The Family as Mythic Reservoir in Alan Garner's Stone Book Quartet Mavis Reimer (bio) I don't think it can be finished . . . . I think this valley really is a kind of reservoir. The house, look, smack in the middle, with the mountains all round, shutting it in, guarding the house. I think the power is always there and always will be. It builds up and builds up until it has to be let loose—like filling and emptying a dam. And it works through people. (The Owl Service 98) Gwyn in The Owl Service, explaining to Alison his theory about the strange events that have taken place at her cottage that summer, sees the whole of the Welsh valley as a reservoir for the powers of love and hate first generated "hundreds and hundreds of years" before them in a love triangle remembered in local legend. The notion that Gwyn articulates is a common one in the novels of Alan Garner: places that have been the sites of momentous events or objects that have been the catalysts for momentous events are imbued with power. Given the right conjunction of elements, the residual power, whether it is understood or not, is released into another time and, once released, will play out the pattern first imprinted on it. So in The Moon of Gomrath, when Susan unwittingly lights a fire of pinewood on the Beacon mound on the Eve of Gomrath, she unleases the primitive magic of the Wild hunt on twentieth-century Alderley. In The Owl Service, Alison's paper reconstructions of owls from the flowers of the dinner plates she finds fixes herself, Gwyn, and Roger in the roles of the valley's star-crossed lovers. Birch wood, mountain, and sand quarry in Red Shift remain places of struggle, sanctuary, and sacrifice in times as distant from each other as the first, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries. The power in itself is neither benevolent nor malevolent. The manifestations of power in the early novels, however, are more often experienced as malevolence than grace because the characters are, for the most part, ineffective either in stopping or channelling the power. It would seem that a knowledge of the paradigmatic pattern should allow access at will to the power of the paradigm. But, in all of Garner's novels, it is only the wizards—Cadellin of the first two books and Malebron of Elidor—who know enough to control to some extent the vehemence of the forces resident in their worlds. Huw of The Owl Service and Tom, Thomas, and Macey of Red Shift know in part, but their knowledge seems only to make them unusually vulnerable to domination by the irrational and mysterious energies of the universe. They are negatives of the wizards. Like the fool Garner describes elsewhere, they are "the shadow that shapes the light" (Guizer n.p.). The central children of Garner's early novels are not among the empowered. For them, victory is surviving the danger and excitement of an adventure which they do not control, about which they have little understanding, and from which they apparently will gain nothing to bring back to their post-adventure lives. At the conclusion of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, for example, Cadellin tells Susan and Colin that their brief participation in the mythic world has not made them a part of that world and, as the sequel story begins, we see the children mourning the fact that "the woods for them should be empty of anything but loveliness" (Gomrath 15). In fact, the action in both of these novels is fueled by the need of the mythic world to take back talismans that Susan has been given. In both novels, the talismans Susan owns suggest that she is someone other than herself. The bracelet she wears in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, for example, has been given her by her mother who has received it from the family servant, Bess. Although Bess knows that the "Tear" is a family heirloom, she happily relinquishes it to her employer's daughter, whom she sees as "the same as a daughter to me." Roland in Elidor protests the lack of connection between the world...