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Synopsis:

Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and an exploration of the fluidity of time, vivid storytelling that brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of everything around him.

‘Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!’

Joe looked up from his comic and lifted his eye patch. There was a white pony in the yard. It was harnessed to a cart, a flat cart, with a wooden chest on it. A man was sitting at a front corner of the cart, holding the reins. His face was creased. He wore a long coat and a floppy high-crowned hat, with hair straggling beneath, and a leather bag was slung from his shoulder across his hip.

Joe Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. He reads his comics, collects birds’ eggs and treasures his marbles, particularly his prized dobbers. When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day – a wanderer, a healer – an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined.

Review:

Alan Garner has been telling his version of British Folklore and writing children’s fantasy novels for decades. I have not read him before, but Treacle Walker caught my attention because of a nomination for the Booker Prize, and I liked the cover of the new edition published by Scribner. 

The story starts with Joe, a young kid who is seemingly up to his own devices at all times. He meets Treacle Walker, a wanderer, healer, and someone who Joe becomes friends with. Joe is a lonely kid, reading comics, wearing an eyepatch to correct a lazy eye, and collecting bird eggs and marbles. When he gets attention, any attention, he is drawn to the person, and in this case, Joe gets into quagmires where only Treacle Walker can help him.

Joe’s life is changed when he meets Treacle Walker, and there are many odd things that happen to Joe after they meet. The world around him does not seem real, or real to him. The whole of the novel is Joe trying to find his place in a world that he does not quite understand. The fantasies that he has, about his comic book characters coming to life and his eye that has been under the patch being able to see into a parallel universe when he takes his eyepatch off, are way that he tries to figure out a world that does not make much sense. He is supposed to trust adults, but the adults are only there to trick him, so he spend the whole story trying to find his moorings. Treacle Walker is his only help, and even in this, he is not very helpful.

I enjoyed this short novella, even with the language being somewhat difficult at times to navigate. There are many words and phrases that are very colloquial to the area where Joe lives. This can be distracting and not terribly inviting for a reader who has no clue about this region of the world. I feel like Garner does this on purpose, like those who are outside of this region needs to be off of their moorings like Joe is throughout the novella. He tries and is somewhat successful in repeating Joe’s experience by making his confusion our experience as well.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.