Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math, what's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the mocking? Our show is just beginning, so find a place to sit. These questions will be on the test. It's time for Sophomore Lit. Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list.
I'm your host, John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Ross Cleaver. Hi, John. How are you doing? Hi. How are things over on that side of the Atlantic? uh well i was going to say we got it's a bit stormy at the moment but then i just looked at the news and i thought okay don't even try and compare a british storm to an american spawn you've been on the podcast now i think twice and uh but
Why don't you reintroduce yourself to everybody? So I'm sorry if I talk in terms of podcast, because that's the sort of the world we're in at the moment. So I. I do two podcasts regularly at the moment. The main one is called General Witchfinders, where I talk to two of my friends about British horror, mainly British horror films. Every so often it's a book or a radio play or something horror adjacent. But just think Christopher Lee and Peter Cushion and you're on the right wheelhouse.
And I also do something called Dark Darset. And I live in a county called Dorset. But the way people, the accent here, it sounds a bit like Darset. Quite rural. And we talk about... sort of weird and wonderful sort of things in our county um mainly because it gets me and my friends out of the house to go and visit these things so stone circles and uh haunted
churches and all that kind of stuff um so yeah those are the two things i just like spooky stuff hence the um the book we're reading today right now dorset is that's that's really down south you've got yes pretty much in the center in the in the middle right right right right so you're over there by like the isle of white yes so that's um yeah so we're one county over from that
So, yeah, pretty much dead center on the coast. The book we're doing this time, at your suggestion, is Alan Gardner's 1967 book, The Owl Service. Yes. actually takes place in Wales. Yes, I did live in Wales for a while as well. Kerry Carey's Wars was in Wales. I feel like this podcast has had an inordinate amount of Wales representation between Dylan Thomas.
and the couple of books I've done with you here. And I think some of the prints I'm waiting went to Wales as well. I think whenever you want to have something magical or slightly... Rural and remote offices tend to stick it in Wales. Well, you're getting ahead of me. I was going to ask more about that because I feel like Wales always seems to stand in for we're going to go somewhere where there's druids and witches.
I don't know what we have in America that's similar. I guess the Bayou in Louisiana. Yes, yeah. So I've got all Cornwall. Cornwall or Wales. And I think they've sort of got the Celtic sort of... routes and stuff there as well. There's lots of legends and folklore and stuff in those areas. And as far as you can get remote here, they're sort of out of the way. And I think for people who are sort of like... In cities and stuff, it does feel quite exotic. So...
Why don't you tell me a little bit about your history with this book, which I had never heard of before you suggested, but which I understand now is one of the... absolute classics of the genre in Great Britain. Yeah, so it is another one of books which I did read in senior school. I wanted to be authentic to the premise of the podcast. But this is one which, and I was trying to think, because the first half of this book is so familiar to me, particularly the first couple of chapters.
And I think I've read this now three or four times, but the second half still comes as a surprise. I couldn't remember how it ended, which makes me think maybe we didn't finish it at school. But I was talking to some friends at work today and saying that I was pretty bad as a kid doing any homework. So it might have been a case that they set the second off the book for us to read at home rather than reading in class.
You know, you do a couple of pages each and I probably just skived off that bit of it. But I can always remember the beginning of this being a pretty spooky and...
Also, it made me think that the poltergeists used to be really popular when I was younger. There was always talk, there was always like... programs on the tv about um the info poltergeist and stuff where young girls being sort of um harassed by scratches and bangs and and things like that and i think this very much ties into that kind of like
That zeitgeist of like, you know, beware when young girls start going for adolescence, things are going to start flying around the room. And I was quite terrified of that as a kid. So I think that sort of sticks in my mind.
