Summary
Joe lies in his bed at home reading a comic book. The comic features the main character “Kit the Ancient Brit.” As he reads, he discovers that Kit begins to move on the page; he winks at Joe and starts to communicate with Joe by writing phrases out on the pages within the typical comic-book speech bubbles. When Joe looks up from the comic book, he finds that the room is distorted. He sees the villain from the comic book, Whizzy the Wizard, as well as another villain, the Brit Basher. They speak to each other through speech bubbles before leaving the room. Everything returns to the comic book’s pages.
Joe sees that Treacle Walker is sitting outside with his pony and his cart. He runs outside and asks Treacle where he’s been, but Treacle Walker avoids giving him a straight answer. They go into the house but before they enter, Treacle Walker asks Joe if he can come in. Joe, surprised, says that he can, and Treacle Walker tells him that after the “stoning”—presumably, the moment when Treacle Walker carved Joe’s name into the stone—no one can enter the house without Joe’s permission.
After Joe and Treacle Walker go inside, Joe confronts Treacle Walker, explaining that after his arrival and their exchange of the bone and the stone, his eyesight has been wrong. Joe tells Treacle Walker about going to the bog and meeting Thin Amren, as well as his optometrist appointment. Joe shows Treacle Walker the paper where he wrote the supposedly non-existent letters he saw at the eye appointment and Treacle Walker quotes Latin at him, saying a phrase at first in Latin and then translating it to tell Joe that prior to the stone, he “saw” but “did not see.”
Before leaving, Treacle Walker tells Joe that the house’s chimney is an axis mundi—a touchpoint between the earth and the heavens. Joe doesn’t believe him and tells him it’s just there to let smoke out. Treacle Walker instructs Joe to visit Thin Amren once more and then leaves.
Joe returns to Big Meadow. While he’s looking at his reflection in a pond, Thin Amren arrives. They talk, with Joe trying to ask Amren why he lives in a bog and Amren telling him that if he didn’t he would rot. Joe mentions Treacle Walker and Amren reveals that he knows him, but says that he wouldn’t trust him. Joe states that he likes him anyways, confirming that he likes him a lot because Treacle Walker makes him laugh, even when Joe can’t make sense of everything that Treacle Walker says.
After reciting a brief rhyming poem, Amren leaves. Joe finds himself repeating some of the phrases that Amren used such as “whirligig” and “what sees is seen.” He goes back home and starts reading his comic books again, this time choosing one that he considers his second favorite—a book about a character named Ernie.
As Joe reads, he finds that the comic book contains imagery from his own life, featuring Whizzy walking along the Big Meadow. On the next page, he sees his own house at the top of Big Meadow; the Brit Basher stands in front of it with a club lifted, as if about to strike the house. On the last page, the house is depicted without any of the characters except for an unknown one looking out of the window—much like Joe himself.
Analysis
Treacle Walker’s distinction between Joe’s ability to see and his simultaneous inability to see, which he mentions when he returns to Joe’s home, continues to emphasize one of the novel’s central themes: the difference between sight and understanding. The novel explores the difficulty of perceiving something for what it is, as well as the notion that we can spend a lot of time looking at something without truly understanding its nature.
Joe’s “glamourie” distorts his perception of the world, pushing him to reconsider the nature of reality around him. With that reality destabilized, he pays much more attention to the people, objects, and landscapes that he encounters. Joe doesn’t realize how much he took the stability of his life for granted until things start to change as a result of Treacle Walker’s magic.
Unlike other texts that may endeavor to explain or lay out foundational “rules” for the magic that they depict, Garner’s novel abstains from this necessity. The magic within it is never explained and seems to shift inexplicably; rather than adhere to standard rules of the fantasy genre, the novel incorporates elements of magical realism and fantasy without necessarily explaining these rules. The reader, in turn, has to embrace the fact that they may not immediately understand the novel entirely.
In taking away the reader’s ability to understand every detail, Garner creates a novel that subverts a reader’s expectations. Although the reader may want to try and figure out what each word, nonsensical phrase, and joke means, they will find it hard to do so, since many of them are fabricated by Garner himself or reference outdated language. The reader, like Joe, may have to struggle to “see,” and in turn, will be forced to let go of searching for answers, just as Joe must let go of trying to rationalize his new sight.
These chapters also incorporate a metaliterary scene, with the comic books and Joe’s world blurring together when he finds that the characters within them appear to be reacting to him. This scene touches on themes of literature and life, emphasizing how we develop attachments to characters. Many critics have noted that Garner’s work can be considered both children’s literature and adult literature; this scene, for adult readers, may remind them of the whimsy and fantastical delight that books can bring about.
