Christopher Middleton, in The Telegraph, tells you anything you might need to know about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and talks with Alan Garner and other writers about the effect it’s had on over 50 years of readers and writers. I will add this, though Middleton mentions it: most claustrophobic scene in all of fiction! Well, in all the fiction I’ve ever read. Scared the pants off me when I was a kid, and then when I grew up and read the book aloud to my kids, I got to that part of the book and could barely read it aloud, so visceral was my body’s reaction to these black and white words on the page. Interestingly, at that moment, my girls, with less knowledge of the world, less life experience, couldn’t understand quite what was making me so squirmy.

I agree with Middleton that part of the magic of the book, and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, is how we are lulled through precision of detail into believing we are in the real world, perhaps the same one we inhabit, when things start to go awry. It’s part of what most inspires me as a writer about Garner’s work, for the pattern follows in other of his books as well—Elidor and The Owl Service come to mind. How does he do it? Where is the tipping point when we know we’re no longer safe in mid-century Cornwall, or wherever the books are set?That said, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen depicts a part of England in which, even at the end of the 1950s, some people lived lives not far removed from their ancestors’ lives. The old dialects of the region still crop up in some characters’ mouths, and a modern reader fed on too steady a diet of strictly modern prose may need to be patient. If the prose seems challenging, that furthers my argument for why we should read prose and poetry of all eras to our children, from when they are very young: to build their capacity for understanding all of English’s fluid capacity backward and forward, and to make them able to face any prose head on, with no fear.

I heard somewhere, a long time ago—maybe Walter Benjamin writes about it?—that around the turn of the last century any illiterate workman could recite Shakespeare, learned orally. I just tried to track down a reference to this and found both evidence that the literacy rate in America was vastly higher than now, among both whites and blacks, and, in the introduction to an academic article, a discussion of the place of reading aloud in Victorian culture. The statistics on literacy are from a chapter of John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, that also includes this, “As reading ability plummeted in America after WWII, crime soared, so did out-of-wedlock births, which doubled in the 1950s and doubled again in the ’60s, when bizarre violence for the first time became commonplace in daily life.” Another argument for reading. But I digress. Whether the statement about workmen and Shakespeare is true or not, my point remains: familiarity builds…familiarity. If your kids are exposed as children to, for instance, Victorian prose (even in homeopathic doses?), they will not quail when faced with Victorian prose later in life. And is this not what we want, in part? Children who are not afraid of words on a page, even if, like me, they may be afraid of the scenes described therein.

Read Garner’s books to all your kids, when they’re old enough, and especially get them for your boys when they’re seeking out thrills and chills from their reading, when they’re on a steady diet of fantasy, when they need a little shaking up. Or read them to yourself, if you dare.

Tagged as: books for big kids, books for boys, books for girls, books for grownups, great gift books, nostalgia, read aloud, vocabulary lessons

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