As I said, I did not read this book until just now. I have to say I was kind of surprised by the book. I didn't know what I was expecting. But this book... is normally classified as a book for children or for young adults, although the idea of young adult fiction I don't think really existed at the time. It uses literary techniques that are quite sophisticated. And it's the storytelling is in some places.
a bit opaque and, and I had to kind of reread sections to understand what was happening. Um, partly because the, the, the plot line of this book is it, this book follows, um, these. Two English step-siblings, just recently step-siblings, named Alison and Roger, who have gone to Wales with their parents because of some convoluted backstory. that they go to belonged to Allison's now deceased father that was transferred to her to avoid death tax. And before that.
belonged to this mysterious cousin named Bertram. At the house that they're at, they meet Gwen. which in America would be a girl's name. This is the son of the Welsh cook that comes with the house. Together, these three children have... Strange paranormal adventures that revolve mostly around a mysterious set of China that they find in the attic, which is such an odd choice for.
a premise, although I understand it was inspired by Gardner actually seeing the set of China that he describes in the book and writing a story around it. It's a weird book. I'll say that as a first time reader. And why it's so difficult, I think, for the first time reading it is Gardner does not tell you anything about the characters. relationships or backstories. He just drops you into it and you don't really understand that these...
Two children are step-siblings until somewhere like the third chapter of the book. You don't understand that the father has died on the one side and on the other side. The father has gotten divorced because of... some infidelities, which are, again, hinted at obliquely. There's like, you have to keep teasing out all these things and who these characters are and the Welsh characters all have funny names. Sorry, to my...
Welsh listeners. And eventually it all ties together with the story of, and I'm going to completely murder her name, Blood the Wetth. Is that how it's pronounced? Oh, wow. You've got just as good a chance of getting that right as I have. I did listen to the audio book this time around, and that sounds about right. I think the double D might be an F sound, but it might not be. I'm not sure. When I looked it up in the pronunciation, it's an aspirated TH. So it's like the TH of the TH of the.
Okay, so a story from the Welsh national epic, what's it called, the Brobdi Ngan? I was hoping you would just say all these words because I have got some well-speaking friends, so I don't want to insult any of them. There is a 13th century collection. of stories dealing with Welsh heroes. And this is one of the stories. I know this collection because I took a class in Arthurian.
literature and one of the earliest pieces we have of Arthurian legend is this, the story Colwick and Olwen, which is from the same book and which is a crazy, crazy story that I would do on the podcast one time. anyone were interested but anyway so welsh mythology of which i knew none uh is very important to this book and there's no point in the book where the
story is told to you so that you understand what the parallels are going to be. It's teased out along the way. Yes. You, you have to do a lot of work with this book. I think. When you were saying it about this being children's literature, it's not. I think it's got children in it. So they just assume that kids should read it at school. And that's about as far as it went. And I don't think they're actually that young children. I think they're probably about 15, 16, about that sort of age.
And like you said, so much of this, you just have to, it just starts and you've got to try and catch up as you're going along. And then also... It's not only the events which happen before the start of the book, which they don't explain. Events happen as the book's going along, which are off-stage, as it were. So there's a bit where one of them starts talking about in the events in the night where something was going on in the girl's bedroom and you just get very small hints about what that was.
you have to try and work that out. And there's aspects like you think there's a bit where through adult eyes, I'm thinking that these kids have sex at some point. And when they went up onto the mountain, because. It's kind of implied that they might have done, or this time around, that's what I got from it. And it's just like, there's a whole character who's a living character.
But you never see them. But she's in the house all the way through the book. And people are talking about which is the living mother of Alison. And everyone's just worried about upsetting her. But she's not even... you've never never come across her at once there's so much stuff happening which you just got to try and work out as you go along and um it can be infuriating but i think it's also it just it adds to the the mystery and the um
and the engagement of the story. It's a book that also makes references to such things as photography. and expects you to understand what an f-stop is, which I don't know if anyone gets taught that anymore. I learned that in my photography class back before digital cameras. And this whole emphasis upon... This set of plates. At the beginning of the story, Allison, who is suffering from some...
undisclosed discomfort. As time goes on, she will again fall into sort of this malign state, which seems to be as the story progresses. more and more the intrusion of this mythical world into her life. But she hears in the attic above her head scratching, which the reader is... led to think might be owls because you have it right there on the title. But there are owls up there, but they are owls that are on these plates. There's these fancy China plates with...
Not even owls with designs on the side that could be read as owls. Or flowers. Or flowers, however you want to. And if you go... to the Wikipedia page, you can see the original designs that he based this on. They are... The picture of the duck and the bunny, they are exactly, yes, they are. You can see flowers, you can see owls, but you can't see both at the same time. And if you cut them...
