Something about Alan Garner’s Owl Service

The Owl Service (1967) by Alan Garner OBE FRSL is an award-winning fantasy novel for young adults that affected me very strongly the first time I read it. 

The Owl Service is a story of the supernatural. It involves something that has been called in other articles a scripted scenario.

The story is set in modern Wales.  The plotline is based on a story from Welsh mythology, a story about betrayal and destruction involving a triangle of two men and a woman.

Three teenagers, Alison the English girl, Roger the English boy and Gwyn the Welsh boy, re-enact the story - or rather the story re-enacts itself through them as it has been doing down the years and through the generations. 

The girl is once again the betrayer, and the two boys hit each other where it hurts most. 

Some of the witty remarks that various characters make have a positive effect when read; there are also some very cruel and hurtful comments that are painful to read and have a very negative effect. This article highlights some of the best and worst of these comments.

Parents and step-parents
Alison’s mother is a terrible emotional blackmailer and Gwyn’s bitter mother seems sadistically determined to sabotage his life, not just for personal reasons but because of unfinished business from the past. 

Exploitation and unfinished business in the life of Marie Corelli

There are some lessons to be learned from the financially successful but personally sad life of the best-selling Victorian novelist Marie Corelli. 

One of these lessons is about taking responsibility where appropriate as opposed to always blaming someone else. It particularly involves learning to be a good judge of character and not being influenced by factors such as self-interest, self-deception and wishful thinking - as opposed to unjustly blaming the other party for not being what we thought they were or wanted them to be.

Blaming people for deceiving us and letting us down seems to be the default. We need to learn to look after our side of things; we need to learn from experience what to look for in people. In particular, we need to learn to recognise warning signals.

This extract from Marie Corelli's book The Silver Domino shows that she knew, in theory at least, that people should take responsibility and blame themselves for their own poor judgement when they feel that they have been deceived by someone:

"...remember that if you do persuade yourselves into thinking that I am a Somebody, and if I turn out after all to be a Nobody, it is not my fault. Don't blame me; blame your own self deception."

This is admirable; it is spot on. However, she talked a better game than she played; she didn't apply her wise words to herself!

The Silver Domino was published in 1892; here is an extract from The Young Diana, which was first published in 1918:

"I 'asked for love' – now I ask for vengeance. I gave all my heart and soul to a man whose only god was Self, and I got nothing back…So I have a long score to settle, and I shall try to have some of my spent joys returned to me – with heavy interest!"

This is Marie Corelli speaking for herself, and from bitter experience. She was raging by proxy at a man she had been infatuated with because she felt that he had deceived her; he was not what she thought he was and wanted him to be. She had become disappointed and disillusioned. The expression 'Hell hath no greater fury than a women scorned' very much applies in her case. 

It all sounds very like the fury expressed by Arthur Conan Doyle's witch Helen Penclosa after her rejection by Austin Gilroy.

Unfinished business: three paths people take

I have noticed that some people get away with a lot. They behave badly but suffer no apparent consequences, internal or external. Perhaps the universe sees and treats them the way adults see and behave towards young children. Very small children cannot be expected to have much understanding or take responsibility for their lives, so some of their bad behaviour is excused.

Other people are not so lucky when it comes to dealing with unfinished business. Perhaps the consequences are age- appropriate punishments from the universe.

Failure to express feelings, failure to assert oneself, permitting exploitation of oneself and failure to think, speak and act appropriately according to the occasion are examples of unfinished business, as are ignoring problems in the hope that they will go away, habitually running away from difficult situations, going through life leaving messes, failed relationships and unhappy people behind, being out of touch with reality and not respecting the truth.

Many people find that unfinished business and ignored and unresolved problems and issues make themselves felt, very inconveniently and painfully, over and over again. Perhaps the universe treats selected people like under-performing schoolchildren who must retake the same examinations until the lessons are learned. The difficulty of the lessons and the severity of the consequences and the amount of pain felt when they are not learned may be proportional to the universe's estimate of the capabilities and potential of the student.

Carrying around a load of unfinished business is similar to living with a lot of debt.

Unfinished business can handicap us and sabotage or even ruin our lives.