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The Owl Service
by Alan Garner
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Del Rey (1981-06-12)
ISBN: 0345290445
EAN: 9780345290441
Binding/Media: Mass Market Paperback - 192 pages
Edition: Reprint
Reading Level: Young Adult
Release Date: 1981-06-12
SKU: P0060-0345290445
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Spine tight, pages mildly tanned. Small scratch on cover page. Cover scan of any book provided upon request.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
An all-time classic, combining mystery, adventure, history and a complex set of human relationships. Read by Robert Powell It all begins with the scratching in the ceiling. From the moment Alison discovers the dinner service in the attic, with its curious pattern of floral owls, a chain of events is set in progress that is to effect everybody's lives. Relentlessly, Alison, her step-brother Roger and Welsh boy Gwyn are drawn into the replay of a tragic Welsh legend -- a modern drama played out against a background of ancient jealousies. As the tension mounts, it becomes apparent that only by accepting and facing the situation can it be resolved.
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Customer Reviews
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based on welsh myth
Rating  (3)
Date: 2010-01-31
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
'The Owl Service' is a young adult novel based on Welsh myths, where another generation seems destined to live out a tale of love, murder and revenge. More of a suspense/horror than fantasy; three teens struggle with class and ethnic tensions as well as the normal adolescent angst when the ancient power of the valley begins to take over their lives.
Although very well written the story is hard to get into, as there is no initial build up, the reader is just dropped into the middle of the plot and expected to fend for himself. This also has the effect of not letting us see the characters in their normal lives before the stress of the situation turns them unsympathetic. The text is almost entirely dialogue, with very little description which hinders the creation of atmosphere. Still it is an impressive book packing a lot of punch in a fairly short story.
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Great
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-12-04
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This was a bizarre little book. It is a retelling of an old Welsh legend - a legend of a curse that is relived in each generation, again and again, in the same Welsh Valley. The main characters are Allison and Roger who are Step Siblings and Gwen is the son of the flitch - the wise man of the valley.
The book captivated and I could not put it down. Various kinds of discrimination and prejudice pervade the plot and the book is full of dark twisty turns in the plot and sub-plots, one of which is the condensation of the English to the Welsh and its corollary in the Welsh resentment of English wealth. The class divide is on many different levels: between a working class boy and richer children, between a land-owning family and a businessman's family and finally there is the divide between urban Welsh and the Welsh-speaking country people. It was a fantastic book and as I stated earlier I could not put it down.
(First written as Journal Reading Notes in 1999.)
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Not Garner's Best
Rating (3)
Date: 2008-11-16
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
After being mesmerized by Garner's stunning Red Shift (Collins Voyager), I ordered this book. I knew it wouldn't be the same, but I thought it might be a good book to give my niece, who enjoys books about owls. But as you should know, Garner doesn't write for children, or even young adult. His books are short and are about children, but they're more like adult fables of the weight of ancient Britain's past, especially the magical power of the land, coming to bear on the present day.
Still, even taken as that, I didn't enjoy the book. It has Garner's great command of and compression of language, it has a well-drawn setting of a manor in a Welsh valley, it has the cultural and caste divides of Welsh people and English gentry, it has Garner's flair for both realistic and poetic dialogue, and it starts off wonderfully with a girl hearing noises in the attic.
That's the mystery, and while I didn't expect Garner to tell something along the lines of a Hardy Boys book, it just didn't seem to fit together, or flow, but sort of jumped to something and then faltered and turned away just as you were getting interested. There's a couple great scenes in the woods at night, and towards the end much is revealed in one such encounter, but the ending is unconvincing and the hero doesn't even play his part. (That may be part of the ending's meaning, of course, but why build all that up beforehand?)
Finally, for those drawn to the book by the title, there's really no owls in the book. I thought "The Owl Service" was like some ancient magical sect the girl would be brought into, but the service in question is a bunch of dinner plates decorated with floral owls, as seen on the cover.
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Let this story blow you away.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-07-13
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Mabinogion myth meets the 'modern' day in this tale of recurring rivalry in a Welsh valley. Three young adults start out as friends until a curse of love and revenge from unknown eons ago descend upon them. Time and time again, century after century, one man kills the other for the affection of the woman. Will it be the same pattern for Alison, Roger and Gwyn?
I must admit to reading the Owl Service twice, as I could not fathom it the first time. Welsh legend combined with language from four decades ago left me frequently perplexed. Take the title, for one. I thought it was about owls delivering messages. My fellow philistines, it pertains to a complete dining set decorated with stylized floral owls. (With this tip, this review is already helpful!)