If you trace them, cut them up, they can actually turn into three-dimensional animals. And apparently in real life, Alan Gardner had this idea of... doing the story about this sort of repetitious sort of myth, which people in this Welsh Valley would just keep living over and over again, but you couldn't think of the hook for it.
And then he went to have dinner with someone, and his wife, I believe, noticed that there were owls in this pattern. And it was, again, one of those things that unless someone points it out to you, you probably wouldn't see it. But she saw it, and then she traced them. and folded the paper and it turns into an owl, which is a freestanding owl. And it's one of those things where they're saying, whoever designed this must have done that. It's too coincidental.
to actually work. But why did they do that? And they did a whole thing apparently where they, because they made a TV adaptation of this in the late 60s. and uh we've got like a tv listing magazine here and they did a like uh uh called the radio times um might be the radio times or the tv times anyway what are those two and they were saying
where do these plates come from? Because they were trying to track it down. And they were saying, they never actually, they're pretty sure they actually came from Wales after all, after they were tracking it down, but they haven't got the actual history of these things. But they've sort of managed to track down a couple of sets of these plates around the country. But again, they're mysterious. No one knows where they came from, apart from they are potentially Welsh. So maybe it was...
The design on the play was related to this whole myth of someone who's made of flowers who turns into an owl. So, you know, the coincidence is uncanny. is full of people doing compulsive strange acts. Allison starts to trace these owls and it's not even... clear what that means. She's somehow transferring the pattern onto paper and folding them up into owls. And after she does that... The designs disappear from the plates at some...
point when no one's looking at them, I guess. And eventually the paper owls themselves will disappear and will later in the book show up again. The stepbrother...
Roger becomes obsessed with this stone by a nearby river that has this perfectly circular hole in it, which is part of the... mythological story that is related to this and he starts to try to take photographs through the hole and it's unclear why and it's unclear why he keeps doing it and but he seems he He's very upset later in the book when someone disturbs the prints he's made of these pictures.
So he ends up seeing, he keeps enlarging eventually and he sees a figure that could be a figure on horseback or it could be a figure on a motorbike and which... This is going to be spoilers anyway, but this myth has gone round and round in circles, and at one point there was someone on horseback on the hill who threw a spear.
which went through the stone and killed another character who was hiding behind the stone. But there was also another character who was the mysterious cousin which he mentioned who died in a motorbike accident. And so that's what he's seeing. It's almost like this loop of this story, which is going around and around and around again, and which they are now part of.
Because I think it needs two men and a woman, or two boys and a girl, to sort of live this story out. And it can end one way or the other. Basically, the story is that... A woman was created for this man out of flowers, but there was no thought whether, for his wife, there was no thought whether she actually would want to marry him or not.
And then she fell in love with another man. They have a fight. And then someone was killed. And out of the punishment, she got turned into an owl and cursed to be an owl. And the story is that...
this riff is going to be played out over and over and over again. And it could end in one or two ways that she can remain being flowers, which means it's a... a good ending or she can become um an owl which is like a a bad ending and it's it's just and these people are stuck in this compulsion and i think that's
One of the interesting parts of the stories, which you don't know how much of people are doing stuff because it's, it's part of this story they're playing out or is it, is it, have they got their own agency or not? And what can they do to stop things? And you're sort of hearing parts of the story which have played in the past in, you know, centuries in the past or just a generation in the past. You're hearing different stories all happening at different points.
Well, another way that this mythical story relates to the current day is thematically part of what this book is about is about the relationships between... upper middle class English family and these presumably working class Welsh people and the way that the English people come in and they act sort of like old old school landlords that are going to come in and rule the place. And when...
The story is related to Roger of Bludeweth. He immediately says, well, you know, isn't that just like a woman to be unfaithful? But Gwen, his... His impulse is to say, well, no one asked her what she wanted. And so there's this who gets related to whom is also a class issue. The Saxons kind of displaced the Celts and there's always been a portion of Welsh people who have felt like, well, why don't we set off and have our own country in the same way that that's in Scotland?
