THE ROLE OF THE NATURAL AND CULTIVATED LANDSCAPE IN ALAN GARNER’S “MYTH-BUILDING”
M.A. Zvir, N.L. PaninaThe work of Alan Garner (b. 1934), one of the most significant contemporary English writers, consistently ranks the local myth of the writer's birthplace, Alderley Edge in Cheshire East. The evolution of the plot development can be seen well in the trilogy that began in 1960 (translated into Russian novel "The Magic Stone Brezingamena" and "Moon on the eve Gomrata") and completed in 2012 (untranslated novel «Boneland»). The story follows the adventures of a brother and sister who settled on a farm Alderley Edge. At an early stage story is built like a fairy tale, with contrasting humanized space truss wild woods and the hollow hill. Borrowing characters, motifs and themes of the epic tales leads to fragmentation and imposition of functions of heroes guarding different places. Chief among them, the magician fron the traditional fairy tale, Cadellin works within the boundaries of the Arthurian myth, protecting the cave with a sleeping king, the role of guardians of other places assigned to other heroes. In searching for the future integrity the author refuses to use ready-made fairy tale and epic models. In the final part of the trilogy keeper of the place becomes an "ancestral character" whose existence lasts until there is a race. The leading method of constructing the plot becomes a parallelism of events that occur with the personifications of the ancestral hero. Writer refuses to opposite locales (humanized and wild, positive and negative, and so on) and eras (ancient and modern, old and new magic, etc.), fusing them together and saying peculiar to primeval consciousness syncretism of perception, the only correct view of the world. Ancestral hero, shaman, guardian and creator of the myth controls all habitats, making all living space cultured at its mythological development. Bearing structures of the local myth becomes a kind of continuity, mastering the same place over successive eras.