Strandloper (Harvill Panther S.) [Paperback]

Alan Garner (Author)

Book Description

Series: Harvill Panther S. | Publication Date: July 3, 1997

Based on the true story of William Buckley, an 18th-century man from rural England, this unique novel begins with a young William preparing for the annual festival known as Shick-Shack Day. William has been chosen as the village's Shick-Shack—an ancient fertility figure—but when the local landowner discovers the celebration in the church, William is arrested, tried, and banished to Australia. Arriving in the strange continent, he escapes and wanders for more than a year before he is discovered by a group of Aborigines who believe him to be Murrangurk, the great hero, lawgiver, and healer of their people. Later William is spotted by English colonialists, granted a full pardon, and allowed to return to England where me must encounter the life he left behind.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A strange mix of realistic narrative and incantatory folk materials by Garner (author of a number of YA and children's fantasy novels) results in a work that is likely to leave most readers scratching their heads in bewilderment. Set in the late 18th century, it's the story of William Buckley (a real person, the dust jacket informs us), an English villager who, having performed in a reenactment of an ancient fertility ritual, is arrested, charged with ``lewdness and Popery,'' and transported to a prison camp in ``New Holland'' (Australia). After escaping, Buckley is taken in by a tribe of Aborigines (who call themselves ``the People'') and soon thereafter comes to be revered as their hero-god Murrangurk, whose appearance was long ago foretold in the prophetic creation ritual they call ``the Dreaming'' (at which skill the transformed Buckley proves almost preternaturally adept). Eventually spotted by white colonialists, Buckley/Murrangurk/Strandloper (this last term denoting a further incarnation) is employed as a translator and given a ``King's Pardon,'' then returns to his Cheshire home for the mixed blessing of a hesitant reunion with the woman he formerly loved, who may have borne his child. All of this is related in a crabbed, terse prose compounded of rustic British slang, Miltonic verse, folk songs and nursery rhymes, and the ornate language of both Church of England rituals and the Latin Mass. It's often very beautiful, especially when describing tenets of the Aborigines' faith (``In the Beginning, when the waters parted, and the Ancestors dreamed all that is, and woke the life that slept, the sky lay on the earth, and the sun could not move, until the Magpie lifted the earth with a stick''). Too often, though, this severely gnomic fiction scorns to render scene or incident clearly, leaving even the most willing reader unsure of what's happening on any given page. This may be a marvelous novel. It's hard to tell. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Alan Garner has written novels for children and adults, among them The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service, and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Random House UK (July 3, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1860461611
• ISBN-13: 978-1860461613
• Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 5.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #354,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbearably beautiful, May 25, 2000

By 

R. Griffiths "bookchoice" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Strandloper (Harvill Panther S.) (Paperback)

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Novel of the Century?, April 17, 2000

By 

flying-monkey (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strandloper (Harvill Panther S.) (Paperback)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Alan Garner's pinnacle, February 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Strandloper (Harvill Panther S.) (Paperback)

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.