The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner

The Stone Book Quartet Reviews

• 
  Nigel

  I have read a lot of books this year, but this may be the most extraordinary. Four novellas, each about a child in a different generation of the same family, at a moment of discovery or grace or insight, intersected by people and words, places and ideas, shapes and histories, resonant with the shared myth of family and craft.
  
  There are people who write spare prose that is sharp and precise and economical; hard-boiled sometimes. Alan Garner's prose is stripped and polished, but the result is beautifully, poetically evocative. Language for Garner is not just surface, it is something that goes all the way down, sedimentary geological layers, with the spoken sounds and read letters merely the visible features of millennia of history expressed unwittingly and perceived unknowingly. There is no sense of loss or grief in these books as things pass and people pass (though I cried twice reading it) but the sense that all things exist in their brief bright moment, and survive in the language and the actions and the genes of their ancestors and in the very bones of the place where they lived, shaping the lives of those who come after in invisible ways, only manifesting in rare secret physical forms: a name carved on a hidden block in a church steeple or a clay pie unearthed with the potatoes. So we live and commune with what has gone before, ignorant but not ignored. So we become the place where we live. Marks carved in books of stone, with love.
• 
  Rhys

  I have been familiar with the name Alan Garner for years but never got round to actually reading him until a couple of weeks ago. I picked this book off the shelves at my local library and I'm very glad I did. It's an excellent piece of work. The writing is superb: uncluttered but magical, and the characters come alive on the page almost instantly. Somehow Garner has tuned in to some 'universal consciousness'. The incidents he decsribes seem common to all of us but also unique to the particular characters.
  
  I felt an acute mixture of nostalgia, sadness and glee as I read these four linked novellas. The only book I have read in recent years that has given me a similar feeling in this particular mode was A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. I fully intend to seek out more books by Garner in the coming months...
  
  * August, 2022. I have just reread this book and I loved it as much as during my first reading. The first and last of the four chapters especially stand out.
• 
  Caren

  There is, in the latest issue of "The Horn Book Magazine", an interview with Elizabeth Wein ("Code Name Verity"), in which she mentions the British author, Alan Garner, as an early influence. It came to me that I had read glowing mentions of his work for quite some time and even had some of his books stashed away with the intent to read them "someday". Rummaging around, I pulled out "The Stone Book Quartet" and decided "someday" had arrived. This is described as a book for children, but I personally think it may appeal more to adults. The four novellas that comprise the book are intertwined, but you don't realize that in the beginning. There is no explanation of when each takes place or of who the characters are, but as you read, bits of the puzzle begin to fall into place. The prose is spare and very well-thought-out, as though each word had been chosen very deliberately. It is kind of fascinating, really, to see how the characters are related to each other. Even so, there were parts I didn't understand fully until I found a British woman's blog post after I had finished reading the book. I like British books; I like the deep, nuanced use of the English language I usually find from British authors. In this book, the culture is so thoroughly British, there were some things I didn't fully understand. For that reason, this blog post was a wonderful help:
  
  
  http://scholar-blog.blogspot.com/2005...
  
  I can see now why Alan Garner is so highly respected. He has brought to life one place, one small community, across the course of a handful of generations. One thing that really struck me about life in those earlier times is the way in which working with one's hands at a trade was the center of a person's life. The work required skill and intelligence, but the end result was something the craftsman could see and which lasted for generations. Sitting in front of a computer screen at work day after day doesn't seem at all as rewarding.
  
  
• 
  Helen (Helena/Nell)

  I'm giving him a five, although I do have some reservation. But still these are such interesting little books. The quartet of thin paperbacks, with large print (one larger than the other three), could easily have been presented as one book in four sections. It still wouldn't have been very long. The stories are presented as for children but I did find myself wondering what age of child, and what kind of child . . . The large print made them seem for younger children than they could possibly be aimed at. Though perhaps I just don't know what children read now. The four books are connected in that all the characters are part of the same family -- different generations. The landscape and language are Cheshire, where I grew up myself, not far from where the author still lives (I don't). So I like the way the characters speak. It seems familiar to me, even though I myself never used these most of these terms. But some of them, yes. The stories are written like poems. The language is pared right back. My favourite, at the moment, is Tom Fobble's Day. I shan't forget the image of the boy sledging at high speed at night. It's during the second World War. There's an air raid -- he pretends to be a spitfire, breaking up the pack of the other boy sledgers. Something hugely beautiful about the scene.
  
