“Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and an exploration of the fluidity of time, vivid storytelling that brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of everything around him.”
https://wyrdbritain.blogspot.com/2022/04/treacle-walker.html

*****

Treakle Walker
By Alan Garner
2023 / 152 pages 
Rating – 9.85 (to read again)
Booker Prize short list 

*****

‘Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!’

Joe looked up from his comic and lifted his eye patch. There was a white pony in the yard. It was harnessed to a cart, flat cart, with a wooden chest on it. A man was sitting at a front corner of the cart, holding the reins. His face was creased. He wore a long coat and a floppy high-crowned hat, with hair straggling beneath, and a leather bag was slung from his shoulder across his hip.” 
*******

This book is not my usual kind of read – and I’m pretty eclectic. Weighing in at only 152 pages with 18 chapters each having its own blank breaker pages, it doesn’t take much time to finish. That said Treacle Walker is NOT a light read. It’s about time and physics and the ways of young boys and old story tellers in a place where everything has a name or two.  Except the pony.  

‘What’s up with my eyes?’
‘You have the glamourie,’ said the man. ‘In just the one. And that’s no bad thing, if you have the knowing.’ 
P 45

Glamourie is a Scots word meaning a charmed condition in which everything is invested with magical properties and possibilities.”  Google it – it’s from Alice Starmore’s book of that name. 

In some places this master magic work of wonder reminds me of Winnie the Pooh, but in others it reminds me of a medieval folk tale mixed up with a bit of Lewis Carrol (or maybe a lot of Carroll), or is this James Joyce here, as in Finnegans Wake – nae, mebee cannae be that because it might be Ishiguro as in The Buried Giant. “Garner has always suggested that there is essentially just one story,” the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/01/treacle-walker-by-alan-garner-review-the-book-of-a-lifetime

https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/reading-guide-treacle-walker-by-alan-garner