Alan Garner and Mark Edmonds: The Beauty Things.

The Beauty Things

Take it in your hands, look, pay attention, turn it over and repeat the process. 

If you’ve read ‘The Voice that Thunders’ you’ll know about ‘The Beauty Things’, and if you haven’t, it’s easily explained. They are objects, things, which have significance for their owners and are valued for reasons that have no relation to their economic value.

So this book, which it must be said is a beautiful object, is a celebration of things.  It claims to be an extension of conversations between Alan Garner and Mark Edmonds, who is an archaeologist.  It consists of photographs and short texts: brief extracts from Garner’s books and unattributed words in quotation marks.

The book celebrates the beauty and functionality of things made in stone, wood and metal, from the earliest stone hand tool to the Jodrell Bank Telescope…it invites you to stop and consider the complex miracle that is homer faber and the vertigo inducing length of time we’ve been around…without sentimentalising or romanticising the human maker, from that first deviant ape who thought sharpening a bit of stone might lead somewhere to radio telescopes scanning the universe and looking at light that had left its source an unimaginable number of years before that ape started chipping.

The Beauty Things  invites the reader to pay attention to specific examples of this making habit. It offers provocative suggestions, it raises questions. Feel the weight, look, imagine, consider, then turn it over and repeat the process. It reminds me of a Colin Simms poetry collection: that fascinated, absorbed willingness to keep looking at the same object without ever exhausting the need to keep looking. It’s a very non-fashionable view of the world, one that celebrates the careful craftsman, the slow acquisition of ability and knowledge. It celebrates both the idea that questions are often better than answers and the pleasure of paying attention.

There are questions. About the way we portray objects from the past. The way the museum case makes static what was always a work in progress, something to be used, improved, perhaps discarded. But also, more troubling, about what these tools have to say about aesthetics.

The stone axe is beautiful. But was beauty an aim of the maker, or simply an accident of design. Is the recognition of beauty simply an aesthetic response to a shape, or is beauty, in this case, a profound, possibly pre verbal, in built recognition of achieved functionality. If the latter, did the aesthetic impulse have an evolutionary function? 

For readers of Garner’s novels there is the echo of familiarity: artefacts which turn up in his books appear in the photographs. And I won’t be the only person who has always wondered what a stone book looks like…the spine is smooth, like a piece of well tooled leather, and I want one. Nor will I be the only person to be surprised that “The” Stone Book was not made by one of Garner’s family…..but as he says here, he had to make things up.

There is one thing missing from The Beauty Things: a book. Not a stone book, a paper book.

There should be a word for this, where the thing that is missing from an object is supplied by the object itself###, but the book ‘The Beauty Things’ is a beauty thing itself, a carrier of stories and questions, something to hold and contemplate. It has its history, from rock scratching to clay tablets, rolls of papyrus, velum, paper: we are, after all, living in a civilisation that could not exist without writing. Books are as much a part of our history and our making as the axe and the horseshoe.

You can buy a copy here:

https://sites.google.com/site/group6press/beautythings

### IF there is a real word for this I would love to know it.

Alan Garner 2a Strandloper

'Becoming difficult'. 

Strandloper 1996.

  

I reread Red shift  on a regular basis. But if there are three phrases in Garner’s career then it marks the end of the second. Strandloper either began the most recent phase or hinged the second and third parts. 

The first time I tried to read Strandloper I shipwrecked half way through. It’s not possible to convey how abrupt and painful that was. Here was 'my' author, the man I’d grown up reading, and here was a book with his name on it that I couldn’t read. 

Garner’s writing had been heading towards an obdurate minimalism. He had faith the reader would make the connections and follow. But in Standloper it felt as though he’d gone into the language and found a layer that was older and richer yet baffling. Whatever he’d pulled up into the daylight made no sense to me. The book tells a story about William Buckley, who is transported to Australia, escapes the penal settlement, attempts to ‘walk home via China’, is adopted by the indigenous peoples and finally makes it ‘home’. 

I knew about thieves cant, I knew about historical dialect and slang, I’d read about Songlines but none of it helped.

In retrospect, I went at the book from the wrong direction. As the head of an English department I needed a novel set in Australia, dealing with Indigenous themes, for the work program I was writing. There was a unit to be called Many Voices, and from the publisher’s blurb (this was before Goodreads and the like) this book sounded as though it were exactly what I needed. 

Books can resent the attempt to misuse them. I was looking to use it. I was reading it as a teacher, anticipating the assignment that would need to be set, anticipating my students’ reactions. The book shrugged me off.

Garner outlined his relationship with teachers of literature in ‘Hard Cases’, published in The Voice That Thunders. It's an essay every English teacher should read.  It makes me want to apologise for my profession and claim we're not all like that. I had fallen into a pattern of thought that whatever its noble or justifiable aims is a use of literature, and like any 'use'  reductive.

In retrospect #2, I realise It was a very silly idea, not just over ambitious but thoughtless. I’m glad I never inflicted the book on a class. It is the first of Garner’s books that defies the categories of publishing, and creates a Model reader who has no age or gender. To use a phrase: ‘It takes no prisoners’. 

I’ve reread Strandloper several times since that first attempt. It might well be the long narrative poem the Modernist poets never managed to write. Ignore the dubious distinction between verse and prose which is redundant with Garner anyway, read it as though you’re reading a poem with a plot, and it’s a magnificent awkward journey that repays all the effort it requires.