The atmosphere of the book is heavy, brooding, eerie and leads you to expect, like the Welsh villagers, that something is coming down from the mountains. Alan Garner weaves magic that you suddenly realize you are at the center of a storm. Let this story blow you away.
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This product highly condensed, add full can of alertness and perception
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-12-05
9 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
Reading Alan Garner is not a spectator sport. You have to participate quite energetically: be alert to pick up on all the clues. He doesn't do explaining. That's why some readers have been left feeling bewildered.
With that in mind, let me set the scene for The Owl Service, especially for American readers who don't have some of the background needed to pick up on the small hints he drops in the turn of a phrase. All this is established in the early chapters, but not spelt out.
The central figure is the young teenager Alison. Her father died and her mother remarried. Clive Bradley is a well-meaning but emotionally clueless man, though of course he is aware of the typical issues of stepfatherhood. He has his own son, Roger, about Alison's age. So they are an upper-middle class English family on holiday (vacation) in a house that Alison's mother (or strictly speaking, Alison) owns in a deep isolated valley in Wales and where they have a local Welsh woman, Nancy, who works for them as cook and housekeeper. Nancy has a son, Gwyn, about the same age as the others...and attracted to Alison. Then there is Huw Halfbacon who is - or appears to be - a slow-witted garden servant (why do all the villagers address him with a title of great respect?)
Now already you have three tensions established: first, the UK class thing of the householder and the servant, with differing levels of money, speech, and education. Nancy is conflicted about her "Welshness" and wants Gwyn to get out of it: she actually prefers to be in the English world, where she says "I know my place" lowly though that place is. Although she has sent Gwyn to the best local school, she doesn't like that they teach him Welsh language and history.
This leads to the next tension: the Welsh/English thing, with all its past memories of the Celtic resentment of the down-to-earth, practical, invading "English" who pushed the dreamy, poetic, magic-believing Celtic nations, with their Gaelic languages, to the western fringe of Britain, and from the 5th century onwards often treated them as tiresome eccentrics.
And finally, do I need to stress the tension of having two teenage boys and one girl. This is what brings to life the ancient curse of repetition that hangs over this remote Welsh valley, known and understood by the locals talking Welsh amongst each other in the shops: the ineluctable repetition of an ancient drama of magic, jealousy and murder.
OK. Now let's develop the characters a bit. Clive, the stepfather, is a "rough diamond." He's made a lot of money and has no patience with nuance. Wants money to resolve everything. His first wife left him - they don't talk about that, especially the son Roger. Alison's mother was criticized for remarrying so soon and possibly for money.
Nancy the cook grew up in the valley but left it following a tragedy and spent most of her life in the nearby town, Aberystwyth. Now she has returned, full of a sort of inverse snobbery and tremendous conflicts about the Welsh v. English thing. I won't go into detail on the revelations about her previous links with the house and indeed with Alison's mother Margaret, a shadowy background figure we never really see. [SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT - It turns out that Nancy's story was yet another previous re-enactment of the ancient cycle of doom...]
She is wedded to the old concepts of immutable class: the noble born and the humble are fine in their respective stations, but she despises the nouveau-riche like Clive Bradley.
Gwyn is a tremendously sympathetic character: mocked for his "country bumpkin" nature by the bigoted English, yet in fact full of ideals and dreams beyond them and in fact well-educated from the grammar school. Has a really, really bad relationship with his mother. Incidentally, again for American readers, Brits understand immediately why Nancy is "me Mam" and Alison's mother is "Mummy" and what that means in class terms.
Every time the centuries-old trapped elemental force of the unhappy Blodeuwedd, the woman made by the wizard out of flowers, finds a modern emotional situation that resembles the one of her ancient tragedy, it manifests itself through the girl of today. It can come either as a terrifying predatory presence that has the nature of a huge fierce owl, or many owls, and will go "hunting," or as a blessing of sweetness and light, with wildflower fragrances, representing the original nature of Blodeuwedd. You will have to see what happens in this wondrous book.
A few quick translations of things I suspect aren't American usage:
If someone is conning you with a tall tale, he's said to be "pulling your leg." If you suspect this, you can tell him "Pull the other one, it's got bells on" - (so more rewarding than this one.)
Packet of fags - cigarettes.
Petrol - gas
Torch - flashlight
Anorak - windbreaker
Ping-pong - table tennis
Snooker - table ball game like pool
The ab-dabs - feeling spooked
Pebble-dash - a rough stucco-type wall finish with tiny stones embedded in it
Flitch - a half-side of bacon. See the part where Huw Halfbacon explains his name.
Torch - flashlight
First floor - US second floor
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