Scotland and the same thing went through Ireland. So there is this tension that's being acknowledged here, but again, that's kind of a sophisticated thing for a so-called children's book. I think it's interesting as well that they start off and they're all getting on fine. And these class differences start to sort of... bubble up. And again, you think, oh, is this coming from their environment? Because I think one of my favorite characters is Roger's father.
who is called Clive. He starts off quite funny and amenable and a really likeable character, but then you start, little things slip out. particularly towards his kind of the way he thinks about the Gwyn and just basically saying, he's an intelligent boy, he goes to grammar school, but you know. It can only ever go so far. I met people like this when I was in the war and stuff. They're good people to have around, but you can't trust them. And these kind of...
opinions, you feel like they're starting to leech into the children. And it's one of those things you, it's, it kind of makes you think about, you know, people don't, aren't born with these opinions. about the classes that exist. It's not a real thing. It's something which is an invention by society, and you learn it from your family, and then it starts seeping into you.
And the same way, like, even though we never see Alison's mother, she starts telling her that she can't, she shouldn't hang around with Gwyn and starts, like, threatening her with, like, you know, is it like pony lessons or something like that? If you start seeing him, I'll take these things away from you. And it's the same way with Gwyn's mother, who she's... We find that there are reasons why she doesn't like people coming into this house, but she's also...
got like a chip on her shoulder about her, um, her, her place in society and stuff. And she really, um, she working hard to send, uh, Gwyn to a good school, but at the same time, she's also like, resented him a little bit for starting to get airs and graces and stuff. The class ring, it just becomes more prominent as the story goes on. There's one other major character that we haven't talked about, which is Hugh, the handyman caretaker who also comes with the house. Hugh...
has been around for a long time. He's the guy who... knows what's going on. He either intuitively or he was taught some time ago what the magical things are, what they mean. And he, in some ways, Hugh is a more... that stereotypical local who is mysterious, who speaks in riddles. He speaks in kind of broken English. And that's... contrasted against Gwen, who in some ways wants to cast off the idea of being a backwater...
And there's a sad part of the book where it turns out that Gwyn has bought these locution records to teach him, I guess, to speak received English. He can't even play them. He doesn't have a stereo, but he wants to learn to drop his accent and like Eliza Doolittle, rise in the world, I guess. So there is this range of characters here, of the ones that...
conform to the idea of Wales as some sort of a mystery place full of uneducated people, but who are wise to the ways of the world. And, you know, Gwen, who's... wants to take his place in contemporary society. I think there's a real tension there because I think he wants to get away, but...
He also wants to keep his Welsh language. But his mum is like, you were speaking Welsh to Hugh out there. Don't, you know, don't do that. You know, I paid good money for you to go to school. You speak English. And it's just that tension going back and forth where people are trying to hold on to certain parts, but get away, push away other aspects of it. And I think it's interesting now that, you know, it's a big thing when you're in Wales for kids to speak.
Welsh to make sure that they keep that Welsh language where, as it looks like in the 60s and the 70s, it was a thing they were desperately trying to push away from their children because it was seen as a... a sign that they were lower class and stuff. But it's interesting. I've been reading about Alan Gardner himself, and he came from a very working class background.
but did very well at school. And, uh, he was the first one to sort of pass his 11 plus and, um, and they ended up going to Oxford. He didn't, um, end up, uh, fully graduating because he just decided that I want to be a writer and, you know, academia is not going to be good for me, but he said that him getting that education completely ostracized him from his family. And I think that, I think Gwyn is his surrogate in this story, this whole thing of that.
Because a lot of his other books are based in the area where he grew up, which is near Manchester, and about the folk. folk stories based around that area and he's very much into archaeology and stuff and I think he's very much someone who wants to hold on to that sense of belonging to a place. But because he went away to be educated, he was almost like pushed away from that place. And he's kind of like lost some of it.
but gained other things. And I think he struggles with that. And I think that's something he's definitely put into this book. The book is set in 1967, which, of course, was the summer of love. And I kept looking around for... signs of what was going on at large in the world in the book. But this book is so isolated that you don't quite get anything. I guess some of the ways in which the...
