October 20 2026, 18:25
The Owl Service
Alison and her family, including new stepbrother Roger, are on holiday for the summer deep in a Welsh valley, in a house Alison has inherited. Local boy Gwyn and his mother Nancy are hired to look after the place while they are there. After hearing scratches in the attic, Roger and Alison go up and discover a dinner service decorated with a pattern of floral owls. Alison finds the plates fascinating, but she doesn’t realise the magical forces her attention will unleash.
I heard about The Owl Service from one of the first people I ever met on old Twitter back in 2014 or so. There’s a tremendous amount of dialogue, to the point where I wondered if it was imagined as a play. It’s set in a Welsh Valley somewhere north of Aberystwyth, and the characters are split between the outsider English family who live in an inherited home and the village locals whose first language is Welsh. I’m Welsh, and I recognise some of the spoken patterns of Gwyn, Nancy, and handyman Huw Halfbacon, so Garner must have spent plenty of time in these sorts of communities. The endless bickering and fighting is tiresome, but it’s also the primary mechanism through which Garner tells the story, which I begrudgingly admire.
When the characters are allowed to stop talking, the descriptions are intoxicating and poetic, thick with sensory details and a feeling of history. The story uses a Welsh legend to tie the modern-day characters into a mystery they don’t understand. Everyone seems to know the legend, but they can’t see how they are being made to act it out, and it’s Garner’s skill that hides this from the reader too until close to the end.
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