The Voice that Thunders - Hardcover

Garner, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860464688 ISBN 13: 9781860464683

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 1999

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In this collection of essays and lectures. Alan Garner shows how his thinking and writing have developed over the years and demonstrates the wide range or his concerns and scholarship, encompassing such diverse topics as language, literature, education, mental health, anthropology, archaeology, myth, the spiritual quest, philosophy, music, and film.Running throughout is Garner's relentless emphasis on excellence, innovation, and humor, priorities derived from his childhood in a rural, working-class family of craftsmen. He has combined their standards with his own education as a classicist and his involvement with the academic world. The whole volume is a poetic autobiography, from the story of when he heard himself declared dead at the age of six to his description of the inevitability of Strandloper, his most recent novel. In the final essay, from which the book takes its title, he describes how Strandloper came to be written and shows the ways in which his many skills were demanded in bringing that work about.

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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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