Have you ever noticed that certain children's books pack such a punch that they stay with you for years? Never mind the "we're all impressionable when we're young" argument; sometimes the book is just so powerful that you never forget it. Sometimes, you're lucky enough to come to it as an adult, and you see the story in a light that would have evaded you as a teenager. Alan Garner's The Owl Service (published 1967) is one of those books. It can hang around in the back of your mind for years after you've read it, not because it was shocking or dreadfully emotional, but because of the simplicity with which it is told and the subtlety with which the message is conveyed.

Alan Garner writes for young adults, using themes of ancient legend recreated in the present day. Most of his work appeared in the 1960s, and much of it won awards such as the prestigious Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award. You might recognize such titles as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor, The Stone Book Quartet or Red Shift. Garner uses Anglo-Celtic themes, and one of the satisfying things about it is that he refuses to be bound by the sanitized, French 14th century versions of the Arthurian sagas. Instead, he reaches back further to stories that have served (or might have served) as inspiration for those French tales. In the case of The Owl Service, he turns to The Mabinogion and the story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes' blossom bride Blodeuwedd.

It's a terrific story, one of my favorites in the Arthurian cycle, actually. Cursed by his mother Arianrhod to never have a mortal wife, Lleu's foster father and uncle Gwydion creates, with the king Math's help, a bride of "flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet and from those conjured up the loveliest and most beautiful girl anyone had seen […] and named her Blodeuwedd (111, The Mabinogion). She and Lleu marry and are blissful for a little while, until Blodeuwedd meets a mortal by the name of Goronwy of Penllyn. They become lovers, and in order for Blodeuwedd to be free they decide that Lleu must be killed. Blodeuwedd, by expressing fear for his life, skillfully steers her next conversation with her husband around to how he, a half-immortal, could be killed, and Lleu comforts her, telling her that his murder is highly unlikely, since his death could only be achieved by a spear worked only on a year of Sundays while all are at Mass, and that spear could only kill him if he were standing with one foot on a goat's back and the other on the edge of a bathing tub. "Well, I thank God for that," says Blodeuwedd, "for this can easily be avoided"! She sends the necessary information off to Goronwy, who sets about forging the spear right away. A year passes, and Blodeuwedd brings up the subject again, asking Lleu to show her the exact position he'd have to be holding in order for this hypothetical spear to end his life. Lleu cheerfully agrees, they set the goat and the tub up, he balances on them, and Goronwy rises up from the hill where he has concealed himself and throws the spear through Lleu, who vanishes with a loud cry.

The lovers are united, and all seems well until Gwydion tracks down Lleu's soul, which has hidden itself in the form of an eagle and remembers nothing of what has transpired. With skill, Gwydion sings Lleu's soul back to himself, and Lleu takes up the spear and goes in search of Goronwy, "to demand compensation from the man who did me this injury" (116). Lleu demands that Goronwy stand and take a blow from the spear, as Lleu himself has. Goronwy agrees, but requests that since Blodeuwedd had manipulated him (!) he be allowed to stand behind a large stone. Naturally, Lleu's superhuman strength throws the spear right through the stone and killed Goronwy instantly. As for Blodeuwedd, Gwydion catches her and tells her, "I will not kill you, but I will do what is worse: I will let you go in the form of a bird. Because of the shame you have brought to Lleu Skilful Hand, you are never to show your face to the light of day, rather you shall fear other birds; they will be hostile to you, and it will be their nature to maul and molest you wherever they find you. You will not lose your name but will always be called Blodeuwedd [flower-face] (Blodeuwedd means owl in the language of our day, and therefore birds are hostile to the owl)" (116). Garner said this of the story: "[f]rom the Welsh collection of myths The Mabinogion, I used "Math Son of Mathonwy" in The Owl Service. In the former a mortal, Gronw Pebyr, falls in love with Blodeuwedd, the wife of an immortal, and he has to pay the price. He kills the immortal, which is paradoxical; the immortal, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, comes back to life, then says, now it's my turn to kill you. And the mortal has to endure that. Which is scarcely fair."

That's the basic story. What Alan Garner does with it makes for a page-turning read. In an interview, he is quoted as saying, "in the Matter of Britain you have reworked, through the centuries and through literature, the idea of man coming into collision with the Godhead, exchanging roles with that Godhead for a while, and having to face up to man's involvement with the Godhead." This is what The Owl Service is all about: people coming into contact with the spirit of place, and how each of them reacts.

The Owl Service begins with Alison and Roger, stepsiblings whose parents have just married. They're spending the summer in an old house in a Welsh valley, a house that has been in Alison's family for ages. Staying with them to cook and so forth are Nancy and her son Gwyn, who is in his mid-teens like Alison and Roger. One day Alison is under the weather and lying down when she hears scrabbling in the ceiling above her. Mice, they all suppose, until they pry open the trapdoor to the attic and discover an old set of plates. Alison brings one down with her to polish it, and discovers a beautiful floral pattern around the edges which, when traced and folded, creates three little owl-shapes. Later on, the plate turns white; the boys assume that the old pattern flaked off, but Alison tells them that as she folded the owls, they flew away.

This is the first sign that something of mythic proportions is happening. Roger, a photography fan, is alone taking snaps up by a rock on the hill when he hears whistling, the sound of impact and a man cry out. Frightened half to death, he flees the hill, but is later drawn to it again to snap more pictures of the treeline. When they are developed and magnified several times, they reveal a blurry shape of a man on a horse.

