Treacle Walker Summary
Alan Garner

Treacle Walker Overview

In Alan Garner's novel Treacle Walker, a young boy named Joe is content with his solitary life in his house in Big Meadow, until a peddler named Treacle Walker visits him one day. Since Joe has a lazy eye, he sees the world in a distinctly fantastical manner. Treacle Walker encourages him to hold onto this version of reality, but the older Joe gets, the more convinced he becomes that he must let go of his childlike way of seeing his imagination. Throughout the narrative, the author embraces elements of the mythic and fantastical in order to craft a complex allegory for the loss of innocence and concurrent death of the imagination. The novel explores themes including innocence, perception, and reality.