Alan Garner's Treacle Walker, published in 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is a brief but poetic novel that explores themes of time, reality, and perception. The novel builds on much of Garner's previous work, which similarly examined time and philosophical issues. Although the novel is not written for children (Garner has previously released several children's books), its protagonist is the young Joe Coppock, and the novel's spare style has pushed some to view it as a hybrid work—bridging and bringing together adult and young readers. The novel was critically hailed for its complex meditations on time, quantum physics, and reality, as well as its uniquely whimsical voice and genre-bending exploration of fables, folktales, and myths.
The novel focuses on the life of Joe Coppock and the sudden arrival of a mysterious "rag and bone" man, Treacle Walker. Treacle Walker grants Joe a "second sight," plunging him into a new and unknown world that forces Joe to question what he considers to be real and not real. Along the way, he meets Thin Amren (a mysterious figure who lives in a bog), encounters comic book characters coming to life, and continues to discover his new magical reality with Treacle Walker by his side.
Garner infuses the novel with British history, slang, and allusions, as well as wordplay and vocabulary lifted from Scottish, Latin, and Old English. Treacle Walker often speaks in riddles, rhymes, and other forms of wordplay. The novel itself is also full of elements from myths, folktales, fairytales, and fables. Despite its short length, the novel manages to create a complicated, whimsical world and to raise existential questions about the nature of our reality and time.
