as being special and I hadn't heard of Garner since. I didn't know, for example, that The Owl Service had been a TV series, or that he'd written many other books and ventured into grown-up topics and materials. So I ordered Treacle Walker and, while waiting for that, I downloaded Kindle editions of Owl Service and Strandloper.
Strandloper is a very strange book and makes perhaps unreasonable demands on the reader. It is divided into four sections, and each of the first three immerses us in a different nearly opaque language environment. The first is mostly lower-class dialect from rural 17th century England. The second is expands to include the jargon, cant, and dialects of sailors, thieves, and Irishmen on a ship heading for Australia. The third moves entirely into the shamanistic universe of aborigines. You never have enough information to understand all the words in any of these sections. You have to surrender yourself to the impenetrable certainty of the characters who use the words with confidence and the author's rhetorical patterns and rhythms. You can general infer approximately what's going on, but pages go by without a sentence you can nail down completely. This is all quite clearly purposeful. You're never in any doubt that the *author* knows exactly what each character means. It feels very researched and authentic--whether it actually is or not, I don't know--but he chooses to leave you on the outside of his knowledge.
The inevitable result--again, presumably entirely intentional--is that you feel you are following the main character from one set of semi-mystic mumbo jumbo to another. You experience rituals, initiations, re-christenings, and outright visions manifested in a thick stew of syntactic form with restricted access to semantic content. You get the distinct shape of the hero's journey while constantly feeling that part of the content is eluding you.
And the journey itself is full of myth, mostly pagan both in England and Australia, though the rites of these myths are several times performed in a Christian church. In the end
The result feels like a tour-de-force of a strange kind of high fantasy in which world creation, language creation, dreaming, and magic, become perplexingly intermingled. Every sentence reminds you of its otherness, and the crafting of that otherness seems to be the author's primary concern.
I then went and looked on line to see what others took from the book and found this sentence: "The Tolkien scholar Jason Fisher, reviewing the book for the Mythopoeic Society's Mythprint, calls it 'a remarkable, luminous, difficult book.'" For personal reasons having little to do with Garner I was mildly stunned. First of all, I was reading and re-reading the Lord of the Rings in the 70s when there were just starting to be a few books about Tolkien, so the idea of a "Tolkien scholar" force a kind of ontological shift in my thinking. Of course it's obvious in retrospect, but in my own internal world a"Tolkien scholar" would be nearly as mythical as a hobbit. (And had I known that was a career path, I might at one time have chosen it! And second, the Mythopoeic Society still exists? And is sufficiently established to be a source people cite? Gott in Himmel! My best friend and I joined the society in our teens when their publications arrived irregularly if at all and had the feel and authority of low-grade fan fiction.
But personal revelations aside, yes, I can see a way to place Strandloper into the limited genre of mythopoeia. For me that means it tries to bring the reader into contact with the numinous through deliberate myth-making (and most fantasy fiction is not mythopoeia, at least in my experience.)
Strandloper is a very strange book and makes perhaps unreasonable demands on the reader. It is divided into four sections, and each of the first three immerses us in a different nearly opaque language environment. The first is mostly lower-class dialect from rural 17th century England. The second is expands to include the jargon, cant, and dialects of sailors, thieves, and Irishmen on a ship heading for Australia. The third moves entirely into the shamanistic universe of aborigines. You never have enough information to understand all the words in any of these sections. You have to surrender yourself to the impenetrable certainty of the characters who use the words with confidence and the author's rhetorical patterns and rhythms. You can general infer approximately what's going on, but pages go by without a sentence you can nail down completely. This is all quite clearly purposeful. You're never in any doubt that the *author* knows exactly what each character means. It feels very researched and authentic--whether it actually is or not, I don't know--but he chooses to leave you on the outside of his knowledge.
