Winner of both the Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal.
"A rare imaginative feat and the taste that it leaves is haunting." The Observer
"One of the first and best novels for and about teenagers; it remains one of the most original and gripping ghost stories. Timeless!" The Times
"Something was stirring in the valley, something powerful and old. Something which had no place in the rational modern world..."
It all begins with the scratching in the ceiling. From the moment Alison discovers the dinner service in the attic, with its curious pattern of floral owls, a chain of events is set in progress that is to effect everybody's lives.
Relentlessly, Alison, her step-brother Roger and Welsh boy Gwyn are drawn into the replay of a tragic Welsh legend - a modern drama played out against a background of ancient jealousies. As the tension mounts, it becomes apparent that only by accepting and facing the situation can it be resolved.
In The Owl Service, Alan Garner takes this old, old story from the Welsh legends which make up the Mabinogion and blends it into the present. It's a fascinating book. There aren't any facile tricks of plot - no time travel, no spirits from the past inhabiting the pages of today.
The Owl Service is about a summer in a Welsh valley not thousands of years ago, but in the twentieth century. Alison and Gwyn find an old dinner service in the attic of the house where Gwyn's mother is housekeeper and which Alison has inherited from her father.
As Alison begins feverishly to trace and make paper owls from the flowered pattern on the plates, Gwyn and Roger join her in reliving the roles of that past drama. And yet, they are not possessed, they remain entirely themselves, with their own qualities, opinions, talents and problems. In the old time there were gods and goddesses, curses, heirs and fiefdoms. In the present time there are step-families and the class struggle. So different and yet somehow, so very much the same. The Bookbag
About the Author
His fourth book, 'The Owl Service' brought Alan Garner to everyone's attention.
It won two important literary prizes - The Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal - and was made into a serial by Granada Television.
It has established itself as a classic and Alan Garner as a writer of great distinction.
Despite an OBE for services to children's literature, and the fact that books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Elidor are the kind of absorbing childhood fantasy that reverberates into adulthood, to view Garner as a children's writer is reductive. He puts it best when he says: "I do not write for children, but for myself. Adolescents read my books. By adolescence, I mean an arbitrary age somewhere between 10 and 18." It's an in-between group, and Garner's books are likewise poised between passion and detachment, intensity and alienation, blunt modernity and ancient myth.
His style is stripped-down, yet shares dialect and linguistic relish with much older works. "The language of my childhood and of my native culture is, technically, North-west Mercian Middle English," he has said - the language of the Gawain poet. The layers of local history and a precise sense of place are paramount in his work.
He has been writing for over 40 years; each book is a lengthy project as he pours so much research into it (learning Welsh for The Owl Service, for example). Eventually, "I feel a jolt within me and I hear quite without any understanding; I hear words, which I put down". Not all his work is fantasy - the Stone Quartet follows four generations of Garner's family from the mid-19th century to the second world war. Strandloper, his first novel for adults, was a difficult, almost experimental, evocation of Aboriginal culture. In his 2003 adult book, Thursbitch, which grew out of his fascination with a mysterious tombstone on a Pennine track, he is back on home ground and all the better for it.
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