  I'll need to read them all again. You can read them quickly and easily, but you know you're missing the intricacy. I like the opening one too, the only one in which the central character is female. The illustrations by Michael Foreman in these Fontana Lions are also lovely.
  
  I read Alan Garner when I was a kid, and as I grew up his books grew older too. But these ones seemed like throwbacks: so I managed to miss them.
  
  The unofficial Alan Garner website tells you a lot. Recommended.
  http://alangarner.atspace.org/
• 
  Rosamund Taylor

  A wonderful book, this is a brilliant introduction to Garner's work, full of the themes he has brilliantly explored over his long life as a writer, such as place, how we exist within time, what being a craftsperson means, how history writes itself on our lives, and how to live in this particular moment. This book is written in simple language, and was originally published for children, and as such is easy to read, but its depth and emotional power linger long after it's finished. The story follows four generations of a family in a village in Chester, going from the early 19th century to the mid-20th. We meet a child from each generation, and see them experiencing life and witness them have a moment of insight or joy. Though simple, these stories demonstrate the ways in which our ancestors live the same kinds of lives we do, and yet how quickly and completely things change. Garner's best work gives us a sense of time, and how we can exist within and outside of time, and leaves the reader full of a feeling of the numinous. This book does exactly that: it captures something of the inevitability of life and death, and also the sense of how our actions matter to everyone around us, through the generations.
• 
  Judy

  Not typical of books that target young readers. In fact, I doubt that kids would read this; it is more appropriate for adults.
  
  I liked the continuity across generations and the connection between peoples' lives and the land. The use of language threw me at first, but after unsuccessfully looking up several words, I settled into the story and let the context shape my understanding.
  
  An example of the writing, p 104:
  Behind each man the corn swarf lay like silk in the light of poppies. And the women gathered the swarf by armfuls, spun bants of straw and tied in armfuls into sheaves, stacked sheaves into kivers.
  
  From the notes at the end:
  This book is not written in standard book English, but in a regional variant, which like all dialect is very bold and direct.
  
  That's it. Does this sound like something that a young reader would enjoy? Most serious of all ... I didn't understand the ending.
  
  I know I'd enjoy it more if I read it again, but before doing so, I'll let some time pass.
• 
  Denny

  I like Garner could not read this one.
• 
  Cheryl

  Wait, what? How could these be published as separate stories? Each is hardly longer than a picture-book. And they didn't make sense until I read all four and got clues from three to understand each fourth. Listen, I'm well-read, I've read plenty of British children's lit, but got only a very vague sense of what was going on here. Sure the language is musical, but sensible? Enlightening? Dialect that thick needs either a glossary or context clues or at least pix... here there's none of that. Well, ok, there might be context clues, but they're in dialect too; it's circular. The internet isn't much help either, though I did finally learn that Garner's idiom 'Granny Reardun' means bastard. How in heck does a young child reading in the 1970s know that?
  
  Now I know this is a minority opinion, and I'm sure I'm only exposing my ignorance to all you fans of this, but I'm going to say it anyway. This is self-indulgent literary twittery that is only marginally more clothed than Andersen's emperor. If the book were written by someone unknown, it would have to have been self-published as a vanity project.
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3123435.html
  
  I was a big fan of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a child, and Red Shift as a teenager, and enjoyed The Owl Service more recently. Somehow this had passed me by. It’s a set of four novellas, set in the same family across five different generations but in the same place, Garner’s home ground, Alderley Edge in Cheshire; each story is about a turning point in the life of a child, who then turns up as an adult in the next. It’s understated, lyrical, not really about very much but very beautifully done. Garner himself apparently regards it as his masterpiece; not sure I’d completely agree with that, but I enjoyed it a lot, and it has a lot of bang for a very short book.
• 
  G. Lawrence

  Beautiful. Simple writing, complex themes. Loved it
• 
  Dearbhla

  The stone book quartet contains four short novels :
  
  The Stone Book
  Granny Reardun
  The Aimer Gate
  Tom Fobble’s Day
  
  The stories tell four different stories, set in four different times in a rural part of Cheshire, England. The first is set in 1864, and the last in 1941. They all tell a story set in one day in the life of children, all of different generations of the same family.
  