The parents relate to the teenagers in a kind of a casual, chummy way. Might, you know, be out of a 1960s movie. But I did. remember that it was at this time that in Britain there was the Earth Mystery Movement, which was the movement of People becoming interested in sites like Stonehenge and this idea of trying to tie into some pre-Christian, prehistoric.
magic there in Britain. There was this concept at the time of ley lines, which actually dates back to the 20s, but was very popular among the, which was that if you connected all of the various barrows and hinges in England or all over Great Britain, you would find these straight lines that would cross together and make patterns, which...
You know, to my way of thinking, any two points will make a line. Exactly, yeah. But I think it's something which is definitely having a massive resurgence about now. I think every time...
You get a jump forward in technology. People start like freaking out a little bit and like saying, well, you know, I need to grab hold of something. And I think, you know, we've got lots of... like this thing called the stone club and weird walks and uh and a lot of people are grabbing it going into that sort of area again now um have we seen a film called saltburn no i have not seen it
Okay, so it's quite a controversial film, which has got some quite graphic elements in it, but there's a film which did quite well in the awards. recently called saltburn um about a uh sort of a working class um uh boy who went to oxford i think it's like in the uh over the late 80s or the early 90s and then he kind of like uh Attaches himself to a very well-to-do family and spends the summer with them in their big country house. And this very much reminded me of that.
So you're entering into this world of people who are able to have three or four week holidays and just do nothing. And if it's bad weather, we'll just stay in bed. You don't need to do anything. The cook will come and make some food for you, all that kind of stuff. But it's all okay until, you know, you might get a bit too close or you might say...
the wrong thing, and then suddenly they can just turn on you on a dime. And if any of the listeners have seen Saltburn, I would say there's definite sort of echoes of that in this book. What I found echoes of were things like, you know, C.S. Lewis and other stories that involve children from the real world being exposed to. increasingly mythical to magic. It's not like a magical world like reading Tolkien. It's our world.
but you find out that there's magic in it. And in these kinds of stories, as in the Narnia stories, it always seems that the instigating... and it was the same in Kerry's War, is children being displaced somehow, being put into a new position. And in many cases, children cut off from... parents. Isolating, yes. And it's in this world where they have little agency, little control over their
that a magical world opens up. What's different about this is that magical world, unlike, say, Harry Potter, where suddenly you become the... The unfortunate boy becomes this powerful wizard. It turns out that the magic is going to be even more constricting and more fatalistic than your... waking life, I guess. Well, I think that whole idea of free will and predeterminism is like how much of your life you've actually got any control over. I think that's a...
And how much of it is actually down to your family or where you're from and the people around you allowing you to break away. I think one of my favorite aspects of this. is like all the people in the, not only you, but the people in the village around all know this is happening. And there's a really great aspect. There's a really great sequence where they...
The two English kids have to go to the local shop and as soon as they go into the shop, the shopkeeper and one of the ladies suddenly switch from speaking English to speaking Welsh so that the kids can't understand. And they're basically just talking about the plot of the books. And, oh, yeah, okay, it's starting to happen again. But they're the ones. And I wonder if...
Basically, I wonder if they're going to survive. And they go, excuse me, do you mind if I get some butter? And they go, yeah, yeah. And there's a bit later on in the book where... um the people are basically trying to stop them from leaving but it's all very kind of like you know oh there's a there's a tree in the road you can't go that way oh the phone lines are down and
And they're just like saying, you know, you better go back now. You know, you've got to go and finish this off because the people in the town know this is what's going to happen. And there's just no escape. And that kind of like insidious aspect of like being trapped somewhere because everyone around there.
knows this is going to happen. That was really quite creepy. I think this is, for a kid's book, there are some quite sort of scary... outright scary scenes but also some sort of like really scary sort of like ideas in there as well you know we've touched on this but um i don't think we ever really explicitly said that one that The previous time this happened, it involved Nancy, who is Gwen's mother, the cook, and it involved Hugh, and it involved Bertram, the...
cousin who bequeathed the house to Allison's father. And they enacted this, again, this... implied love triangle that ended with Hugh sabotaging Bertram's motorbike. And when you say that...
