Alan Garner on R4
Mar. 25th, 2009 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylFollowing on from last week's interview with Ursula Le Guin, yesterday's R4 feature involved another of my literary heroes, Alan Garner, in The Return to Brisingamen. Interviewed by the extremely enthusiastic John Waite — who had grown up in Cheshire, cycling across Alderley Edge on the trail of Weirdstone's heroes — Garner talked about his inspirations, his view of writing as a craft which would let him live up to the artistic standards set by his stone-carving and blacksmithing forebears.
Particularly interesting/horrifying was the story behind the awful moment in Weirdstone when Colin and Susan, fleeing from the mines of the svart alfar, have to crawl through a 9 inch shaft in the rock. According to Garner, the nightmarish jackknife, when the children have to flip over and Colin becomes stuck, was based on a real experience he had whilst caving. So vividly does he evoke the experience that some readers are, apparently, unable to read on — something Garner views a failure, but which is, in reality, proof of his writerly brilliance.
Particularly interesting/horrifying was the story behind the awful moment in Weirdstone when Colin and Susan, fleeing from the mines of the svart alfar, have to crawl through a 9 inch shaft in the rock. According to Garner, the nightmarish jackknife, when the children have to flip over and Colin becomes stuck, was based on a real experience he had whilst caving. So vividly does he evoke the experience that some readers are, apparently, unable to read on — something Garner views a failure, but which is, in reality, proof of his writerly brilliance.
