The Owl Service

"My fourth choice is The Owl Service by Alan Garner. One of the first jobs I was given as an illustrator was designing the cover of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen , then Moon of Gomrath , then Elidor … so I don’t know why I’ve particularly chosen The Owl Service— but it did stick with me. It’s different to the others in that it deals with adolescent crisis. This is a coming-of-age story. It is based on a story I knew very well from reading The Mabinogion , another story I went on to illustrate. It is the story of a woman made of flowers–of oak broom and meadowsweet. She is created as a wife for a young man who is not allowed to have a human wife–because of a curse. And they are happy for a while until she falls for someone else. She and her lover conspire to kill her husband, who had told her he could only be killed in a particular and rather elaborate way. She tricks him into telling the secret, with unexpected consequences. “When I go out into the woods, or by the river, I get a sense of hidden forces or beings in the landscape. ” That is the basis of the myth. You get the sense of the strange rituals–especially in Garner’s books –a sense that the stories have filtered down through the ages. In The Owl Service this idea is taken even further–in that these myths are actually manipulating the modern characters in the story. It’s just great stuff. All those Mabinogion stories are full of strange magic and poetry. I think there is a connection with the work I do. Drawing and drawing from myth. I’m not exactly sure why I chose to immerse myself in myth. Obviously because I’ve been reading them since I was five or six years old. These stories are so bound up with the landscape. So when I go out into the woods, or by the river, I get a sense of hidden forces or beings in the landscape. So even if I’m painting a landscape that is just there, I feel I’m investing it with, or conjuring up, some life within that landscape. This is particularly true where I’m living at the moment in Dartmoor, which is such an ancient landscape. A simple walk can cover thousands of years of history. Tin mines from 1300, a village that was deserted in the 1400s, stones circles that are 3,000 years old–it’s all there living in the landscape."