The inevitable result--again, presumably entirely intentional--is that you feel you are following the main character from one set of semi-mystic mumbo jumbo to another. You experience rituals, initiations, re-christenings, and outright visions manifested in a thick stew of syntactic form with restricted access to semantic content. You get the distinct shape of the hero's journey while constantly feeling that part of the content is eluding you.
And the journey itself is full of myth, mostly pagan both in England and Australia, though the rites of these myths are several times performed in a Christian church. In the end
The result feels like a tour-de-force of a strange kind of high fantasy in which world creation, language creation, dreaming, and magic, become perplexingly intermingled. Every sentence reminds you of its otherness, and the crafting of that otherness seems to be the author's primary concern.
I then went and looked on line to see what others took from the book and found this sentence: "The Tolkien scholar Jason Fisher, reviewing the book for the Mythopoeic Society's Mythprint, calls it 'a remarkable, luminous, difficult book.'" For personal reasons having little to do with Garner I was mildly stunned. First of all, I was reading and re-reading the Lord of the Rings in the 70s when there were just starting to be a few books about Tolkien, so the idea of a "Tolkien scholar" force a kind of ontological shift in my thinking. Of course it's obvious in retrospect, but in my own internal world a"Tolkien scholar" would be nearly as mythical as a hobbit. (And had I known that was a career path, I might at one time have chosen it! And second, the Mythopoeic Society still exists? And is sufficiently established to be a source people cite? Gott in Himmel! My best friend and I joined the society in our teens when their publications arrived irregularly if at all and had the feel and authority of low-grade fan fiction.
But personal revelations aside, yes, I can see a way to place Strandloper into the limited genre of mythopoeia. For me that means it tries to bring the reader into contact with the numinous through deliberate myth-making (and most fantasy fiction is not mythopoeia, at least in my experience.)
November 25, 2024
The story of William Buckley is fascinating as it offers readers some insight into Indigenous life, customs and beliefs prior to settlement/invasion. This is from the settler/invader point of view. And it is from this point of view that Alan Garner reimagines the story framing it in terms of pagan ritual in rural Cheshire and marrying this to the Dreaming into which Buckley is inducted by local Aborigines who save his life as an escaped convict. Garner’s vision in the book is of one Dreaming, “One tree was all, and all the world one Dreaming.” (198)
This novel will alienate readers who feel there is an overreach into Aboriginal culture and beliefs but the novel acknowledges the displacement of Indigenous people, deep connection to land and the profound significance of culture and belief systems. The focus on language and learning and different language registers reflects the displacement of all people from nature and the harm that is done to the environment. This is, as always with Alan Garner, a book full of wisdom.
Garner describes Bunjil farewelling Murrangurk/William and writes “It was not by chance that you were sung, for chance is but a little dream, said Bunjil. We are the bees of the invisible. We gather the honey of the invisible and store it in the great, yellow hive of the visible, for everlasting life.” (182)
Back in England, William looks for Het as he promises but who has married in his thirty year absence. He stops her from killing her bees. “William began to sing. And the bees left the shop and settled on him, over him, his clothes and face and skin, until no part of him could be seen but the bits of their hair and wings. And he sang.” (193)
Her says to William, “Well, they do learn you summat.”
This novel will alienate readers who feel there is an overreach into Aboriginal culture and beliefs but the novel acknowledges the displacement of Indigenous people, deep connection to land and the profound significance of culture and belief systems. The focus on language and learning and different language registers reflects the displacement of all people from nature and the harm that is done to the environment. This is, as always with Alan Garner, a book full of wisdom.
Garner describes Bunjil farewelling Murrangurk/William and writes “It was not by chance that you were sung, for chance is but a little dream, said Bunjil. We are the bees of the invisible. We gather the honey of the invisible and store it in the great, yellow hive of the visible, for everlasting life.” (182)
Back in England, William looks for Het as he promises but who has married in his thirty year absence. He stops her from killing her bees. “William began to sing. And the bees left the shop and settled on him, over him, his clothes and face and skin, until no part of him could be seen but the bits of their hair and wings. And he sang.” (193)
Her says to William, “Well, they do learn you summat.”
