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On First Light, an anthology in celebration of the work of Alan Garner


Described by Philip Pullman as ‘the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien’, Alan Garner has enraptured generations of readers with novels like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, Elidor, The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet. He turned 80 last year and in celebration many of the writers, artists, archaeologists and historians he has inspired are contributing pieces to a special anthology called First Light. Its editor, Erica Wagner introduces the project.


I


was eight years old. It was the summer of 1976, that sweltering English summer, and I was driving with my parents through the Cheshire countryside. Nothing so unusual about that, you might think, but for the fact that we were by no means locals, but had


come to Cheshire from an ocean away – New York City, where we lived, where I grew up. But my mother was a passionate Anglophile, avid for ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ and with a stack of memoirs by ex-RAF pilots by her bed. My father was compliant; and so here we were, on an English adventure. I don’t know where we were driving from; I don’t know where we were driving to. I do know – I remember vividly – that suddenly, right by the side of the narrow lane on which my dad was driving, there loomed the great dish of the Lovell Telescope.


I didn’t know it was the Lovell Telescope. I know my dad nearly ran off the road – and he was a very good driver. Here in this ancient landscape (when I look back, I’m sure I could feel its antiquity in those high hedges and twisting roads) was the future. The future and the past right next to each other, co-existing – how was that possible? We drove around for a little while until we found the entrance to Jodrell Bank Observatory; in those days the visitor centre was pretty rackety, hardly a visitor centre at all, but it didn’t matter. You were in the shadow of the Lovell’s great dish, a giant ear set to listen to the universe, to map the stars which tell us so much about ourselves.


I had absolutely no idea that a little over a mile away lived a writer whose work I would not discover until over 20 years later. Growing up in the United States I didn’t read the works of Alan Garner, but books by E B White, Madeleine L’Engle, Beverly Cleary; American writers in an American childhood. But when I did discover Alan’s work as an adult, I found that his connection to the ancient universe was no less strong than that of the Lovell Telescope and all the work that goes on at Jodrell Bank. Here is a photograph of Alan Garner, walking up the track of the house which has been his home for many decades – as many decades as the telescope has been in the next field. On the site of Alan’s home in Blackden there is evidence of human habitation going back 10,000 years. On one side of the image is the house, with its medieval timber beams; on the other side of the image, the telescope.


14 Books for Keeps No.212 May 2015


The connection is more than coincidence. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, The Owl Service, Elidor, Strandloper, Thursbitch, Boneland… These are books that enable readers, young and old alike, to slip into the other worlds that exist alongside our own if we only know to look: a book is a kind of telescope, too. So, here am I, all these years later, assembling a collection of essays in praise of Alan Garner’s work. Alan turned 80 last year; it seemed a good enough excuse for a celebration for a writer whose influence extends far beyond the world of fantasy, or of children’s books. (I’d rather write: ‘books published for children’ as that seems more accurate to me; all of our writers, and all of Alan’s readers, have found in his work nourishment to keep them going all along the road of life.) When we were about to launch the book on the Unbound crowdfunding website – because this is a book which won’t exist without Alan’s devoted readers jumping aboard and supporting our endeavour by


subscribing to it – we were missing one crucial element: a title. Yes, Margaret Atwood would send us a piece. Sure, we had Philip Pullman writing for us, and Neil Gaiman, and Stephen Fry, and David Almond – and many, many more great names as you’ll see on the site. But what we didn’t have was a title – until Alan himself suggested First Light as a ‘neat nod’ to Jodrell Bank.


For just last March, Alan inaugurated a new series of public lectures at Jodrell: the Garner Lectures, which will explore the connections between science and culture. ‘At Jodrell Bank, the boundary between science and culture barely exists. In fact, it’s hard to find someone who works here who recognises the two as separate areas.’ Those are the


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