Growing up is weird, and can seem quite sad, especially when you remember the things that used to ring and resonate and you can almost remember what the ring and the resonance sounded like but not why it set your nerves on fire and filled your head with light. I suppose they were simple things in their way. Magic. Adventure. Heroes. Villains. Whether it's age or the world, such things don't quite hold the thrill they used to, or the thrill seems cheapened by camp and over-saturation and the acute knowledge of how dreary reality can be.

But maybe it's not supposed to be quite like that. We assume as we grow that we put magic aside and sigh and set our shoulders and stride in the grey light of adulthood, and that fantasy and adventure and romance are now cheap escape routes from the grey. But there is more than one sort of knowledge, isn't there? As we grow, we acquire the tools we need to live. Language. Skills. Strength. Learning. perhaps within those tools are deeper, more profound consolations and magics.

Alan Garner wrote two children's novels: The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen and The Moon Of Gomrath. They were wildly popular, and I know I wore my copies out with rereading. They were an odd mix; old-fashioned, inventive but somewhat conventional children's stories imbued with deeper, darker roots into folklore and landscape. The adventure narrative dominated, though, and they were quite thrilling and exciting reads, for all the slight tingle of unease they left when completed. The conventional narrative was to shrink and the unease to grow through Garner's subsequent novels: Elidor and The Owl Service, until with Red Shift he broke with linear narrative completely and jumbled time and place and memory and history and myth and wove them into an extraordinary, disorienting form.

Garner does not seem to have retained much fondness for Weirdstone or Gomrath, and has a tendency to disparage them. It was a surprise, therefore, to discover that they were the first two volumes of a trilogy, and he was finally, decades later, going to complete it.

Boneland is not an adventure narrative of heroes and magic. Boneland is, if anything, almost an apology for those first two books, addressed to the landscape they exploited, the myths, the people the community and the history they, perhaps, cheapened. It is an author coming to terms with his own beginnings, both as a person as an author. And it is an offering to the reader, hopefully the reader who grew up with those two books, of a reading experience that is at once harsher, more difficult, less fantastical, much more uneasy and ambiguous, and yet also deeper, richer, broader, invoking the lost memories of deep time and the unfathomable vastness of the entire universe, while reaffirming the debt, the ties and the need for a deep rooting in a a home place.

In Boneland, Colin cannot leave Alderley Edge, cannot spend a night out of its sight or else it will vanish and the world will end. The wisdom of this book is that this is both something true and a metaphor for something else, and though we use different tools to examine the truth and the metaphor, they do not have to be divided. And so Garner offers his readers, who thrilled as children to magic and adventure, a conception of the adult world that encompasses its dreariness and a form of magic and adventure that cannot be cheapened or made camp.