Treacle Walker by Alan Garner Review

Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker is such a steaming pile of book, OF COURSE it’s the favourite to win this year’s Booker Prize! It’s garbage like this that turn people off from reading and awards-nominated books in general.

Garner does such an inept job of telling his story, I can’t even provide a basic summary to start this review. There’s a “character” called Joe and he seems to have a problem with one of his eyes, which somehow makes him able to see magical (I think?) beings called Treacle Walker and Thin Amren. Some characters from his comic come to life and one of them “dies”. The end.

Huh?

Joe seems to be a child but we don’t know because we never find out what he does - does he go to school, or have a job, or have parents? No idea - as none of those things are mentioned. What are his goals? No idea. Ditto any motivation. Things just happen to him - incomprehensible things. Who or what are Treacle Walker and Thin Amren? No idea. They’re mysterious and probably magical - just ‘cos. What do they want? No idea. What does anyone in this book want? No idea. What’s the point of the story? No idea. Is Joe crazy? Maybe. Am I crazy for finishing this rubbish? Well…

It’s such bad writing, and these are the most basic elements of storytelling, so it’s amazing to me that anyone could think to praise such incompetence, much less nominate it for one of the most famous literary prizes in the world!

I looked up Knockout Comics after reading this and found out that it’s a comic that ran from 1939 to 1963, before having a brief failed revival in the 1970s, so that gives you a timeframe - if you thought to look up this element of the story that is, because, you’ve guessed it, Garner doesn’t include any context in when this takes place either. Not that it matters I suppose but then it’s not clear what - if anything - about this story matters at all!

The story’s set in a small rural community and I think the dialect is northern English, Yorkshire-ish, maybe. You’d have to look up the words Garner includes in his gibberish, I mean dialogue - eg. “corr bolg”, “tarradiddles”, “hurlothrumbo”, and “lomperhomock”, all of which makes the title character sound like a bargain bin BFG - because no explanations are provided and, hey, who doesn’t love constantly interrupting their reading to look things up, eh?

Those words don’t really make a huge difference in the narrative - they provide a sense of local colour more than anything - but it’s just another example of the writing providing no way in for the reader in figuring out what the hell’s going on.

The one thing holding this book back from potentially winning the Booker is that Alan Garner is an old white man - tantamount today to having a swastika face tattoo, in some social circles - so it’ll probably go to Elizabeth Strout’s Oh, William!, which is an equally dreary book, but Strout is an old white woman, which gives her the edge (even though her novel is about an old white man).

Treacle Walker: corr bolg, what a complete load of tarradiddles!