4th Estate, 152pp, £8.99
At 160 pages and only 15,000 words, Treacle Walker is a slip of a novel but lovers of Alan Garner's half century of story-telling magic will recognise the landscape - fairy story, fable and a touch of medieval morality tale which awarded him a place (at 88) on the Booker Prize shortlist. In the Times Literary Supplement, medieval literature scholar Carolyne Larrington thought it a ‘remarkable achievement, somehow encapsulating a long lifetime's work’.
A young boy, Joe Coppock, lives alone and when the pedlar Treacle Walker calls by with his horse and cart, it sets off, wrote Larrington, ‘a chain of mysterious happenings that seem both inexplicable and inevitable’. Susie Goldsbrough in the Times wasn't sure who it was actually for. ‘The story slips into that particular, snug pocket of children's literature about sick or lonely children who stumble into magical worlds.’ But the language, she thought, was ‘tricky (if delicious flustifaction, Clanjandering) and the plot scattergun’.
But in the , Sam Leith simply loved it. ‘Garner knots together a whole range of mythological and fairy-story motifs, and tropes from children's stories - double vision, looking-glass worlds, wise fools, monsters that can't cross a threshold unless invited in, obscurely understood magical objects - to create a
