Where Shall We Run To? - Alan Garner - review

By Brian Clegg

There is no doubt that Alan Garner is a remarkable writer, for whom a sense of place is absolutely central to his writing – so it’s not entirely surprising that in this memoir of his childhood up to the age of 11 (with a couple of short articles from later years), the location where he was brought up – Alderley Edge – plays as much as part as his childhood friends and relations.

This was not the Alderley Edge of the modern football star – the village from mid-1930s to mid-1940s was a typical large rural village of the period with the familiar combination of eccentrics and everyday occurrences. Garner was a sickly child, whose illnesses also have a major influence on what we read.

For such a sophisticated writer, there is a deceptively simple style, relating events in a way that seems not much different to the way the young Garner himself might have related them – relatively little pastoral description, far more on what happened, with a casual attitude to time that enables him to flit backwards and forward through those ten years or so. School features large, as does family, and the ever-present Edge itself.

My main disappointment as a reader is that, while Garner hints at his transition to grammar school, he stops the narration before arriving there. This fits entirely with his sense-of-place driven approach, but I went to the same grammar school, also from the school of a large village (though 20 years later, and from a Lancashire village) and I would have loved to have discovered his experiences in Manchester – perhaps (please) there will be a sequel.

It’s a short book that would be possible to read in a single sitting and a delight that Garner fan, and many others would want to share.

Where Shall We Run To? is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.