Book review: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

By Simon Demetriou

I may not be forgiven for this, but I didn’t really enjoy Treacle Walker. The weight of evidence is against me: earlier this year, the novel had just made Alan Garner the oldest ever Booker Prize nominee. Writers and academics queue up to laud Garner as one of Britain’s most significant authors, and many view Treacle Walker as a culmination of all this brilliance in under 100 pages.

And Treacle Walker is certainly bursting with invention and erudition. Joe Coppock is a child with a lazy eye who lives seemingly alone and who tells time by listening and looking out for Noony, the train that passes every day at noon (duh!), but which is only ever seen moving in one direction. Into his life enters Treacle Walker, a mysterious, foul-smelling rag and bone man who exchanges a pot and a stone for a pair of Joe’s unwashed, pongy pyjamas and an old lamb bone. Treacle Walker’s eyes are ‘green violet’ and the little ceramic pot that Joe gets from him has a smear of the same coloured gunk upon it. When Joe inadvertently touches the lid of his good eye with the gunk, he experiences a dazzling pain, and things are never the same again.

It turns out that Joe has acquired ‘the glamourie’, a condition that allows his good eye to collapse time and look beyond the linear and rule-bound. The condition is spelled out to him by a character called Thin Amren, a naked man with a brown leather hood who lives in the Alder bog at the bottom of the meadow outside Joe’s house. Except only Joe’s good eye – which now sees what doesn’t appear to exist in conventional reality – can see Thin Amren, so the glamourie apparently provides its own definition and justification.

Things only get weirder from here, as space also collapses when Joe gets embroiled in an ongoing battle in his favourite comic book after characters emerge from the page and take Joe through a series of parallel worlds reached by stepping through the mirror in his room.

So, what’s my problem? Well, I hate Treacle Walker. When Joe asks how Treacle knows Joe’s name without being told, Walker replies, ‘“More know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows”… or don’t they?’ This habit of speaking in riddles and appending a question negating everything he’s just said annoys me no end. I know it all makes sense with a book that sets out to complexify or make quantum how we think about time, space and stories. And so I should overlook my personal annoyance. But I can’t.