Alan Garner is renowned for his highly sophisticated novels for juveniles such as The Owl Service, and Red Shift, which was described by the TLS as “probably the most difficult book ever to be published on a children’s list”. He also now writes for adults, and things haven’t got any easier. Such familiar ingredients as an elliptical prose-style, a tendency for the narrative to slip between past and present, and a sense of the enduring power of old myths are all found in the remarkable and occasionally baffling Thursbitch.

The novel was apparently inspired by a memorial stone in the Pennines to a John Turner, who was “cast away in a heavy snow storm in the night in or about the year 1755”, which records that: “The print of a woman’s shoe was found by his side in the snow where he lay dead.” The narrative opens with Turner, a packman, making his way through a blizzard with his train of horses and his dog. His body is subsequently discovered by members of his family, one of whom brushes away the mysterious footprint. The story then doubles back to describe Turner’s travelling life and the farming community he comes from, these chapters alternating with an account of two people, Ian and Sal, walking over the same Cheshire terrain 250 years later.

The relationship between Ian and Sal (not at all what we imagine) and between them and Turner is gradually, obliquely revealed. Sal’s speciality is geology and her excursions with Ian are partly an attempt to make sense of the benchmarks they find. Similarly, in a world where few people ever leave home, Turner uses local features to guide him. “Most geologists agree about sentient landscape,” Sal says. “Some places have to be treated with respect.” When her compass fails to register as it should, she puts it down to “pockets of geomagnetic anomaly”, but something altogether weirder is taking place.

The land does indeed seem alive thanks to Garner’s acute sense of place and his delight in language. A feeling that the old gods may have been superseded by the pale Galilean but still hold sway is powerfully present, and while it may be hard to follow exactly what is going on in such episodes as the Dionysian bull ritual, there is no denying the effectiveness and the strange poetry of Garner’s writing. The dialect of his historical characters is occasionally impenetrable ( “They’ll land in such a festerment they’ll big dog you,” Turner informs his horse), and the puns of his contemporary ones are excruciating, but this novel crackles with linguistic life. Whatever you make of the story’s defiantly opaque resolution, it is hard to resist a book that includes a beautiful catalogue of the different tiles required to repair a roof (“one rogue-why-wink-thee, a small duchess, a wide countess, a short haghatty”), and a splendidly northern dismissal of London as “a right midden of a place, I can tell you. I don’t know how he tholes it, King”.

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