THE SCIENTIST LEWIS Wolpert believes that the human capacity for belief arose from tool making, from the putting together of stone hammers and axes by human beings who thought about cause and effect. I have always felt that we became religious because of the mysterious continuing presence of our dead, in memory and dream.

Freud said that early religion was ancestor worship. Alan Garner’s Stone Quartet is a work of art and memory about both tools and ancestors — his own ancestors, who were toolmakers beside Alderley Edge, an “eroded fault-scarp of Triassic sandstone in Cheshire”. There are four plain, deep tales put together with a stony precision of language like a subtle mosaic, and then brought to life by the rhythms of breath and blood in the written language, and the rhythms of eye and brain in the reading eye and mind.

The four stories — first collected in 1978 and reissued as a “modern classic” — are about what medieval craftsmen called the “mysteries” of the stonemason, the blacksmith, the maker of clockwork and, ambivalently, the soldier, attending to the mechanism of his rifle on leave during the First World War.

They are about craftsmanship, the body, and the earth — the complicated nature and textures of stone, the fire and hammer and melting iron of the smithy, the precision movements of clock and rifle. There seems to be no room for language in this world. In the first tale, The Stone Book, Mary asks her father for a prayer-book to take to chapel, and is given a carved stone replica of a book, and an encounter with the earth that is beyond words — except that Garner has found the words, and every one of them rings true. The prayer-books of Mary’s friends hold pressed flowers. The stone book contains fossil flowers, millions of years old.

This first tale is the most mysterious and breathtaking. Mary climbs the church spire where her father is carving stone and is then taken by him into the depth of the hill, with a few candles, and told to go on through a narrow cleft where only she can fit. She comes to a cave with an ancient drawing, her father’s masons’ mark, an arrow head, and the footprints of hundreds of walkers — the ancestors, marking the clay.

I suffer from both vertigo and claustrophobia and both the beginning of the climb up the steeple and the descent into the bowels of the earth put real fear into my own body as I read. So that like Mary I could feel understanding and delight flood into place as the mind adjusted to the earth. This is a hard thing for a writer to do to a reader, and Garner judges it as precisely as a stone carver.

In the later tales both thrills — the fire in the forge, sleigh rides down wintry fields — and danger intervene. The child of the forge watches his grandfather make a new sleigh, after another child smashes the old. Uncle Charley gives a craftsman’s attention to his gun and the men give craftsmen’s attention to their scythes and stones and rhythms of movement as they move in on the standing corn at the centre of the field. But after that they use the gun to shoot the screaming rabbits from the last sheaf. And the boy collects hot shrapnel — formless, mangled bits of metal, designed to kill, dropping from the sky. (Not that the ancestral spears were not designed to kill. Garner is not sentimental.) Garner has said that these are not childrens’ stories — and I think that perhaps young children could not imagine the relation to the earth, and things and craft and mystery that is so moving here. Garner writes good children’s books about magic and danger and monstrous things in which we half believe with a feverish excitement that is a reading delight of the young. But you have to be older to understand the mystery of homo faber and his relationship to the solid world that is the only world we inhabit. There is the same understanding in Seamus Heaney’s poems about implements and things in the Irish earth — or in Czeslaw Milosz’s poem about war-torn mud, in which there are fragments of delicately crafted teacups, for which he grieves.

In the illuminating interview printed with this edition of the Quartet Garner describes where and how he got the solid and singing language that he crafts into the tales. He says he sat under the table of his widowed grandfather, “in the lamp-glow” and listened to the family talk — in “single words, partial statements, often not whole sentences”. “And beneath that table, over a period of about six years, randomly by osmosis, I absorbed the essence, the oral history and non-linear anecdotes of a clan.”

He gives us dialect words, like polished pebbles, that are both strange and recognisable. He was asked by the interviewer whether he felt that what he had recorded was too specific, too attached to a precise place and time and family. He replied that he was severely worried that the book might “prove too personal”. In that he resembles Henrik Ibsen, whose Peer Gynt, taken from the tales and memories and local landscapes of his own growing-up, was the work he thought would never be liked outside Norway — but has proved both popular and universally understood. Garner remarks that perhaps the way to universality is to go “straight through one’s own being”.

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