On one level [The Owl Service] is a story of possession, in which accidents take on dual meanings and the Welsh landscape adds its own shut-in, brooding atmosphere. Alison's mother and Roger's father hope to consolidate their recent marriage and see their children making friends here in the valley. So quickly does the author establish these characters, particularly through subtly diversified class idiom, that you can see the stresses which will threaten the holiday hopes…. These stresses might have upset the surface amiability of the four in a week of wet days: the owl plates precipitate personal crisis and, as well, actual, frightening, inexplicable happenings. The real and the supernatural interchange, influence, quicken feeling. Most of all in Alison; for here is a remarkable portrait of a girl in her 'teens who is translated, as it were, from her conventional self into an ancient counterpart whom she cannot escape from or understand. Her refuge seems to lie with Gwyn…. It is the last irony of a subtle book that her safety is achieved finally not by the sensitive, tormented, Welsh boy but by brash, unimaginative Roger. The book shows how people change under stress—shows it in a novelist's manner, with none of the limitations of 'writing for children.' (p. 949)
Enough of the Mabinogion is quoted for the reader to pick up clues and see the rôle of each person involved in this strange re-living of the past, but anyone who reads the whole of the Fourth Section of the Welsh book and follows up other clues in Garner's story will find deeper analogies and layers of meaning and—most important—deeper emotion.
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2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Garner, Alan 1935–: Critical Essay by Margery Fisher Access Pass.