April 11, 2019
I don't know that I'm impartial - I'm a couple of years or so younger than Garner, not a classicist, and I (just) remember him at school. (Old Mancunians will know what I mean). I also saw him play Antony with Dudley Moore as Enobarbus. Alderley Edge I don't know all that well - I come from a little further down the Bollin valley. I've just read - backwards - "The Voice that Thunders", with a good deal of (unexpected) emotion. If you read it that way round, you may think you know a bit about "Strandloper" before you read it. I've only come to both books a quarter of a century late, and I've just read the opening chapter of "Strandloper" for the first time. I suppose, as a result, I did know a little beforehand. But none of it blunted the power and the portent of the opening pages, or concealed their roots. I'm afraid Garner is the real thing. So much so that the Nobel Prize for Literature would (I hope will) mean nothing to him. The man who could write about that, as deftly and deeply as he did, has become the craftsman his ancestors were. That is worth any number of Regius Professorships.
November 23, 2021
An ambitious but deeply flawed attempt by this mythopoetic writer to expand his global reach, the novel’s multicultural approach fails to persuade, however musical and resonant the prose style. In the present moment the narrative reeks of cultural appropriation though when it was published this might have felt more like a large minded multiculturalism. This may benefit from a later reread.
June 3, 2019
This books showcases Garner's fascination with language, with the incomprehensible, with the direct experience of mythology. It is very dreamy in places, very difficult to pick reality from fantasy/dream/delirium. It was fascinating reading, but I'm not sure I enjoyed it.
October 19, 2020
Wow. Just wow.
March 24, 2022
Beautiful and terrible and sad - dream time - songs - tears
March 11, 2025
Least favourite Alan Garner I've read is still pretty good
December 7, 2018
You don't so much read Strandloper as immerse yourself in it and let it push and pull you about. It's familiar Garner, right enough, with added metaphysical transcendency (or a bit bonkers, if you prefer). It's not a book you'll forget in a hurry.
September 27, 2016
What a book: a short shamanic epic that is utterly without pretension. Garner's novels are almost all about one place - his part of Cheshire - and their scope comes from his exploration of what he calls (in Boneland) 'Deep Place': a sense that the past is present, and that ancestors who once lived there are linked spiritually with those who live there now. Strandloper finds a way to journey away from Cheshire through the story of William Buckley, seemingly a real person who lived in Cheshire at the end of the Eighteenth Century, was transported to Australia, escaped and lived with the native Australians, becoming a holy man. Eventually, as white colonisation spreads across the continent, he returns home.
It's a simple enough story, and it's a short book, but Garner's writing is unique and his approach is unlike what you find in all but a few historical novels. He has always been a master of brevity, of terse, Anglo-Saxon diction and sometimes of dialect. Here, that style lends itself to an impressionistic evocation of Buckley and his world that takes you not just into another time, but into another kind of consciousness. He enters an alternative way of being by evoking a way of speaking, and by extension a way of thinking, that comes from the past.
Even as a Cheshire-man, Buckley has a quasi-shamanic sense of his environment and the forces at work around him. Following his arrest, the transportation ship is a jumble of speech-registers and dialects: the journey, we sense, isn't just taking him to another continent. The fulfilment comes when he is adopted by the aboriginal people, who recognise him as a Dreamer, someone capable of mastering the spirit world which is at the heart of their experience. All this is conveyed in the symbolic language of shamanic consciousness. Finally, he returns home, but remains attuned to the spirit world and finds its presence in Cheshire, where he continues his rituals, dreams and dances.
The closest writer I know to Garner is Ted Hughes. This is crow poetry become a novel.
It's a simple enough story, and it's a short book, but Garner's writing is unique and his approach is unlike what you find in all but a few historical novels. He has always been a master of brevity, of terse, Anglo-Saxon diction and sometimes of dialect. Here, that style lends itself to an impressionistic evocation of Buckley and his world that takes you not just into another time, but into another kind of consciousness. He enters an alternative way of being by evoking a way of speaking, and by extension a way of thinking, that comes from the past.
