Customer Reviews

Strandloper

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Strandloper is an almost unbearably beautiful book which repays every moment of the fourteen or so years the author took to write it.(You can read about that process in The Voice that Thunders) Every word is in exactly the right place, every phrase consummately crafted. As a result Garner's novel reads like the purest essence of distilled prose. It may be an acquired taste, but it it is truly worth the effort to acquire it. If you are familiar with Garner's previous work you will know that he is concerned with the impact of legend and myth on human life, and with the links that exist across time and culture. In Australia, to say you've got 'Buckley's chance' is to hold out almost no hope at all. Garner's depiction of William Buckley, convict, setting out across the Outback with only the paper sketch of a compass to guide him is one of the most poignant scenes I've ever read. How Buckley survives... well, read it for yourself.

Alan Garner's books for children were always favourites of mine (some kids do understand them!) - 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 1990s if not the entire Twentieth Century, it was criminally ignored by almost every major reviewer.

This is, quite simply, the most astounding book I have read. In many ways it is a logical extension of Alan Garner's previous writing, but even so, to see someone reach the heights that he has with this novel is a spellbinding experience.
From the Wierdstone onwards, Garner's books have increasingly shown confidence in the reader's ability to reshape a seemingly basic narrative into the full picture Garner seeks to convey, whilst consistently dealing with themes such as dislocation and the repetitive nature of history and folklore. I remember struggling as a child with Red Shift and The Owl Service, but each time managing to infer a little more from the rich but stark prose.
And now, after over thirty years of writing, he is able, with little more than dialogue, to take the reader through the four stages of one man's journey, from bricklayer in 18th Century Cheshire through to Aboriginal spiritual leader in ... 18th Century Cheshire.
The gaps are deliberate, they require perseverance to fill, but by doing so the reader has to see the world through Buckley's eyes. Maybe the Kirkus reviewer was busy that day, or maybe they just couldn't be bothered. I could be bothered, and I will never look at a book in the same way again.

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.

This is as brave an attempt as Garner has made to effect voices from other eras. It's achieved with consistently brilliant time and place shifts, and one can't conclude other than, in choosing the Buckley legend, his many years of mining in this direction has hit paydirt. Particularly powerful is the sense of Buckley's rural upbringing, which assists his passage into indigineous understandings of the world, and the mental state he confronts when re-entering 'civilisation'. In potent brief passages, Garner breaths life into the attitudes of the peoples and the times. No endistanced historical voice to mediate. Having read reasonably widely around the indigenous literature of Australia, I'd rate his evocation of indigenous society poignant and free from anthropology, romanticism and paternalism. The entire, slim book reads more like a poem than a novella. Which leads me to recommend Barry Hill's long poem on Buckley,'Ghosting William Buckley' which was justly well received in Australia.

I loved this book, like most of the other reviewers here. And I'll leave it to their reviews to try to convey the nature of the novel in a nutshell, so much as that is possible. It is remarkable, and difficult, and it doesn't do the reader any favors -- exposition? bah! -- but if you take the time to work at penetrating this seemingly impenetrable novel, the rewards are well worth that effort.

HOWEVER, the simple truth of the matter is this: Strandloper is not for everybody. If you are looking for straightforward fantasy, this isn't it. If you're looking for "another Alan Garner novel", this isn't it (of course, I'm oversimplifying here -- but I mean that this novel is very little like his others). One reviewer likened Strandloper more to Faulkner than to Tolkien, and that is spot-on (at least on the surface -- in reality, Garner's deep, almost baptismal immersion into mythology here is very much in keeping with Tolkien).

If you find getting through Faulkner a bit difficult, then Strandloper is going to make you want to check into an asylum -- or chuck the book into the fire. Reading it is not a passive act, the way reading most novels usually is; you have to take an active part in working to unravel its abstruse layers of narrative and meaning, and if that doesn't sound like much fun to you, then put down Strandloper and try something else -- perhaps O'Brian's Master and Commander.

..and perhaps the most rewarding. Definitely NOT for children of any shape or size, STRANDLOPER is an amazing experiment in writing in which Garner mixes a variety of styles and languages to tell us the story of a young man from the Midlands who gets transported "upon the seas and over the seas" to Australia in 1799. Once in Australia he escapes and is adopted by an Aboriginal tribe with whom he remains for more than thirty years before returning to his home village. The ending is sheer poetry, and will stick with me long after other details fade. This may be a tough read for some, but stick with it!

The first sections of this book are the hardest to get through, being heavy on dialect and glimpsed only "through a glass, darkly." I almost didn't make it through this section, which is why I only give 4 stars. Both the dialect and viewpoint could have been lightened a little, to make it easier on the reader. On the other hand, I felt uncomfortably like I was seeing through the eyes of a man one step into a vast and stifling madness. There is a strangely claustrophobic feeling, because of that, which is oddly escaped in the real claustraphobic depths of a transport ship, where our hero embraces his chains on several levels. Garner warms to his subject by the time we meet these new scenes and characters. His viewpoint into the aboriginal Dreaming is utterly mythic, and is one of the most compelling visions of a culture outside of our own that I have encountered. By this point, we gain insights into the interweaving of the Dream and the Dance, that binds all visions together, and flows throughout the rest of the book.

What a strange and powerful thing it is to encounter the work of a complete master-craftsman. I support the others who have heaped praise upon this work. I would encourage any who have found it difficult or confusing - as I did at first reading - to persevere, and all will become clear. As I said in another Garner review, reading him is not a spectator sport - you have to engage.

When he plunges into the 200-year old country life of north-west England, at first it is bewildering...but then one recalls that in that countryside, daily life still included much of the ancient pre-Christian beliefs and practices, and even the fertility rituals of "cockle-bread." And the ironclad structure of social classes is well summed up in the actions of Sir John Stanley and his anger at the "Jacobin" texts that William has been practicing handwriting with, though not understanding. Ironically, it was Stanley's son who had been helping William to learn - but this never comes up in "the family" - what matters is that Stanley will not allow the peasants to learn to read. The memory of the French Revolution was fresh, and Stanley does not allow anything to upset the sacred role of property. "MY oaks have been lopped" he says angrily when the peasants have cut a few branches to celebrate a ritual.

The deepest part of the story however is the underlying almost mystical connection between William and the aborigines whose leader he becomes. Before he is ever sent to Australia, at the moment when his fate is being decided in the country church, words of the aboriginal language come to him over the thousands of miles and burst from him. To the vicar he is "speaking in tongues." Garner gives full credence to the oft-documented psychic powers of the Australian natives and seems to enter deeply into their world. I think he is very much in tune with Jung's "collective unconscious" and with Deepak Chopra's statement that we are all basically waves on an ocean: You can perceive and define an individual wave, it has an identity, a beginning, duration, and end, but it is also absolutely a part of the ocean. We are all bound together and connected in a very real way.

After the first reading, take the time to look up some of the old dialect words where the meaning could not easily be deduced - you will have a fascinating journey through many old philological works and feel immersed in an older and in many ways richer world. Then return to the book and see how much meaning is packed into every sentence. It is the richest, densest prose one can imagine. I've just ordered "Thursbitch" to move forward with my Garner readings.

This book is both haunting and beautiful... it hung around and is staying with me far longer than most books do when I've finished them. I first read Elidor when I was 14 years old, and that book made such an impression that I still remember it 35 years later. I probably won't be around in another 35 years, but Strandloper will stay with me until then. This book is a treasure.

As other reviewers have stated, this book requires, nay, demands your full attention, but once you have passed through the first pages and get caught in the rhythm, you will find this book very difficult to put down.