A Fantastic Nonfailure

09 Feb, 2025

I finally sat down this week and read Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Published in 1967, it’s what we’d probably call today young adult literature. I had no real expectations, but ended up being pretty impressed by how it brought a story from the Mabinogion into the contemporary world, disrupting, among other things, commonsense assumptions about time’s linear flow.

Here’s what really got me, though: how class differences and conflict are an essential part of the story, how Garner depicts the disturbing ease with which kids grow into the assumptions of family and class, and the casual cruelty that gets unleashed in the process. I’d have to give a full plot summary to make any of that clear, but the tale is basically centered around the interactions between three teens: two upper-class kids (Alison and Roger) spending time in their rural vacation home; and Gwyn, the son of Nancy, who’s been hired to cook and keep house for them while they’re there. The three seem at first to be getting on great, hanging out and walking around. But as odd occurrences focused on Alison grow more frequent, tensions creep in, with lines generally being drawn between the locals—Gwyn, his mother, the seemingly halfwitted groundskeeper Huw—and the leisured family, most of whose members make increasingly clear indications about who belongs to whom and who doesn’t fit. The locals, too, have less-than-generous thoughts about the visitors, but other than Nancy’s occasional threats to quit, their indignation and true feelings about the way they’re treated can at best be (silently) spoken via small acts of sabotage or insinuating gestures or pretending to play dumb.

The thing is, Nancy left the village as a young woman, and she’s been working hard ever since to put her son through school in the city—but now she’s convinced Gwyn thinks he’s better than the rest of them, and her threats to pull her support and send him out into the working world grow ever more sincere. Gwyn obviously wants something different for himself, and he’s got the smarts and education—if not the resources or connections or the right accent or polish—to find it. But now he’s being pulled into something none of the children or members of the home-owning family seems to understand, and as the mystery deepens, the reactions of the people he thought were his friends also make clear that he’ll never have a full place in their affections, that he’ll only succeed as much as people of their sort will allow him to, no matter how hard he tries.

Even in an environment that might not grasp the fine gradations of British classism, “young adults” will probably understand what’s happening here. That isn’t, of course, the main focus of the story, or where teen readers will invest most of their energies. But I have to give it to Garner for bringing it all in so naturally in a book that often gets brought up in discussions of ghost stories or fantasy.¹ He’s not trying to spare young people’s sensibilities, or even offer any sort of moral lesson: this is how it is, and this is one way that people hurt each other. The book’s ending is what we’d probably call a happy one, with the hope that a vicious, centuries-long cycle has reached a final conclusion, and in which some awareness of wrong that’s been done is accepted. But it’s also an ambiguous ending, and I’m still not really sure about one character’s fate. I do think, though, that after the debris has cleared the friendship between the haves and the have-not will have reached its limits.

I don’t want to celebrate what I think is the overly simplistic imperative to show and not tell. Maybe I’ll rather say, then, that Garner includes and simultaneously refuses to theorize about the structures we inhabit and how they enable or limit the ways we treat each other. And that manner of proceeding seems like a good example of Jack Halberstam’s assertion that a lot of children’s movies might do more than we think they do—and that kids get the point we assume only adults can catch beneath the zany characters and special effects: “while children’s films… are often hailed as children’s fare that adults can enjoy, they are in fact children’s films made in full acknowledgment of the unsentimental, amoral, and antiteleological narrative desires of children. Adults are the viewers who demand sentiment, progress, and closure; children, these films recognize, could care less.”² He’s talking in particular about depictions of queer characters or possible alternatives to the social arrangements the adult world accepts (and tries to reinforce) as given. There is the sense in The Owl Service that another sort of world does exist within the one we take as normal: the locals operate with a different understanding of time and collective responsibility. But none of the characters is really invested in the world being other than it is; to some degree, they all know and accept their own place, whichever world they call their own, and Gwyn’s desires are simply to get ahead in the mainstream version, not to change it.

But here, too, is where I see a connection to Halberstam’s larger project: rethinking what the wider world considers failure. Again, Halberstam is focused in particular on the way in which many queer communities embrace modes of thinking, living, being, and loving that mainstream cultures would consider unacceptable, i.e., a failure. The Owl Service is a very straight book, but the ways it starts to look at failure and assumptions about it can bring it into productive dialogue with Halberstam’s work.

There are, of course, the continual hints and reminders that Gwyn’s never going to get as far as he’s capable of or wants to go, simply by virtue of where he came from and the origins he can’t shake. He’ll keep trying; he’s not the sort to be held down. But as Alison notes sympathetically and Roger views as something at best pathetic and amusing, and more generally as not worth caring about at all, Gwyn doesn’t even know where or how to start in a way that would make a difference. The elocution records he listens to, we probably all know, won’t result in a My Fair Lady transformation—and even if he does manage to achieve an upper-crust pronunciation, “real” gentry like Roger’s father will always recognize and treat him as “barrack-room lawyers [as] we called them in the RAF....But brains aren’t everything, by a long chalk. You must have the background.”³

But then there’s the other sort of failure, the one that Halberstam would probably want to focus on: groundskeeper Huw, who offers only seeming nonsense and half-answers in his broken English when anyone tries to get hard facts out of him. In a lesser author’s hands, Huw would end up being a stereotype, something like the wise old peasant, or maybe even Harry Potter’s Hagrid. But other than the generational and location-based responsibility he feels to manage the situation he and the other villagers understand, he’s in no need of forcing his wisdom on anyone; he’s not the surly giant with a soft spot, and the book provides no moral lesson about the rewards of simplicity on display via his habits and preferences. Huw’s simply accepted he’s part of a place and a way, and doesn’t need or desire the extraneous things that guide the lives of the people in the house—but that doesn’t mean his life is conflict-free, or that he can go about the hills just enjoying the fresh air. Huw is deeply concerned with what it means to be present in and with the world—but it has nothing to do with, as Halberstam would say, “adult conceptions of success and failure,” or the ways in which the English family views the Welsh laborer (and probably most of the village inhabitants) as something other than an adult.⁴

I suppose this little rumination really just comes down to how much I enjoyed the book—and to how much I also tend, unjustly, to dismiss literature not overtly aimed at providing adults with a story they’d consider significant, meaningful: successful. It’s a recognition I should hold onto—a reminder of the kindred spirits I shouldn’t shun—as I keep trying to come to terms with, or rather live into, my own strain of failed existence.

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