There's more. A portrait of a beautiful girl with flowers in her hair is revealed as the pebble-and-dash plaster chips off with no encouragement in the games room, but closer inspection reveals that the painted flowers are made of owl's talons. The plates fly at people with no one to throw them. Alison becomes obsessed with making the little owls, but can't find them once she's folded them and placed them about the house. They are finally found in an eerie half-circle, gazing at a huge stuffed owl in a glass case, locked away in an old shed which has no key, before both the paper and stuffed owls rise up and fight against those who intrude. As the mythic tension mounts, the pattern vanishes from all the plates and the portrait vanishes from the wall, plaster crumbling and the wall weakened.

What is happening? Alison and Roger, both British, have no idea, but Gwyn, born and bred in Wales, has more than a suspicion. With the help of the apparently half-witted gardener Huw, he realizes that this valley is where Llew Llaw Gyffes finally tracked down and killed Gronw Pebyr. And, above and beyond that, Blodeuwedd is struggling between her flower form and her owl form.

The strength of the myth is undeniable. Over and over it plays itself out; rather than a spirit of an individual haunting a place, the myth itself is so huge that it possesses the valley. The focal point now is the focal point of the original struggle: Bloduewedd. "She was made for her lord," says Huw. "Nobody is asking her if she wants him. It is bitter twisting to be shut up with a person you are not liking very much. I think she is often longing for a time when she was flowers on the mountain, and it is making her cruel, as the rose is growing thorns (53, The Owl Service)

Huw is more than he seems, but it is portrayed so subtly that most readers will miss it, or interpret his odd speech as a bad translation from Welsh to English. He is one of the gloriously subtle and undefined parts of The Owl Service: it is never clear whether the valley and the power of the myth have settled so deeply into his mind that he is mistaken, or whether the myth has actually created in him a kind of descendent of those who originally participated in the myth. He considers himself a part of the valley, and refers to himself as the one who created Bloduewedd, his uncle as the one who painted the ancient portrait in the games room. He tell Gwyn that his grandfather and his uncle sought to return peace to the valley by "locking her in plate and wall" (72), and muses that "[w]hen I took the powers of the oak and the broom and the meadowsweet, and made them woman, that was a great wrong - to give those powers a thinking mind" (72).

The abuse of power, magical or otherwise, is an undercurrent in The Owl Service. Were Math and Gwydion right to create Lleu a wife, or did they abuse the power of creation? Did they abuse the power they had over her by forcing her to marry Lleu, then judging her when she made her own choice? Huw tells Gwyn that he is the heir to the valley, heir to its power, which is released over and over "[t]hrough us, within us, the three who suffer every time" (133). The question can be posed as to whether the power is abusing the three in each generation that it fills to play out the myth over and over.

When the climax of the myth comes, and Alison is unconscious, surrounded by paper owls and unseen energies drawing owl-like shapes and patterns in the dust on the floor, Roger and Gwyn must put aside their differences and work together. Oddly enough, it is Roger, not Gwyn, who pushes past the heaviness of the myth to talk urgently to Alison as feather fly about her and owl-like scores on her cheeks and hands arise without breaking the skin. Huw tells him that "Always it is owls, always we are destroyed. Why must she see owls and not flowers? […] She is coming, and will use what she finds, and you have only hate in you" (153). Gwyn, heir to the power of the valley, does nothing, trapped by his fear and his anger with the well-to-do family he is working for, and instead Alison's stepbrother Roger, the third presence in the myth, makes his choice and acts.

Roger brushed the feathers away from Alison. They circled and clung: circled and clung: the owl dance he had found in the dust. They were moving on the ceiling and the walls, and he began to see the patterns that had followed Huw in the rain: eyes and wings and sharpness: winged eyes, yellow, and blackness curved: all in the rafters and the wall and the feathers everywhere. […]

"He is hurt too much she wants to be flowers and you make her owls and she is at the hunting -"

"Is that it?" said Roger. "Is that all it is? As easy as that?"

" - and so without end without end without end -"

"Hey, Ali, did you hear?" Roger brushed the feathers aside. "You've got it back to front, you silly gubbins. She's not owls. She's flowers. Flowers. Flowers, Ali." He stroked her forehead. "You're not birds. You're flowers. You've never been anything else. Not owls. Flowers. That's it. Don't fret. […]

"Flowers. Flowers. That's the way." The marks paled on her skin, and tightness went from her face as she breathed to the measure of his hand on her brow. "That's better. There now: yes; yes: of course they're flowers. What made you think those plates could be anything else? Why didn't you cut the pattern into flowers right at the start, you silly girl?" […]

And the room was full of petals from skylight and rafters, and all about them a fragrance, and petals, flowers falling, broom, meadowsweet, falling, flowers of the oak. (152-5)

Has the cycle been broken? Is Bloduewedd at rest now that's he has returned to flowers, her natural form, rather than the human form imposed upon her? What happens to Gwyn, to Alison, to Roger? Has Gwyn forfeited his right to the valley and its power by refusing to help return Alison/Bloduewedd to her flowers? We never know. Garner's story is told, and here it ends.

Garner, Alan. The Owl Service. Collins: 1999.

Thompson, Raymond H. "An Interview with Alan Garner, 12 April 1989". (Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature)

Gantz, Jeffrey (trans.). The Mabinogion. Penguin Books. London: 1976.

(c) A. Murphy-Hiscock. Originally published in Montreal's Magickal Circle June 2000