The opening lines: ‘Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!’
What is a Donkey stone? I googled it to find out that it was a scouring stone. The donkey stones were gradually disused by the 50s and 60s.
Though a short book, it felt like a 300-page book as every other word needed to be googled, at least I had to. Words like hurlothrumbo, lomperhomock, glamourie, clanjandering, tarradiddles, mirligoes etc. Even some of the phrases are unheard. The language is playful. It appears
Is it a dream or is it a rambling of the brain? Mythical, folklore, magical. Is it peculiar, poetic, metaphorical, or allegorical?
Treacle is sugar syrup but historically a medicine, something that cures.
Marble collection, comics, eggshells, the boy talks about dobber glass. I am clueless, only to learn later through an article about a brief history of marbles. It reads like looking through a glass but requires retrospection.
Did it bode well with me? To each their own. I couldn’t construe the deeper embedded meaning in it. Was it about death? About how we reflect upon various situations, about what we look at and we don’t see, hear but not listen. Sometimes it feels nice to think of oneself as a magician and more often we would want people to pop out of a book magically.
The story is about Joseph Coppock (Joe) who has Amblyopia (lazy eye) and Treacle Walker, a rag and bone man cum healer or mythical mystery man. Alan Garner himself was ill during his childhood and was declared terminal by the doctor and Joe could be a character reflective of that.
Why is this character called Thin Amren? Is it symbolic of something? Is he a link? Link to what? This character reminded me of Gollum from Lord of the rings/Hobbit. His disposition, his reaction, his scorn, all of it.
The book has a lot of Cheshire dialect words and Latin words. Even in the end, Joe says “Kosko gry! Kosko gry!” - which I had googled and found out what he meant. The treacle tangent, a website created by the author, was a good help in finding out the meanings of the phrases, words, and translations.
Axis Mundi: In astronomy, Axis Mundi is the Latin term for the axis of Earth between the celestial poles. (Source: Wikipedia). Why is it being mentioned in the book? Is the author doubting the connection between heaven and earth? Death is a very intriguing, phenomenal cessation of life. Mysterious yet scary, agonising, and real.
Corr Bolg: magical bag from Celtic mythological stories. Bag of magic, souls. Does that make Treacle Walker a Shaman?
The line ‘What’s out is in; what’s in is out’- sounds like Advaita philosophy wherein they talk about the universe or everything being within us and us being part of the whole.
Every line has a profound element of philosophy. For E.g. “This stone is small, of little price” can be interpreted in many ways, how we are only a microcosm in this infinite expanse of space.
There were many lines in the book that were funny and unique.
No one can read it just once!