Alan Garner: ‘The Chronicles of Narnia are atrociously written’

My earliest speechmaking memory
In March 1941, aged six, I was lying successful furniture successful an isolation hospital, recovering from measles, whooping cough and meningitis, and looking astatine the Knockout comic. My favourite quality was Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit. I could work the code bubbles due to the fact that my parent had taught maine superior letters, but the extended captions nether the pictures successful precocious and little lawsuit were beyond me. I indispensable person been decoding them unconsciously for immoderate time, but the infinitesimal of realising that I understood the words, that I could work All By Myself, seemed to beryllium instantaneous. I fell backmost successful the furniture and stared done the model astatine a metallic barrage balloon hanging successful the entity supra Manchester and couldn’t halt trembling. From past connected I binged connected words: The Dandy, The Beano, Shakespeare, Leslie Charteris’s The Saint books, shade stories and subject fiction, comics and pulp magazines cadged from US soldiers; immoderate came my way. I was omnivorous.

My favourite publication increasing up
While recuperating, I discovered a tattered transcript of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The last pages were missing, and I work the publication 11 times, hoping to find them. But each I learned was however to accidental “Kagoda” – “I surrender”, successful Mangani Gorilla language. After that, I immersed myself successful my grandmother’s 8 volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia of 1910, which were the main root of acquisition for maine successful my superior schoolhouse years portion I continued to beryllium often and spectacularly ill.

The publication that changed maine arsenic a teenager
I was a sixth-form classicist astatine Manchester grammar school, wherever we were fixed the accidental to survey successful extent the erotic subtleties of the poems of Catullus, which did wonders for teen antheral angst.

The writer who changed my mind
Aeschylus. Reading his Oresteia aged 17 made maine alert much than immoderate different substance of the powerfulness of language, and its introspection of matricide came astatine an opportune moment.

The publication that made maine privation to beryllium a writer
I ne'er had immoderate ambition to write. I was acceptable to beryllium an academic. After a play of unfocused increasing unease, I had a Damascene infinitesimal wherever I “saw” that I had to travel my household of originative manual craftsmen successful Cheshire. But I was useless with my hands. However, I did person a installation for languages. Therefore, I would write. That was the astir anserine and illogical thought I ever had; but it helped to quell the panic of realisation. And erstwhile I started, determination was nary turning back.

The writer I came backmost to
TS Eliot’s The Waste Land irritated maine erstwhile I archetypal met it successful 1950, and inactive does; but it led to the Four Quartets, which I work often for its spiritual charge.

The publication I reread
The King James Bible, intermittently, for its language, contented and mythology.

The publication I could ne'er work again
I ne'er enjoyed CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. I work the books with horrid fascination. They were, successful my opinion, and remain, nasty, manipulative, morbid, misanthropic, hectoring, totalitarian and atrociously written.

The publication I discovered aboriginal successful life
One time successful 1955 I picked up William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, reasoning it was a textbook connected demonology.

The publication I americium presently reading
CG Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

My comfortableness read
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It takes maine backmost to the lukewarm comfortableness of my grandfather’s code arsenic we sat successful the acheronian of his forge and I listened to the stories of his youth, our household and agrarian neighbours, and the Legend of Alderley.