The Stone Book Quartet
Introduction | Subjects | Genesis

Genesis of "The Stone Book Quartet "

The characters of The Stone Book Quartet represent four generations of my family, although that is never apparent. The framework is set by history, in that great-great-grandfather, Robert, is the earliest of whom any tradition remains, and I could not impose on the generation of my own children events that they might not choose to acknowledge.

All through my childhood, every Sunday night was spent in the lamp glow of my grandfather’s cottage, as his sons and families paid their respects. No one takes any notice of a child sitting under a table. And so, randomly by osmosis, I absorbed the oral history and anecdote of a clan. When the idea for the novel struck, all I had to do was to tap, and rearrange, these memories. The holes I filled with a writer’s experience. So the novel is historically accurate, and, where history fails, the emotion is true.

The idea was precipitated when a distant cousin sent me a photograph of a family group, taken in 1890, which contained our mutual ancestors, including my grandfather, his mother and her parents, Robert and his wife. I knew, intellectually, that I was holding a print from a glass plate that would have called for a thirty-second exposure without a blink on anyone’s part; but, emotionally, I saw the intense gaze of my people focused on me, demanding in silence, across almost a century, that I speak for them. They must not die. Instantly, the whole of The Stone Book Quartet fell into my head, complete, a super-saturated solution, scarcely to change. I did not have to think, but to remember, and to use my skills in its shaping.

I asked my father to read the typescript, because I felt it to be imperative to get this book, if no other, right. My father read. Immediately he demanded to know why I had let what he saw to be the family skeletons out of the cupboard and who had told me so much that was hidden. But the areas of my father’s annoyance were the parts that the novelist, not the historian, had written. My joy, in the sense of a purpose accomplished, was complete. The earliest surviving example of writing by a Garner is a scratched cross from a pen held in the fist as a dagger. Now a family of manual craftsmen had been served by a different craft of the hand.

An edited extract from The Voice That Thunders: Essays and Lectures by Alan Garner (Harvill Press, London, 1998)