The Owl Service

The Owl Service was first published in 1967, which is about the time I discovered The Lord of the Rings and vowed never to read a children’s book again. Yes, OK, I was a precocious git. But even though the book is much beloved by most UK fans of my generation and the next, I had not read it until now.

The attraction of the book is obvious. It is a fine piece of YA horror with the tension ramping up from one chapter to the next. It is not an easy book to read, but a clever teenager will doubtless warm to the challenge and love it all the more because of the effort it asks of them.

I suspect that a lot of present-day book reviewers would decry the book as ‘badly written’ because of how hard Alan Garner makes the reader work. It isn’t until you are well into the book that you can sort out who all of the various characters are, and what their relationship is to each other. The TV series was doubtless much easier to follow.

Also Garner expects you to understand what is happening (and often what has happened off screen) from the conversation. He is really very good at giving you a great sense of the action from a few well-chosen turns of phrase. Even in his own time some critics apparently complained that books for children should make the plot more plain. But that, I think, would detract from the building sense of dread.

However, I wasn’t reading the book for a general review. It is well known enough without me. I was reading it specifically as a work of Welsh fantasy. That requires asking some very specific questions. It also means spoilers.

I should start by noting that the book is very much of its time. Growing up as a Welsh kid in an English town, I was well aware of the contempt that most English people had for the Welsh back then. Also the sense of shame that many Welsh people had about their own language at the time was very real. It was engendered by the notorious Blue Book reports of 1847, and even when my mother was in school during WWII Welsh kids would be beaten if they dared to speak their own language. Things are very different now, but even so I think that almost all of the people who vote for Reform in the May elections will be people who don’t speak Welsh.

The main Welsh characters in the book don’t come off very well. Sometimes that is for believable reasons. Nancy has clearly been very badly traumatised by the previous cycle of the curse, and Gwyn has had a hard upbringing because of that. Huw Halfbacon seems at times as if he could have walked out of a rural village in Lovecraft’s New England, probably complete with gills, but he too is a victim of the curse.

Before being too upset with Garner, however, we should bear in mind that the closed rural community that he describes in the book is not something that is particular to Wales. I have already mentioned Lovecraft, and many other horror writers have used such communities as a setting. Some of them have been in England. I note also that Gwyn is a character who would have been very familiar to many of the kids I went to school with. We couldn’t wait to get out of Somerset.

Garner is not exactly kind to the English either. Roger and Alison are spoiled upper middle class brats. The horror expressed by Alison when ‘Mummy’ threatens to stop her attending choir and the tennis club if she doesn’t stop talking to Gwyn is magnificently out of proportion to the true horror of what it going on in the plot.

By the way, I am fascinated by the character of the new Mrs. Bradley, Alison’s mother. She never appears on screen. Clive, her thoroughly wet husband who would do anything for a quiet life, seems utterly cowed by her. How Clive got to be a wealthy captain of industry is a mystery to me. He probably inherited the role from his father.

The key point, however, is that at the end of the book it is the English who break the curse. Roger and Alison go back to their comfortable lives in Birmingham and can forget about their awful experience in Wales. Nancy is already ruined, and Gwyn loses everything in the events of the book. That doesn’t come over well for a Welsh reader.

I note that Garner seems to have skimped a bit on the research. He clearly thinks that Lleu Llaw Gyffes from The Mabinogion has a name that rhymes with ‘clue’. That would be true if he name were spelled Llew, which is often is. But Garner spells it Lleu, which rhymes with ‘ley’. Roger and Alison would make this mistake, but the Welsh characters would not.

Another disappointment is that the book doesn’t connect well with the source material. The only things that Garner really takes from the Fourth Branch are the love triangle and the flowers/owl nature of Blodeuwedd, and even then it isn’t really a love triangle because Roger and Alison don’t have that sort of relationship. Gronw is beholden to Lleu, but Lleu is no English overlord, he’s the heir to the kingdom of Gwynedd. Blodeuwedd is not English either, and Garner ignores the fact that she’s a golem made by Gwydion and Mab to get around a curse that Lleu shall never have a human wife.

All of which leaves me thinking that, while I am sure that there is a very good modern fantasy story that could be written about the love triangle between Lleu, Blodeuwedd and Gronw, The Owl Service is most definitely not it. Nor, indeed, is a small, tight-knit, rural community the correct setting for it. None of which takes away from the book’s power as a work of supernatural horror set in such a community. It is just a misuse of the source material.

Title: The Owl Service
By: Alan Garner
Publisher: Harper Collins
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