TREACLE WALKER

A brief, cryptic, often charming fable about the convolutions of time and magic.

In ways, this book looks like a YA novel of the type its octogenarian author is well known for: It features a solitary boy named Joseph Coppock who wears a patch to combat lazy eye and lives, alone, in a rural house. Joseph seems to spend his days reading comics, wandering the marsh, and marking the passage of the noon train. At the beginning the boy encounters a rag-and-bone man, the eponymous Treacle Walker, and trades ratty pajamas and a lamb bone for a cup and a sort of pumice stone. Soon he's dealing with incursions of and excursions into magic: interacting with characters who've emerged from his comics, bartering with a bog-dwelling time lord named Thin Amren, even receiving a Latin incantation by way of an eye chart only he can see. Amren tells him he has the "glamourie," which seems at times to mean literally that he has one eye that sees ordinary reality and another that focuses on the mysterious and otherworldly. But in a way such a reading misses the point; the main adult pleasure here is in the book's fresh, playful twisted vernacular, the way Garner uses English folklore and old-fashioned linguistic legerdemain to get at big ideas. "Time is ignorance," reads the epigraph, and Garner seems to imply that tedious adult ideas like plot and chronology hold no sway here. This is a book that takes place before the binocular vision of youth and the child's comfort with mystery have fully faded or flattened (though the through-line, if there is one, has to do with Joseph's desire to grow up and set magic aside).

Alluring, elusive, and quick—a fable for adolescents, and for those willing to revisit the murk and jumble of adolescence.