The Voice That Thunders - Softcover

Garner, Alan

4.43

143 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846554721 ISBN 13: 9781846554728

Publisher: Harvill Press, 2010

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Alan Garner is an exceptional lecturer and essayist. This collection, taken form the work of more that twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.

The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England's best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here.

This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country's history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer's own life. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

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Review:

"His is a consummate artist's vision that matches landscape and people and story; his is an artist's ear able to hear preliterate song as well as local speech and adolescent slang. With great skill he has wielded these into tales uniquely blending rustic vigour and classical economy of diction. They have won him a place in the company of English writers" (Ralph Elliott Labrys 7)

"Garner is his own man... taut, powerful and credible" (Penelope Lively)

"His work has a symphonic quality unique in fiction" (Jacky Gillott The Times)

"Alan Garner's themes are huge, urgent, compassionate, his voice distinguished by clarity, compression, precision, depth of feeling and sharpness of thought" (Neil Philip in A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner)

Book Description:

A rich collection of writings ranging through archeology, myth, music, philosophy, language and literature; it also serves as a poetic autobiography of a great and deeply English writer.

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