  The first, The Stone Book, is the story of Mary, who is bringing her father his “baggin” or lunch. He is a stone mason, working on the church spire. Mary is hoping that her mother has a boy soon because she is tired of “being a lad” and having to climb up the spire to help her father. But at the same time she enjoys the closeness with him.
  
  Granny Reardun is the story of Mary’s son, Joseph. A Granny Reardun is a child raised by its granny instead of its mother. Possibly because he was illegitimate. Joseph has been helping his grandfather, but he knows he doesn’t want to work with stone.
  
  The Aimer Gate tells the story of Robert, Joseph’s son, as a cornfield is harvested in the old way, with a team of men using scythes. He climbs up the spire of the local church and finds his own name engraved there. This, of course, is the his great-grandfather’s engraving, Mary’s father, Robert.
  
  The last story, Tom Fobble’s Day, is named for a local tradition whereby any child can take another’s marbles by calling “Tom Fobbles” on Tom Fobble’s Day which seems to be the day after Easter. But the day in question is not Tom Fobbles day, but is in the middle of winter.
  
  The stories are obviously linked because the concern different individuals of the same family, but they are also linked because they are about traditional crafts, customs, and skills. And the line that links all these different generations of the same family.
  
  They are lovely stories. Garner writes so simply, and yet he never dumbs down. There are plenty of words that I’d never heard of before, but for the most part, you know what he is talking about because of the context, the “baggins” of the first story for example is obviously a traditional local word for lunch. And that use of unfamiliar words really works to help create a very distinctive atmosphere and setting.
  
  In all his writings that I’ve read Garner is always concerned with place and how it can link a person to their whole family’s history. Garner himself was born in the place where his family had lived for years, he knows so much about that area because he has grown up with people who can trace their history back through generation after generation, each with stories and knowledge about that particular place. That idea that a place can own a person and a person can own a place.
  
  There was a line and he could feel it. It was a line through hand and eye, block, forge and loom to the hill. He owned them all: and they owned him.
  
  I’m pretty sure there must be an illustrated version of these stories out there, I must go investigate at some point, because I think these are stories that can be revisited time and again, probably offering more on a reread. When I have the time I’d love to read some books about Garner and his work too.
• 
  Flora

  There is so much to find in Alan Garner's work. Over and over again he unearths the stones from beneath the hill, turning them over in his hands, smoothing and polishing to make them shine, wearing them away so that they sit comfortably in the hand - an axe - warm, shining, useful.
  
  You can't talk about Alan Garner without talking about the land. Somehow space, place and time always come into it. Each work is just a different iteration, a different facet of the same great work: who we are and where we are (not to mention when we are) and how sometimes that's the same thing.
  
  Lift up the cover of
  First Light: A Celebration of Alan Garner and you find the constellation of the plough (which points to the North Star which points home). Lift up the turf of the hillside and you find good stone (which came from a house which once was home).
  
  Alan Garner's writing is the closest I can come to any kind of spirituality (which is a terrible word and I wish I could think of a better one). The idea that time is not linear, that in fact it folds in on itself in layers, that, as Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." That we tell each other stories about the land that we live on and that the land tells us stories too. That there is no distance between us and the person who made a handprint on a cave wall millennia ago. That the ground teems with the footprints of all those who walked there a thousand, a hundred, a day, an hour ago, an invisible crowd. That there are lines that connect us to each other, to the hills, to our place in the universe.
• 
  Abbie