When you read it this time, you kind of forget what happens at the end. I felt like as the book went on, it became more and more a fever dream. So much gets revealed in the last... couple chapters like like it's it's sort of like um gardener wants to like wrap up a bunch of stuff but he's like i i've kind of run out of time and it ends on
a very strange note. And I kind of, it just sort of stops the narrative and it's left up to you to decide what... happens next i guess and also one of the aspects i liked about this because it's kind of set up that gwyn is going to be the hero um he's he's i think he's the one you're rooting for all along because he's kind of like the working class guy who people have turned on him a bit. They're saying that the girl can't see him anymore. His mum is trying to stop him from going, you know.
bettering himself and he's kind of fighting against this. But then he gets teased about this whole elocution thing. which is a secret which he told Alison who she let slip to the Roger and it all sort of turned into this sort of like whirlwind of kind of like anger and embarrassment and stuff. And right at the end, it's kind of like this can all stop if you forgive her and you give her comfort. They keep saying comfort.
And essentially, he's just like, no, I'm not going to let go. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to let go of that anger. And it turns to Roger to be the one who has to take on the part to almost like exorcise the... the spirit of the owl, which is taking over Alison, but doing it through love and, and, and, and, uh, compassion. And I just, I think it's a very, um, brave and different ending for someone for the Gwynn character to say I'm not going to let go of this
Like I said, I did not know what I was expecting when I started reading this. I guess because it has this title, The Owl Service, I was expecting there to be some sort of... service run by owls you know like maybe transporting messages like in harry harry potter whatever um It's a weird, strange book, and I have to say I'm glad to have read it. Did you enjoy it, though? I ended up enjoying it. But as I said, probably because I was underestimating it as a children's book, I...
Got a little confused as to what was happening early on in the book. And I had to go back. And then once I realized that this is the kind of the kind of game that. Gardner's going to play, I'm like, oh, yeah, fine. I've read Faulkner. I can get into this mindset here. And you have to accept if you're the kind of person who at a movie keeps turning to the person.
to your side and said, who is that? Do we know who that is? Do we see that person? This book will drive you insane. I was going to say, not only are there stuff which happened in the past you've got to try and work out. Not only are there, if there was a point where I thought, oh, have I missed a chapter or did I fall asleep on the last chapter? Because they're talking about something which happened after the last chapter and this point, but it's not in the book.
But there's also times where you see a passage of time from one person's point of view, and then it goes back, and then you see the same events from someone else's, from a different person's point of view. And again, it's not... always clear if that's actually happened and then there's also there's points where some people like for example Hugh he's suddenly he's remembering things from another life and you're thinking is he is he going mad or is it is it
Is he actually becoming another character at this point? So, yeah. There are two lengthy chapters that are told from Gwen's point of view. They are so interior to his mind and it happens all at once that we go from this third person omniscient narrator to this like close. you know, was a free and indirect discourse where we were only focused on that. It's, it's kind of unsettling. It's sort of like you've read, you're suddenly reading another book.
But it all adds up in the end, I guess. But I don't know what I would have made of this if I had read this. I was going to say, I think I was about 11 when I read this. It's probably the reason I can only remember the first kind of chapters because that's the only bit which actually is a clear narrative. There's something in the loft. They're going to go and get it out of the loft and they're going to... Like you said, but after that point it just goes all over the place, doesn't it?
I've tried reading some of the other Alan Garner book and there's one in particular called Redshift, which I believe is a love story told in three different time zones. And it's not clear when you're reading it, which time zone you're in as it goes along. So I would say this is probably one of the easier ones to read. But my wife has read some of the other, there's this trilogy, which, what's the name of it?
Anyway, my wife's read some of his other books and she said he writes women really well. I'm not sure how well he wrote some of the female characters in this book. So I'm going to go back and read some of his other work. But I think it's, I think it's fantastic. And I think it just called a children's book and like some of the covers you look like they like, it looks like it's been.
being marketed are quite young kids, and I don't think a lot of them are going to get this. But it's something which I think you can come back to as different points in your life and see different things in it. So I think it's a... way more sophisticated than a lot of people would give it credit. And I'm glad I got to reread it again. Thanks again to guest host Ross Cleaver.
If you have an idea for a book, a short story, a poem, or any other reading to cover on a future episode, or a suggestion for a guest host, or if you just want to say hi. you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. The Sophomore Lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard, and this podcast is brought to you by The Incomparable Network. More funny, smart podcasts are available at TheIncomparable.com.
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