Even as a Cheshire-man, Buckley has a quasi-shamanic sense of his environment and the forces at work around him. Following his arrest, the transportation ship is a jumble of speech-registers and dialects: the journey, we sense, isn't just taking him to another continent. The fulfilment comes when he is adopted by the aboriginal people, who recognise him as a Dreamer, someone capable of mastering the spirit world which is at the heart of their experience. All this is conveyed in the symbolic language of shamanic consciousness. Finally, he returns home, but remains attuned to the spirit world and finds its presence in Cheshire, where he continues his rituals, dreams and dances.
The closest writer I know to Garner is Ted Hughes. This is crow poetry become a novel.
October 15, 2024
This was right up my street. A heavily embellished retelling of the real life account of a Cheshire bricklayer, William Buckley, who was banished to the Australian colonies for taking part in a pagan fertility ritual and spent 30 years as a spiritual leader among first nation people. It's the perfect setting to allow Garner to explore parallels between cultures and our interconnectedness with the land.
Like his other novels, there's a lot going on in a relatively short amount pages. I liked the odd parallel of the Henny Penny folk tale and the first people's urgent premonition of the sky falling down, with their respective twists of fate. One particular point that really got me was the language. It reminded me of the 'shadow tongue' that Paul Kingsnorth developed for his masterpiece 'The Wake'. It's weird but you always get the gist. There's a great bit on the prison ship where people from all over the British Isles are together in the hold, trying to figure out what each other are saying. Regional dialect was so varied anyway, and nothing was standardise, the irony is not lost on them.
There's a great line when the colonialists finally arrive to claim the first nationers land and the landowner waves some deeds around claiming he owns the land to Buckley, now called Murrangurk.
"Nay, youth" said Murrangurk. "The land owns us: every mortal one."
Like his other novels, there's a lot going on in a relatively short amount pages. I liked the odd parallel of the Henny Penny folk tale and the first people's urgent premonition of the sky falling down, with their respective twists of fate. One particular point that really got me was the language. It reminded me of the 'shadow tongue' that Paul Kingsnorth developed for his masterpiece 'The Wake'. It's weird but you always get the gist. There's a great bit on the prison ship where people from all over the British Isles are together in the hold, trying to figure out what each other are saying. Regional dialect was so varied anyway, and nothing was standardise, the irony is not lost on them.
There's a great line when the colonialists finally arrive to claim the first nationers land and the landowner waves some deeds around claiming he owns the land to Buckley, now called Murrangurk.
"Nay, youth" said Murrangurk. "The land owns us: every mortal one."
February 16, 2014
I was spurred to read this by The Voice That Thunders. Garner put his heart and soul into this novel. It draws on his eternal themes of loops of time, myth, identity, spirituality, but it's much harder work for the reader than his nominally children's books. There's no hand-holding by the author -- you are left to figure out for yourself what the Aborigines are doing.
It's not a long book, but I got a bit bogged down on the Aboriginal section, which started to feel too worthy and Noble Savage-like. But it was redeemed by the final section, when William returns home and blends his two worlds. The real William Buckley didn't do this, but it makes perfect sense in the novel. Perhaps the ending is too neat, but it's beautifully and poignantly executed. Hesitating between three and four stars, I ended up with four, but three and a half would be more accurate. It reminded me a little bit of Riddley Walker -- except it's not nearly as good!
It's not a long book, but I got a bit bogged down on the Aboriginal section, which started to feel too worthy and Noble Savage-like. But it was redeemed by the final section, when William returns home and blends his two worlds. The real William Buckley didn't do this, but it makes perfect sense in the novel. Perhaps the ending is too neat, but it's beautifully and poignantly executed. Hesitating between three and four stars, I ended up with four, but three and a half would be more accurate. It reminded me a little bit of Riddley Walker -- except it's not nearly as good!
