WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
Where to start with Treacle Walker? Well, perhaps with the lapidary verse from the Rosarium philosophorum which is quoted in the book on an optician’s chart, and is then translated from the Latin:
Like the Philosophers’ Stone, this book is certainly small – it comes in at a meagre 152 pages, but 26 of those are completely blank and another 18 have only a Roman numeral on them, I to XVIII, marking the new scenes (representing the change of hours? days? years??). Little price – well, word for word it’s more costly than most paperbacks nowadays, but worth, that’s a different matter. Spurned by fools – it would be very easy to dismiss it as almost incomprehensible, but it’s certainly been honoured if not by the wise, then by many book reviewers and those drawing up the shortlist for the Booker Prize.
As for what it is, that’s harder to answer. At the basic level, it’s about a boy, Joseph Coppock – Joe – who lives alone in an ancient house, reading comics and playing marbles, and what happens after he is visited by a mysterious rag and bone man, the eponymous Treacle Walker, who can heal everything save jealousy. (The original treacle, before it became synonymous with molasses, was a medicinal compound, an antidote to poison.) But the book is actually about time, death, continuation, change, the circularity and whirligig of life. I think.
Despite its short length, this is not a quick, easy read. It’s like a giant extended cryptic crossword puzzle where everything is linked, but initially nothing makes sense, and only time, effort, and continual re-reading of the clues starts to bring light into the darkness, but even then, for me at least, a lot remains obscure.
Into the plot Garner throws Thin Amren, a bog body reminiscent of Tollund Man, who dreams the world; a cuckoo, harbinger of summer and layer of eggs in other birds’ nests – Joe thinks to steal a cuckoo’s egg for his collection by finding its own nest, showing how little he knows of the bird; an antique pottery jar of Poor Mans Friend, a C17th/18th remedy produced in Bridport (perhaps also a name for people who helped those dying in agony to have an easy death?); a train which passes at noon each day but never returns; the bonacon, a mythical beast described as like a bull but with a noxious self-defence strategy; a valued marble (a small stone of little price); Stonehenge Kit and his adversaries, characters from a comic who come from the page into Joe’s house running through mirrors upon mirrors and speak in capitalised Comic Sans; Joe’s alter ego/dream-self who cannot be allowed to touch him; a bone pipe which plays a tune with wings; the White Horse of Uffington which leaves silver hoof prints behind; an eyepatch, a lazy eye, an optician’s chart and double vision; a chimney where Joe sleeps and where he and Walker talk which is the Axis Mundi, on which the sky turns, "the way between" the earth and the heavens "and the sapient stars"; and a cleaning, protecting, donkey stone.
The relevance of all of these I’ve not yet worked out, but after two slow reads, I’ve solved some of the clues and arrived at the main plot. I think. Treacle Walker is a psychopomp, the guide who takes the dead from this world to the next (as is a cuckoo?); so is also, perhaps, the Philosophers’ Stone incarnate, transmuting the base metal of earth-bound life into the gold of the afterlife. Joe has died, but has not yet moved on, remaining in a limbo by the chimney where every day is the same. When Treacle Walker arrives, Joe gives up rags and a bone – symbols of his dead body – and in return is allowed to choose something from a box Walker carries on his cart. As in any good myth, the choice has consequences, and in selecting the cheap, chipped antique jar of Poor Mans Friend instead of one of the glittering valuables, Joe has chosen his fate -- he is not now destined to move on to the afterlife. Instead, he kills the cuckoo and re-buries/imprisons Thin Amren in the bog so he can continue to dream the world, and he gives Treacle Walker the gift he most desires (“To hear no more the beat of Time. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years. Oblivion.”) sending him home to the summer stars. Finally, Joe takes over Treacle Walker’s box of shimmerings, his horse and cart, and his job. He becomes Treacle Walker. I think.
This is not a book of limpid prose; the dialogue in particular is elliptical, difficult, and Walker and Thin Amren speak in riddles, with old-fashioned phrases and dialect words scattered everywhere. But there’s a good deal of humour in it, not least in Joe’s impatience at the riddling and his misunderstandings of Latin and difficult words. There’s not the lyricism and yearning for the English countryside I thought there might be (having read only one Garner, which I’ve wholly forgotten) but there is an air of myth about the book, and towards the end of my first read I was reminded of Pincher Martin by William Golding, perhaps because that also occupies the same liminal space between life and death.
So is Treacle Walker worth reading? Not if you want a commonplace read with a plot and characters you can immediately understand, nor if you have no patience for a kind of literary labyrinth. But it’s intriguing, strange, baffling, mysterious, and worth honouring, or at least worth puzzling over. I’m sure of that.
