[Alan Garner's] books, though few, have had an extraordinarily powerful impact; they have been felt and not forgotten. (p. 108) Because Garner's four novels came out at intervals of two and three years, they show their differences—and the author's development—more clearly than do the works of more prolific writers. Alan Garner has never stood still. His stories have become less complicated but more complex, less crowded but more intricately ramified. Action has become less...

Something has happened to Alan Garner. He is never a predictable writer, and one can never be sure just what he will produce next. But one thing has so far been common to all his work: It has been emotionally overcharged. (With the exception, I hasten to say, of his nativity play, Holly from the Bongs, all too little known, and a gem.) To put it in crude critical shorthand, Garner's work has so far lacked balance. One always felt the tremble of incipient hysteria: all those dark elemental forces abou...

Alan Garner's writing is marked by hard thinking and hard, fierce imagining. These have been brought to bear upon a distinctive choice of subject: the meeting-plane of two contiguous worlds. One is the world that most of us agree to describe, however inadequately, as ordinary, everyday, or by some such term. The other is the world of folklore and myth, dream and nightmare and vision. The wall between these two worlds is tough, but of less than tissue-paper thinness. Where the thinness can be worn int...

[The books in Alan Garner's quartet] are the longest short books I've ever read; and I mean that in their quite exhilarating concision they cover, and carry the delight of eighty years (from c1860 to c1940) in the life of a family in Alan Garner's own corner of the world, Alderly Edge in Cheshire. A succession of grandads, fathers, youths, Josephs and Roberts and Williams, they work in stone and wood and metal. Work, and the mysteries of work, are of supreme importance. In the first boo...

The creation of other worlds … leads, naturally, to a preoccupation with landscape and terrain…. [This] is a natural development but in the case of Garner it's something more than this. All his work shows a strong, mystical sense of place…. Often, as in Garner and [Ursula K.] le Guin, there's a strong sense of a vague, disembodied but menacing force which is just hovering around waiting to be loosed, a process which might be as accidental as springing a trap. This is very ...

[As William Butler Yeats] saw the gray and grimy streets of Dublin give birth to a "terrible beauty," so Alan Garner shows that the complacent lives in a Manchester suburb can be intertwined with a "terrible beauty" [in Elidor]. With deceptive simplicity, Garner tells of the battle for the good—the light—in the world called Elidor and how that battle can hinge on the tenacious belief of a Manchester child named Roland. (p. 328) Alan Garner is celebrated for his use ...

To distil the message from Alan Garner's quartet of books which, so far, includes The Stone Book, Tom Fobble's Day, and now, Granny Reardun, the reader has to locate himself in the landscape at a point in time. Chronologically Granny Reardun comes before Tom Fobble's Day, but each, in Alan Garner's terms, is its own onion of craft, time, place and family. Time is caught in stone walls and steeples made by Joseph's grandfather, so that when Joseph at the beginning of Granny...

[Short] though it may be, this small precise poem of a book [Tom Fobble's Day], is not simple. In the past I have found Alan Garner too conscious of his own brilliance. Here his cleverness is nearer understanding. The book is about doing and becoming (and not always avoiding danger in the process); about belonging—to people, to landscape, to their shared past; above all about that total loving attention to substance that is not only the beginning of poetry, meditation even, but also the beginn...

[Despite] the odd suspicion that Mr. Garner is showing off …, there remains the sense of an age gone by, that still lives on in the Garner Quartet. Granny Reardun forms the lynchpin between its predecessors. Poised between worlds of quarry and forge, it traces a progress from Stone Age to Iron; from stone getters to brick setters, from monoliths to machines. The world is changing and Iron's "aback of everything".

[Holly from the Bongs] is one of the most delightful books I have looked at, read, listened to, for a very long time…. [It includes] the full text of the play, in which Alan Garner has skilfully included a Mummers' play based on traditional sources…. How lucky are the children of Goostrey; but how lucky are we also to share in this experience. Timothy Rogers, "Fiction: 'Holly from the Bongs'," in The School Librarian and School Library Review, Vo...

Holly from the Bongs is, to put it simply, a nativity play. It was written for the Cheshire village of Goostrey and performed at Christmas 1965 in the stable of the Crown Inn…. The effect of the book as a whole is overwhelmingly sincere and beautiful. You get the impression of a small, interdependent community with the freedom of the fields, of children being themselves and yet being partly translated by the feel of unfamiliar language and heightened emotion…. It is in the text … where ...