December 28, 2012
Alan Garner's Thursbitch was such a delight that I opened Strandloper with rare excitement. I was not disappointed. Garner writes with brilliant, bare precision, even if he can demand much of his readers.
As the cover tells us, the essence of the plot is the true story of William Buckley, a Cheshire bricklayer who was unjustly deported to Australia in 1801, escaped, and lived for 31 years with the Aborigines. Garner weaves together Cheshire folklore and Aboriginal spiritualism in separate melodies that blend to create a single harmony. This beautiful and moving tale is not always an easy read; old Cheshire dialect is as obscure as Aboriginal words and the reader sometimes has to look for meaning in the context rather than the words themselves. In a way, it is like looking at a landscape through a stained glass window; there are layers of beauty that reward the eye that is willing to concentrate.
Garner says, in The Voice That Thunders, that a writer has to have a sense of the numinous. That single word probably sums up Strandloper.
Numinous.
As the cover tells us, the essence of the plot is the true story of William Buckley, a Cheshire bricklayer who was unjustly deported to Australia in 1801, escaped, and lived for 31 years with the Aborigines. Garner weaves together Cheshire folklore and Aboriginal spiritualism in separate melodies that blend to create a single harmony. This beautiful and moving tale is not always an easy read; old Cheshire dialect is as obscure as Aboriginal words and the reader sometimes has to look for meaning in the context rather than the words themselves. In a way, it is like looking at a landscape through a stained glass window; there are layers of beauty that reward the eye that is willing to concentrate.
Garner says, in The Voice That Thunders, that a writer has to have a sense of the numinous. That single word probably sums up Strandloper.
Numinous.
August 26, 2016
William Buckley, transported to Australia in the 1790s, escapes, intending to walk north to China, then turn left for England and home, and end up spending thirty years amongst Aboriginals, taken in as a resurrected warrior and becoming a beloved and respected holy man. He eventually returns home.
And that's the story, and a strange, powerful and beautiful story it is, but with Garner it's the language. The words and folk dances of Buckley's home, the babble of dialects and cant on the ship, the precise and evocative language of the Aboriginals that reflect a whole different way of being. The language represents community, gang, tribe, and Buckley is initiated into each and is subjected to injustice, privation brutality and the ravenous incursion of colonialism, but the language lives on in Bukley, as does the Dreaming, fused into a transcendental final Dance at the climax of the book.
It's an incredible, beautiful, funny, mind-expanding, heartbreaking book. Garner working at the height of his not inconsiderable powers. There really is nobody else like him.
And that's the story, and a strange, powerful and beautiful story it is, but with Garner it's the language. The words and folk dances of Buckley's home, the babble of dialects and cant on the ship, the precise and evocative language of the Aboriginals that reflect a whole different way of being. The language represents community, gang, tribe, and Buckley is initiated into each and is subjected to injustice, privation brutality and the ravenous incursion of colonialism, but the language lives on in Bukley, as does the Dreaming, fused into a transcendental final Dance at the climax of the book.
It's an incredible, beautiful, funny, mind-expanding, heartbreaking book. Garner working at the height of his not inconsiderable powers. There really is nobody else like him.
February 1, 2011
A book unlike any other, Garner is a true artist a poet more than a novelist.
A difficult book I don't pretend to fully understand it all. Set partly in Garner's beloved Cheshire and partly in Australia, each effecting the other in subtle ways, in that it reminded me of "Red shift" or the later "Thursbitch" but here rather than previous events affecting different people across time, the story is wholly about William Buckley and his quite separate lives as a Cheshire peasant and an Australian aborigine. The story is loosely based on fact William Buckley did exist, he was transported to Australia as punishment for a minor offence, he did escape and spend over thirty years with the aborigines. The book however is largely fiction, not that that makes any difference to it's quality.
