Scrambling Up the Hill

Or Going Mad in Thursbitch

Someone on Twitter once sort of challenged me – or I provoked myself – to write as if Enid Blyton had strayed into Garner Country, or if Alan Garner had tried to write in the style of La Blyton. “Wot larx,” I thought – and although parody is not really something I can do very easily, I thought a quick go would be OK. After all, the Weirdstone begins with two children going on holiday, doesn’t it? How hard can this be?

Actually, it’s really difficult. Blyton, although occasionally mocked and frequently criticised – Joyce Grenfell is merciless – was hugely popular and does attempt a child’s-eye drama, but she has such a different point of view from what we see of Alan Garner, from use of language to views of landscape, that I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s often quoted ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’ – see, for example this blog post. Would an Alan Garner world be comprehensible to Enid Blyton?

And yet, poorly little Joe in Treacle Walker might (possibly with a sigh) tear himself away from his Knockout comic to read some escape with spies and danger if such a thing seemed exciting, and The Mountain of Adventure might have gone in a more Aikenesque or Garnerish direction. Garner’s Mossocks might stand for Blyton’s Evans, and we are, after all, in a misty, hilly landscape…

I am being cheeky here.

Where the task becomes impossible is evident from my subtitle. Imagine the tragedy, the earthiness, the spirituality of Thursbitch being reduced to a tale of spies and scientists up in the hills… or (more fairly) to keep to Garner’s earlier work, aimed more at a young readership, Selina Place in Weirdstone or Gomrath being tamed into simply an unpleasant figure with a big house on the Cheshire plain? It is where this taming would be necessary that the parody becomes worthless.

Witness:

Brambles were waiting for them on the other side, but they tore themselves free and ran as best they could through the scrub and matted fringe of the wood.

Garner: Weirdstone Ch 16: The Wood of Radnor

which might have come from either author, whereas

In [Roland’s] narrow angle of vision there was nothing but mountains; peaks, crags, ice and black rock stabbed upwards. The porch seemed to be at the top of a cliff, or a knife-backed ridge. Roland had the sensation of a sheer drop behind him in tge room.

Garner: Elidor Ch 14: The High Places

That sheer drop is astonishing landscape painting, the view through the letterbox that seeps into the everyday, and the image, a little further on, of the lance-carrying men “with the beauty of steel,” riding stags in the shadow-light completes this, a short but utterly brilliant fantasy scene. There is little place in Blyton’s mystery novels even for “Athens in the woods of Warwickshire,” and there is a lack of nuance and transcendence in her more magical writing that sets her apart from Garner. I cannot escape the idea of “lack,” but at its simplest, these are worlds and words far, far from each other. We might as well begin a Blyton adventure in Llareggub, with Dylan Thomas.

Now that would be a parodist’s challenge.