This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
words of Dr Teresa Anderson, Director of the Discovery Centre at Jodrell. She is one of our contributors too; and it’s in no small part thanks to her efforts that the shabby visitor centre I visited decades ago has vanished to make room for a brilliant place of public engagement.


In his lecture (which you can read in its entirety in The New Statesman) Alan Garner told a story about meeting the late Sir Bernard Lovell, who constructed the telescope. He felt a connection, Alan said, between his work and Lovell’s; he brought to Lovell’s desk a hand-axe. ‘Half a


million years ago, thereabouts, a hominin forerunner took the pebble and struck flakes from it with another rock, shaping it to sit in the hand, with one edge and a point sharpened to cut meat.’ Lovell, as much a cultured and spiritual man as he was a scientist, understood what Alan was getting at. ‘The hand-axe was the step we made towards the telescope,’ Alan said in the Wolfson Auditorium of the observatory’s Star Pavilion. ‘Without the axe, Jodrell would not be here. Both are functional, both works of art.’


What makes Alan’s work extraordinary is its ability to break through many boundaries – not just those that apparently exist between science and culture. There are boundaries too, we’re told, between history and fiction, between the oral and the written, between books that adults read and books that children read. There are books we like to think of as fantasy and books noble enough to be called literature. But these boundaries dissolve when a reader comes to consider Alan’s work. ‘A book, properly written, is an invitation to the reader to enter: to join with the writer in a creative act: the act of reading. A novel, it has been said, is a mechanism for generating interpretations. If interpretation is limited to what the writer “meant”, the creative opportunity has been missed. Each reading should be a unique meeting, leading to a new interpretation.’ That’s Alan in an essay called Hard Cases from his remarkable collection, The Voice that


Thunders; it’s a piece that, with both humour and sensitivity, despairs of an educational system that would set literature on a single track of meaning – while recognising the gift that real education can be.


I’m still awaiting most of the pieces which First Light’s wonderful, eclectic crew of contributors will file. We’ve got novelists,


Books for Keeps No.212 May 2015 15


archaeologists, historians, storytellers, poets: what they will have in common is – of course – their love for Alan Garner’s work. But I’m betting there’ll be something else too: a sense of horizons broadened, divisions bridged, no matter what discipline each of our writers works in. I will never forget an email exchange I had with Alan, not long after we first met, just before the turn of the century. I asked him something about his creative process, and he replied in no uncertain terms. ‘I don’t INVENT,’ he wrote to me, ‘I FIND.’ His was a kind of discovery I had never encountered before; but it changed how I saw the world, and that change has stayed with me ever since. ‘The old man lifted his staff and lightly touched the rock, and it split with the noise of thunder,’ runs a line in the legend of Alderley, set out by Alan as a prologue to The Weirdstone. The farmer from Mobberley sees wonders of which he could never have dreamt


before the wizard revealed them; Alan’s readers learned, from the very first pages of his very first book, what they could expect from him, and over more than half a century now they have not been disappointed.


It’s an honour and a joy to be editing a book which will sing the praises of Alan Garner – we’ll make a chorale which, I hope, will do him justice. But it won’t just be my book, or a book by the authors who are writing for me – your name can be in it too, and for as little as a tenner! First Light will shine: thanks to Alan, to our authors – and thanks to you.


You can contribute to First Light via Unbound www.unbound.co.ukn


Alan Garner’s books are published by HarperCollins The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, 978-0-00735-521-1, £6.99 The Moon of Gomrath, 978-0-00712-787-0, £6.99 Elidor, 978-0-00727-478-9, £6.99 The Owl Service, 978-0-00712-789-4, £6.99 Red Shift, 978-0-00712-786-3, £6.99 The Stone Book Quartet, 978-0-00720-494-6, £11.99


Erica Wagner is an author and critic, former literary editor of The Times.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32