The Owl Service (1967)

The book opens in an old house in Wales during a hot summer afternoon. Alison is in bed but can't rest because of a persistent scratching overhead. Not only persistent, but rhythmic. She asks Gwyn, the son of the housekeeper, to go into the loft and check. He finds a dinner service neatly stacked and nothing else.

The plates are not fine china, but glazed earthenware and heavy. Ironstone. They have an unusual pattern that at first glance is of flowers, but Alison sees them as owls. She traces the design onto paper to the show the effect. On asking his mother about the plates Gwyn is surprised at her angry response and demand that the plates not be disturbed. His mother has a history with the house as well as the valley, returning for this job only out of need for the money.

Meanwhile, Alison's stepbrother Roger rests from his daily swim on a rock by the river and has a strange feeling overcome him. The stone has a hole bored clean through it and is a part of local legend concerning a legendary warrior and a tragic love triangle.

I knew very little going into the book, but Garner quickly immersed me into the eerie mystery and cursed magic surrounding Alison, Gwyn and Roger. Garner doesn't explain much, and the tensions of the house can at first be explained as stemming from the recent unequal marriage of Alison and Roger's mother and father. There is also tension between Nancy the housekeeper and the hired man Huw Halfbacon as well as between the servants and the family. Tensions arise among all three teenagers as well. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and Alison's mother's constant, unseen presence overshadows everything.

After you've finished reading the book, I highly recommend the 1969 TV series produced by the BBC. It is far from perfect but captures much of the mood and tension of the novel. All eight episodes are on YouTube. ( )

Considered a classic by many, I found it less so. There were some good scenes, but a lot of it is a deliberate muddle and you start to wonder if anything is going to happen. When it does, it is anticlimactic to say the least. And the ending is one that scholarly articles have been written on, since so many readers object to it. I won't spoil it for you. I did enjoy the Welsh setting very much. It makes me wan to spend time in one of those valleys, no matter how insular it turns out to be.

The audiobook was very well read by Wayne Forester. ( )

An ancient Welsh curse gets reenacted every generation, and we're here given one iteration of the doomed scenario when a family comes to vacation in the home that the step-daughter has inherited from her father, and she, her step-brother, and the son of the housekeeper (who herself has a strange part to play in events) find themselves inevitably and unwillingly taking on the magical age-old roles that started it all. Will they be able, unlike so many before them, to resist the pull of the curse and break the cycle?

So yeah, this one is much better thought-out and executed than that Brisinger mess, I have to say. It's an interesting plot and Garner does a fair job telling it, with Gwyn - the housekeeper's son - stealing the story by being by far the most interesting and well-drawn character. ( )

One of my least favourite books from childhood, surpassed mostly by the other Alan Garners.

Our school was Very Keen on Alan Garner. So we had the obvious canon of them forced upon us. Which rarely works. Particularly so for the Owl Service. This is a novel mostly of teenage jealousies. If you're 11, you've not only not read the Mabinogion, you've not yet been jilted by your crush in favour of the posh kid either. So when we were forced to read this, we had neither of the reference points that Garner bridges between, so no wonder we didn't understand it. We probably thought it was about owls, or plates.

Much later, I decided to re-read Alan Garner (CS Lewis too, who came off rather worse for it). These days I live in a village where Merlin is sleeping under a hill nearby and our local cafe has a life-size carving of Blodeuwedd, because why wouldn't you? So I understood Garner's world rather better and this time round I loved it.

It's a "Young Adult" book. But that's not a kid's book.

One of my favourite books from childhood. There's so much to grasp, so many depths, so much unexplained, so satisfying. One character is there living in the same house as all the others and influencing the action - but we never meet her - how and why did Alan Garner engineer that? I try not to re-read too often and the story keeps fresh for me. ( )