A difficult book I don't pretend to fully understand it all. Set partly in Garner's beloved Cheshire and partly in Australia, each effecting the other in subtle ways, in that it reminded me of "Red shift" or the later "Thursbitch" but here rather than previous events affecting different people across time, the story is wholly about William Buckley and his quite separate lives as a Cheshire peasant and an Australian aborigine. The story is loosely based on fact William Buckley did exist, he was transported to Australia as punishment for a minor offence, he did escape and spend over thirty years with the aborigines. The book however is largely fiction, not that that makes any difference to it's quality.
June 10, 2016
Will Buckley, a young country man, finds that the practice of an ancient rite gets him sent to a penal colony. He escapes to live the next three decades of his life immersed in the lives and dreaming of the aboriginal peoples.
The story of Will is also the story of the links between the spirit keepers of two cultures. The book is set in the time period when much of the magic of England has been confined to folk customs, which are being suppressed by the authorities. This suppression and oppression is extended to other peoples all over the globe.
North Americans unfamiliar with the regional dialect may find some of the language difficult. I would suggest letting the meaning filter through the flow of the language. This is a remarkable work.
The story of Will is also the story of the links between the spirit keepers of two cultures. The book is set in the time period when much of the magic of England has been confined to folk customs, which are being suppressed by the authorities. This suppression and oppression is extended to other peoples all over the globe.
North Americans unfamiliar with the regional dialect may find some of the language difficult. I would suggest letting the meaning filter through the flow of the language. This is a remarkable work.
March 26, 2013
More a schematic than an actual story. And awfully derivative of Red Shift. There's the artifact with talismanic juju, the fugues of visionary madness, the clipped dialogue and style...but there the doomed romance of the teenagers held it together, making it resonate and mocking it at the same time--but here there's no one to feel for. It's just a recital. Like one of those ponderously intoned ancient epic sagas, full of names and wind, signifying nothing. And the verbiage during the Aborigine section got awful Noble Savage--don't any of those people ever laugh or fart?
November 17, 2007
This is definitely Garner's weirdest book (and that is saying a LOT!) based on a true story of a young man who was "transported" from England to Australia in the 19th Century, ran away & was rescued by a group of Australian Aboriginals, lived with them for 20 years & then returned to the U.K. umder a pardon, this book requires the reader to enter into an almost magical realm where the border between the actual and the imagined completely evaporates.
September 30, 2009
The command of various kinds of slang, accent, and dialect by this author was amazing -- and uncompromising: no mercy for the reader. Stretching from the English countryside and an immemorial celtic/pagan past to Australia and a different immemorial aboriginal past, the book seemed dreamlike, a babel of voices. Sometimes you have to let the meaning of individual words go, so that the tale can sweep you up instead.
January 16, 2011
I have been working my way through a number of Alan Garner books. From the descriptions of the plot that I had seen this looked like the one that would appeal least to me, but most its reviewers were producing glowing reports – and they were right. It is certainly one of his top three books. I combines his common theme of overlapping time though in this case more of a loop of time with his always detailed research to create an intriguing tale.
August 23, 2016
Colonialism,dreamtime, the Transport,injustice,culture clash,galligaskins,mulla-mullung,string stram ring dong,going native,sadistic landlords,hedge papists, swaddledidaffs, 8 months in chains, 20 years in the desert,death sentences, sorrow and forgiveness, Odysseus returns,gripe griffin hold fast, Cornwall to Bone Country, Six Points of Time.
Here is the start of Time.
Here is the start of Time.
September 3, 2012
At first I was disappointed as I started to read this book having been a fan of Garner for years. However, the more I read, the better it got though it still comes nowhere near to the excellent Red Shift.
July 8, 2013
Read this book if you can! I think it's extraordinary. It's a series of initiations, through the medium of language - and takes you on a journey through the true, arduous heart of human identity. It's not easy, but Garner can be trusted to the nth degree. Read it if you dare!
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