  The Stone Book, Granny Reardun, Aimers Gate, and Tom Fobbles Day are short stories that make up The Stone Book Quartet. Together they span a century and offer a glimpse into life in Northern England at various points in history.
  The first story begins with Mary in the mid 18th century- her uncle is a weaver and her dad is a stone mason building the huge cathedral in the nearby town.
  Joseph, her son, is the titular "Granny Reared 'Un". Realising that there is soon to be no work for stone Masons as cheap brick is being used everywhere, he decides to become a Smith.
  Robert, his son, watches the men bring in the harvest as WWI is breaking out. His uncle Charlie has enlisted and their way of life is soon to be lost.
  William, his son, comes of age during the blitz and the story of his sled ties all together.
  A really, really beautiful book that leaves you desperately wanting more than these short snippets into their lives.
• 
  Cooper Renner

  Brief, lucid, beautiful novellas following one rural English family through four generations. The depth and affection of Hardy condensed into four 40-page works in which every single word counts. Garner is one of England's very finest writers of the past 50 years.
  
  Reading again—2022. Another Garner masterpiece.
• 
  Gabriel Clarke

  One of those books that finishes and leaves you with a kind of electrical shock of feeling and engagement.
• 
  Andrew

  Story, language, land, character and craft. A deep sense of place. A plunging in time. A story of stone and metal and silk and wood, of crafts which call to each of the young people of each novella as they come of age, each connected through the material of their craft fashioned into a piece of the place where a father places a weathercock atop the great church he has built of the yellow-white dimension stone, or the hands of the clock on the chapel, lying at either end of the village - a 'running stitch' throughout the quartet and Garner's life.
  
  The stone of the land - galena ('lead glance', a source of silver, with its beautiful black-silver sheen), puddingstone (or plum-pudding stone, a conglomerate of rounded pebbles), marl (lime-rich mudstone of clay and silt), and foxbench; flint, Tough Tom; the green stain of malachite - lies beneath the Lifeless Moss below Wood Hill in great stopes of sheer excavation, beneath the fields ploughed by rhythmic teams of scythers, being too steep for the self-binder to reap on. Bants become sheaves become kivvers in a timeless rhythm of the harvest, echoed in the clack of the loom in the shuttle and the silken ticking of the clock and the setting of the clock by the bell.
  
  These rhythms, lost in a past never ours, never mine, born on the fringes of its disappearance, are evoked for us through an archaic language: gangue (material such as quartz around a mineral); ophicleide (a long straight brass instrument like a tuba but shaped like a sudraphone); a Macclesfield dandy (a cheap clay pipe). Flitting, brogged, donkey-stone, raddle and daub, pobs, a bass (tool bag), raunging, gondering, boggler and brat. A weisening. A thrutch. Sweet tea and verjuice.
  
  Garner's evocation of the past echoes throughout all his novels: the fairy-tale mythology of The Weirdstone and Moon Of Gomrath, of Elidor, The Owl's Service and Red Shift; the echoes of a deep past through a deep land of bull and blood in Thursbitch, and the nearer echoes of a recent past in The Stone Book Quartet. His loved land is northwest Cheshire, the wolf maw of the Mabinogian falling off the Welsh Hills and ranging down Shuttlingslow over Alderley Edge. In drawing the blood of legend out of the bedrock, he conjures time vertically out of place, strata of history seeped in lore. How could a motorway sit above all this? Our world barely intrudes: roadworks in Alderley unearth the Brollochan; the roads of Thursbitch bring the backpackers to the bull; the road of Chorley links one end of the village to the other.
  
  The Stone Book Quartet is a quadrilogy of vignettes of fine focus in a place remote from the world we now know. It has moments that glance off the mind in reveries of other homages to the past (Cider With Rosie [1959]), it has the feel of a rural childhood full of wonder, wandering in endless fields without a living soul. It has the thrill of secret places and experiences none but one other has ever shared. It brings an echo of the reverberation of your own childhood and youth, that no one else knows but the companion of those reveries. It is a private world of caves and woods, of being inside steepletops, in secret hideouts, set in a community like an extended family - but still there's space for precious secrets. Here, there is no threat - but from the wider world. Garner weaves stories from land and time so personal, they feel like our own past lives, even though we know they are his and his family's biography.
  
  Why did I suddenly pull this off my shelf, despite other reading plans? Because of this evocativeness, calling.
  
