Alan Garner's writing is marked by hard thinking and hard, fierce imagining. These have been brought to bear upon a distinctive choice of subject: the meeting-plane of two contiguous worlds. One is the world that most of us agree to describe, however inadequately, as ordinary, everyday, or by some such term. The other is the world of folklore and myth, dream and nightmare and vision. The wall between these two worlds is tough, but of less than tissue-paper thinness. Where the thinness can be worn into a transparency or where the unusual pressure of one world bursts its way into the other, there is the beginning of a Garner story.

In The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, which can be considered as consecutive parts of the same story, the two worlds were unequally balanced: the weight of the reader's interest was with the other world, not with the two ordinary, convenient children who broke through into it.

Then came Elidor, realistic-apocalyptic, comic-sublime: the author's art held his two worlds together in exact balance, in a perfection of narrative tension. Here was a splendid achievement. (pp. 291-92)

The fourth and latest book, The Owl Service, brings the worlds together again; but with a difference of method and effect. The story is contained within a remote Welsh valley where the power of that other world lies like some bottomless lake. Into this place are gathered the everyday people who are at the centre of the story: two boys and a girl, no blood relation, yet brought together so closely that at one time it seems as if only the spilling of blood can separate them. The young people discover an old dinner-service with an owl pattern round the edge, which becomes the girl's obsession. This is the beginning of a series of discoveries, mysterious and deeply disturbing. The discoveries allow themselves to be made, but thereafter take charge, driving the story onwards, apparently towards some tragic conclusion.

Early in the story the girl, Alison, is sitting out of doors reading in the sun; the two boys arrive to tackle her on the subject of the owl service. One, Gwyn, is stung into violent quarrelling and kicks the book out of her hand. It lands yards away from Alison on the grass:

Gwyn could see himself reflected in her sunglasses, and at the corner of the lens something fluttered like a wounded bird. He turned his head. It was the book. It came for him through the air. Its pages rattled, and disintegrated, but still came for him, like a tail after the red binding. Gwyn dropped the flour bags and protected his face as the book swarmed at him.

"No!" he shouted.

This is only one of the nonsensical and violent happenings that in the telling (what a word is swarm, in this context!) defies disbelief. The incident is particularly important because here the double-dealing of the story begins to emerge. For the possessed book is the 'Mabinogion', whose Fourth Branch tells of the bewitched valley. A certain man was under a curse to have no natural wife, so a woman was conjured for him out of the flowers of the valley, oak and broom and meadowsweet. But what is it like to be a woman made for another's purpose, instead of born to your own? This woman made of flowers betrayed her husband for a lover, and two men were killed through her; her punishment was to be changed into an owl. All this happened a long, long legendary time ago; but the valley flowers still bloom, owls still hunt, and human natures can still be suddenly filled with hate as with love.

This is partly a roman à clef and, properly to understand what is going on, the reader needs every aid: the publisher's explanatory blurb, the endpaper design of the owl plate, the author's acknowledgements and three quotations before the story begins—and the Fourth Branch. Even with these, the narrative power of the book may be the undoing of the susceptible reader, hurrying him on in headlong excitement towards a total of mental confusion. It isn't up to an author to explain everything, of course; but he should make plain. In Elidor there are plenty of inexplicables, but this happens; in The Owl Service, on the whole, it does not.

Yet parts of The Owl Service are as good as anything comparable in Elidor; and there are new strengths, too. In particular, there is a masterly appreciation of class idioms and snobberies, and an awareness of their deadly potentiality as weapons. Not the happiest of subjects for young readers, some may say. Others will be almost certain to add that even unhappier is the choice of illegitimacy and adultery, jealousy and revenge as recurring themes in the story.

My repeated objection, however, is not that young readers (and adults too, for that matter) may understand too much, but that they are likely to understand too little. This is a great pity in a story by Alan Garner. (pp. 292-93)