Where to start with Treacle Walker? Well, perhaps with the lapidary verse from the Rosarium philosophorum which is quoted in the book on an optician’s chart, and is then translated from the Latin:
This stone is small, of little price; spurned by fools, more honoured by the wise
Like the Philosophers’ Stone, this book is certainly small – it comes in at a meagre 152 pages, but 26 of those are completely blank and another 18 have only a Roman numeral on them, I to XVIII, marking the new scenes (representing the change of hours? days? years??). Little price – well, word for word it’s more costly than most paperbacks nowadays, but worth, that’s a different matter. Spurned by fools – it would be very easy to dismiss it as almost incomprehensible, but it’s certainly been honoured if not by the wise, then by many book reviewers and those drawing up the shortlist for the Booker Prize.
As for what it is, that’s harder to answer. At the basic level, it’s about a boy, Joseph Coppock – Joe – who lives alone in an ancient house, reading comics and playing marbles, and what happens after he is visited by a mysterious rag and bone man, the eponymous Treacle Walker, who can heal everything save jealousy. (The original treacle, before it became synonymous with molasses, was a medicinal compound, an antidote to poison.) But the book is actually about time, death, continuation, change, the circularity and whirligig of life. I think.
Despite its short length, this is not a quick, easy read. It’s like a giant extended cryptic crossword puzzle where everything is linked, but initially nothing makes sense, and only time, effort, and continual re-reading of the clues starts to bring light into the darkness, but even then, for me at least, a lot remains obscure.
Into the plot Garner throws Thin Amren, a bog body reminiscent of Tollund Man, who dreams the world; a cuckoo, harbinger of summer and layer of eggs in other birds’ nests – Joe thinks to steal a cuckoo’s egg for his collection by finding its own nest, showing how little he knows of the bird; an antique pottery jar of Poor Mans Friend, a C17th/18th remedy produced in Bridport (perhaps also a name for people who helped those dying in agony to have an easy death?); a train which passes at noon each day but never returns; the bonacon, a mythical beast described as like a bull but with a noxious self-defence strategy; a valued marble (a small stone of little price); Stonehenge Kit and his adversaries, characters from a comic who come from the page into Joe’s house running through mirrors upon mirrors and speak in capitalised Comic Sans; Joe’s alter ego/dream-self who cannot be allowed to touch him; a bone pipe which plays a tune with wings; the White Horse of Uffington which leaves silver hoof prints behind; an eyepatch, a lazy eye, an optician’s chart and double vision; a chimney where Joe sleeps and where he and Walker talk which is the Axis Mundi, on which the sky turns, "the way between" the earth and the heavens "and the sapient stars"; and a cleaning, protecting, donkey stone.
The relevance of all of these I’ve not yet worked out, but after two slow reads, I’ve solved some of the clues and arrived at the main plot. I think. Treacle Walker is a psychopomp, the guide who takes the dead from this world to the next (as is a cuckoo?); so is also, perhaps, the Philosophers’ Stone incarnate, transmuting the base metal of earth-bound life into the gold of the afterlife. Joe has died, but has not yet moved on, remaining in a limbo by the chimney where every day is the same. When Treacle Walker arrives, Joe gives up rags and a bone – symbols of his dead body – and in return is allowed to choose something from a box Walker carries on his cart. As in any good myth, the choice has consequences, and in selecting the cheap, chipped antique jar of Poor Mans Friend instead of one of the glittering valuables, Joe has chosen his fate -- he is not now destined to move on to the afterlife. Instead, he kills the cuckoo and re-buries/imprisons Thin Amren in the bog so he can continue to dream the world, and he gives Treacle Walker the gift he most desires (“To hear no more the beat of Time. To have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years. Oblivion.”) sending him home to the summer stars. Finally, Joe takes over Treacle Walker’s box of shimmerings, his horse and cart, and his job. He becomes Treacle Walker. I think.
This is not a book of limpid prose; the dialogue in particular is elliptical, difficult, and Walker and Thin Amren speak in riddles, with old-fashioned phrases and dialect words scattered everywhere. But there’s a good deal of humour in it, not least in Joe’s impatience at the riddling and his misunderstandings of Latin and difficult words. There’s not the lyricism and yearning for the English countryside I thought there might be (having read only one Garner, which I’ve wholly forgotten) but there is an air of myth about the book, and towards the end of my first read I was reminded of Pincher Martin by William Golding, perhaps because that also occupies the same liminal space between life and death.
So is Treacle Walker worth reading? Not if you want a commonplace read with a plot and characters you can immediately understand, nor if you have no patience for a kind of literary labyrinth. But it’s intriguing, strange, baffling, mysterious, and worth honouring, or at least worth puzzling over. I’m sure of that.