  Each of these stories may be slight, but they are rich. They remind you of something lost, found now only in words, Garner's craft.
• 
  Jean-Paul

  My ongoing reading journey through a variety of folk traditions recently brought be back around to English writer and folklorist Alan Garner, author of The Owl Service (tremendous!) and The Weirdstone of Brisingham (fun!). After looking for something new to read from Garner I came across a series of four short stories which, when published together, are titled The Stone Book Quartet. When I initially sought the book out at my local public library, the 1978 edition they had available from storage in the stacks consisted of only the first story, “The Stone Book.” While this hardcover book does include several beautiful etchings by Michael Foreman, it did not include the three stories that, published later, ultimately comprised the entire four-story sequence. As a result, I devoured “The Stone Book” and quickly ordered a more recent Harper Perennial collection which includes all four stories as well as a biographical sketch of the author, an interview and a wonderful family photograph from 1890 that inspired the author's writing ("About the Book," page 16). Taken as a whole, each extra lends additional depth to the series and only adds to the great value of the purchase.
  
  The Stone Book Quarter consists of “The Stone Book”, “Granny Reardun”, “The Aimer Gate”, and “Tom Fobble’s Day”, clocking in at a breezy and concise 172 pages. While each story can stand alone as a look at one part of Garner’s somewhat fictionalized family history (as revealed in the book's additional matter), taken together it paints of broad and deep understanding from a multitude of generational and gender perspectives. During my first (this will find its way into my list of titles to re-read annually) read through I could not help but take notes in my 5" x 3" spiral bound as images brought up in “The Stone Book” found their way back around through the other stories. Each story takes a look at familial relationships, an individual character's search for purpose through work, while painting a vivid picture of each historical period with direct language. In addition to taking notes regarding images and plot, I also found myself looking up terms and concepts that applied to each career explored, among them stone masonry, textile and metal work. A secondary motif that runs throughout The Stone Book Quartet is the communal power of song. Each chapter includes family members young and old who find joy in their work and play through a shared tune. Despite the seemingly hard-scrabbled lives of the characters, each takes pride in being able to contribute to an occasional tune either through voice or instrument.
  
  In The Owl Service and other works, Garner points to the impact of mythology and folklore as carried through landscape, but here the mythology extends to include family and work. The magic of The Stone Book Quartet lies not in supernatural dishes or stones, but rather in the connection built among family and craft through time. For Garner’s characters, the magic of existence is revealed in identifying and pursuing one’s productive passion whether in stone, iron, wood or even, in Uncle Charlie's case in "The Aimer Gate", stopping rabbits from striking. Each of these elemental pursuits create family across generations and this practical magic is often unrevealed until one looks into a small corner or behind a shadowy wall.
  
  The Stone Book Quartet is well worth seeking out for those interested in folklore, English history and legacy.
• 
  A.M. Steiner

  I am in awe of Alan Garner's eye and prose, and this is possibly his best written book. As a work of literature, it unquestionably deserves its reputation as belonging at the top end of what is possible. I'll be honest, though, and admit that I admired it far more than I enjoyed it. The Stone Book quartet is a fictionalised memoir of four generations of Garner's Cheshire family, and while it touches on themes such as the value of craft, the way in which history accumulates, and how the things we make, make us (in much the same way as did Red Shift), at its core this is simply an account. Garner himself confirms in the excellent addendum that it's not intended to be "about" anything. And, as Garner also confirms, he writes for himself. The monument to family that Garner has created here has certainly been carved true, perfectly perhaps, which accounts for its austere beauty, but I'm afraid that's it's too literary and the rural extended family situation too far from anything I can relate to for my personal taste.
• 
  David

  A beautifully written elegy for a time long gone, The Stone Book Quartet features four interlinked stories, spanning more than a century, about one day in the life of four generations of Garner's family. These are stories of craftsmen, stone cutters, blacksmiths, passing on their knowledge and craft, the secrets of their trades. But they are also stories of change, of a vanishing way of life, of loss and progress.
  
  Set in and around Chorley in Cheshire, where Garner's family has lived for generations, there is a pared down directness to the writing that means no word is wasted. No sentence is superfluous. Each short tale is moving in its own way, from the stone cutter showing his daughter the secret cave his family have visited for hundreds of years, to the blacksmith ending his time during the second world war surrounded by the shades of his forebears.
  
