The Owl Service

Characters

Alison

Roger

Gwyn

Huw Halfbacon

Clive (Roger's father)

Margaret (Alison's mother, mentioned but never seen)

Nancy (Gwyn's mother)

Bertram (Alison's deceased cousin, mentioned)

Blodeuwedd (Welsh mythical figure)

Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Welsh mythical figure)

Gronw Pebyr (Welsh mythical figure)

Plot summary

Roger and Alison are stepbrother and sister. Alison's father died and her mother Margaret has married Clive, a businessman and former RAF officer. Clive's former wife was notoriously unfaithful, bringing shame to the family and a particular kind of pain to his son, Roger. To bond the new family together they are spending a few weeks of the summer in an isolated valley in Wales, a few hours' drive from Aberystwyth. They occupy a fine house formerly owned by Alison's father, subsequently transferred to her to avoid death duty. He in turn inherited it from a cousin, Bertram, who died there in mysterious circumstances around the time Alison was born.

With the house comes Huw Halfbacon, also known as Huw the Flitch, a handyman and gardener. He is the last of the original domestic staff to remain at the house. The former cook, Nancy, had left to live in Aberystwyth but is offered a substantial amount to come and resume her duties. With her comes her son Gwyn. He has never seen the valley before but knows everything about it, courtesy of his mother's stories. Someone else who knows a lot about the place is Huw, but he is very mysterious about it. Oddly, Nancy has told Gwyn nothing about Huw.

Alison hears scratching noises in the attic above her bed and persuades Gwyn to investigate. He finds stacks of dinner plates with a floral pattern. When he picks one up, something odd happens. He almost falls through the ceiling while simultaneously Roger, lounging by a large flat stone near the river, hears a scream and seems to see something flying through the air toward him. The stone is known as the Stone of Gronw. It has a hole neatly bored through it, and legend says that Lleu killed Gronw by throwing his spear clear through the stone that Gronw was holding to shield himself.

Alison begins behaving peculiarly. She traces the pattern on the plate onto paper and folds the result to make an owl. Finding out that Gwyn has been in the attic, Nancy demands that Alison give up the plate. Alison asserts she has no right to it, and eventually produces a blank white plate. She maintains that the pattern disappeared from the plate. Alison becomes obsessed by the plates. One by one she traces them and makes the owls, and one by one the plates become blank. The owls themselves disappear, though no one cares at first about some folded paper models.

In the house's billiard room part of the wall has been covered with pebble-dash. Bit by bit this begins to crack and fall away, exposing first a pair of painted eyes, and then an entire portrait of a woman made of flowers. Tensions between the occupants of the house begin to rise. Gwyn is intelligent and wants to further his education, but Clive expresses the stereotypical clannish closed-ranks attitudes of the upper middle class towards him. Roger begins to feel hostile despite his initial friendliness. Eventually he takes to ridiculing Gwyn's efforts to improve himself with elocution lessons on gramophone records, calling them "improve-a-prole." Alison seems friendly to Gwyn and the two go on long walks together. She has visions where she sees herself next to him, even though he is some distance away. Margaret, her mother, never appears but the need to keep her happy affects everyone else.

Writing

Garner spent four years researching and writing the book. He learned Welsh "in order not to use it" in the dialogue—nor to use dialect, as in what he calls the "Come you here, bach" school of writing—because he believed that doing so would only superficially express what it is to be Welsh.

Themes

John Rowe Townsend cited the theme of ancient but living legend, which also appears in Garner's earlier books, saying that in this book "Garner added to his gift for absorbing old tales and retransmitting them with increased power a new grasp of the inward, emotional content of an incident or situation."

Another fellow reteller of Welsh material in English, Susan Cooper said that the novel can be called "true fantasy", "subtle and overwhelming". Penelope Farmer wrote, "I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner's The Owl Service."

Gillian Polack notes that although “Alan Garner doesn’t explore the Middle Ages deeply in The Owl Service”, he deftly utilises “one small legend to build a modern study of class and personality” which indicates that “where you come from and what opportunities your life gives you can open and close life choices”.

Inspiration

According to his Postscript included in the 2017 HarperCollins (London) edition, pp216–219, Garner had "The sensation of finding, not inventing, a story .... It was all there, waiting, and I was the archaeologist picking away the earth to reveal the bones". He described 4 key inspirations leading to, and directly providing key elements of, the story, in both book and video forms.

First, (p216)

It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd who was made for him out of flowers.

Second, (p217)

The legend stuck in my mind for several years, and then one day my mother-in-law showed me an old dinner service. She had noticed that the floral pattern round the edge of the plates could be seen as the body, wings, and head of an owl. My wife, Griselda, traced the pattern, juggled it a bit, folded the pattern together and there it was, a model paper owl, which she perched on the back of a chair.

Third, (p217)

But even so, for a long time nothing else would come. Then, by chance, we went to stay at a house in a remote valley in North Wales. Within hours of arriving I knew that I had found the setting for the story, or the setting had found me. Its atmosphere fitted both the original legend and the nature of the dinner service. Ideas began to grow. [...] The story took shape. I looked around for more ideas. The lie of the land fitted the descriptions in the legend. Everything was where it ought to be. The legend could have happened here. As I stood on the doorstep at night, thinking these things, an owl brushed its wings in my face.

Fourth, he cited a local's key contribution: (pp217–218)

Dafydd Rees was eighty-one years old. He was known in the valley as Clocydd, "bell-ringer", because he had rung the church bell for sixty-five years, after his uncle retired from the same job after seventy years. Dafydd had worked as the caretaker and gardener of the house since 1898. He was the greatest help to me, since he let me in to his knowledge of the valley, its history, its traditions, its folklore. Everything that Gwyn, in the book, tells Alison about the valley, is what Dafydd told me. [...]

The dinner service

The pattern of the dinner service, a floral design in which some "flowers" can be read as "owls" when upside down, was designed for Old Hall by Christopher Dresser (died 1904). Garner sought to identify the designer for more than forty years.

Peter Plummer, the producer and director of the television adaptation, described in 1979 a nationwide search for surviving dinner services with the same owl/flower pattern, conducted in association with TV Times during 1969:

"I only know now that there are precious few of these sets in circulation ... (we) only managed to turn up three other copies, one of which, curiously enough, had been accompanied by very unpleasant associations of disaster in the family which had owned it (and one of the other families suddenly woke up to what it was they were eating their tea off while watching the transmission of the first episode)."

In 2012 Garner mentioned that he had only ever seen five plates with the design.

Television adaptation

The Owl Service was made into a Granada Television television serial of the same name in 1969. It was dramatised first by ABC-FM Australia in circa 1987 then for BBC Radio 4 in 2000.