  This is some of Garner's best writing, a book for everyone. Superb.
• 
  Marcus Wilson

  This is the first non fantasy book I have read by Alan Garner and the one many consider to be his masterpiece. I don’t necessarily agree with the critics on that score, preferring the Owl Service or Red Shift, but thematically this is a must read for anybody who has enjoyed his work as it gives a great insight into Garner the man.
  
  Essentially four novellas gathered together into one volume, it charts the stories of four generations of children from Garners own family, all growing up in the same area. The times may change with each story but the place remains the same, and it shapes the lives of each of the protagonists. These defining moments that occur in our childhood, and how they shape our later lives is what lies at the heart of the Stone Book Quartet, but some may choose to see it also as a meditation on the decline of craftsmanship and traditional life. An intensely personal piece of writing from one of Britain’s finest authors.
• 
  J

  More donkey-stones to be had out of this one. Garner writes in such a strange way. It's very similar to my own writing style, an inheritance from a love of Joyce, perhaps?
  
  This sort of lyric flow takes precedence. The sounds of the words matter. They need to roll over one another smoothly. And now and then nature must be seen. Some sensation felt. Some small element of the mythic needs to flash and disappear.
  
  This is four short (very) stories turned into a cohesive novel in time. A single family with stone and metal in its past.
  
  I have to say, I don’t like having to spoil books, so the shortness of this one prompts me to remain vague.
  
  The writing manages to wrinkle up the hem of history and gather in a sort of ancestral common lore. This isn’t the story of lives, so much as the moments that determined the character’s lives. And then their children’s.
  
  A really interesting book. Especially worth reading if you’re a writer of literary fiction.
  
• 
  Andrew McClarnon

  This was from my father's collection, picked out now because I've not read any of Alan Garner's work before, despite knowing I should. Here was a chance to make a start. Its a bracing read, brief but so intense. I had no expectations, beyond the north Cheshire setting, so was delighted as the connections between the stories gradually unfolded. I had to read at a pace, as the dialect and rhythmic speech was a struggle if I tried to follow each phrase too closely. I've no idea what some of the references are, but that does not detract from the powerful impression. I felt the vertigo of the church spire, the claustrophobia of the mine shaft, the heat and weariness of the harvest, the thrill of the sledge ride. A famliy saga, a sense of wonder and the quiet satisfaction of purposeful craft.
• 
  Amber Scaife

  This middle grade book is a collection of four stories, each following a day in the life of a child living in Cheshire, England, and spanning four generations in the same family. There are clues in each story that link it to the next and/or previous ones and the connections are subtle and fairly clever. And so I feel that I should like this one more than I did. The idea is a good one, but sometimes it felt like I had to work much harder to figure out the linking clues than I really wanted to, which leads me to believe that some kiddos would miss them entirely and quickly would be lost. The Cheshire dialect was in parts a bit of a challenge as well. In the end, it falls into the largish bin of Books with Good Ideas but What Should Have Been Written By Neil Gaiman.
• 
  Robert

  The first story is the best, as it goes well beyond the small town folksy nature of the other stories. These reminded me a lot of some books of Irish tales I read years ago, also of Appalachian stories like those in Pissing in the Snow.
• 
  Josie Boyce

  I read a heck of a lot of sci fi and fantasy, and these loving turned words and evocations of a long gone past that wasn't really so long ago, could almost be another world, maybe it is. Just lovely stories. real time travel.
• 
  Judith

  A book that repays reading attentively - as a consequence I’ve read all of it at least twice! I could have done it some sort of family tree - & a map, but that comes of having grown up in NE Cheshire.
• 
  Helen McClory

  A spare series of stories of interconnected generations of one family. Lots of very specific language of tooling and working and dialect that passes me by but also adds a sense of something deep embedded.
• 
  Tim Armstrong

  Not a wasted word and masterful in every sense.
  Supposedly a children's book or books. But really one of the most thought provoking series of books you could read - at any age. Wonderful stuff.
• 
  Oliver Ho

  Beautiful and melancholic series of stories that are really one story—I love everything about this book. The structure and voices are incredible.