I read a book from Wales: The Owl service, By Alan Garner

She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls

This was such a strange book. 

If strange is not your thing, check out my list of other suggestions for Wales here!

I really had no idea what I was getting myself into with this one. But a novel described as a modern retelling of an old Welsh legend sounded intriguing enough to give it a try. Even if the author, Alan Garner, is in fact English and not Welsh. Rules are to be broken, right?

I chose the audiobook simply because it was readily available, and it turned out to be the perfect choice. The Owl Service is almost entirely dialogue-based. We’re never told what the characters feel — only what they say and do. It almost feels like a play, and the audio version is ideal for that style. The narrator (Wayne Forester) is fantastic, bringing the Welsh accent and slang to life and immersing you in the remote Welsh valley.

To set the scene: Roger and Alison are step-siblings. Alison’s father died, and her mother has married Roger’s father. They’re spending the summer in a fine house, in a secluded valley in Wales, a few hours’ drive from Aberystwyth.

The house originally belonged to Alison’s father, who inherited it from his cousin, Bertram, after Bertram died under mysterious circumstances. 

The third teenager, Gwyn, is the son of the family’s cook, Nancy, who has reluctantly returned to the valley after living in the city for years.

The story begins when Alison hears scratching from the attic, and she and Gwyn discover a set of mysterious dinner plates. And by bringing them out, they unknowingly awaken an ancient and dangerous force.

As the trio tries to unravel the meaning behind the strange floral-owl pattern on the plates, the lines between reality and legend starts to blur, and the book bekomes increasingly strange. Alison becomes obsessed with tracing the pattern of the plates onto paper, books fly through the air, strange figures appear in photos taken through a mysterious hole in a rock, and the enigmatic Huw Halfbacon — the last of the house’s original staff — speaks in riddles and clearly knows more than he’s letting on.

The class differences and the Welsh-English antagonism add another layer to the story. Alison and Roger, who are English and middle-class, see the world very differently from Gwyn, who is Welsh and working-class.

Although it is categorized as a children’s book, I’d say it would take an exceptionally clever child to grasp what is going on. Even as an adult, I’m not entirely sure I understood it.

And I definitely didn’t expect it to be so genuinely scary. It’s been described as “folk horror,” and I think that label fits perfectly. The entire story is eerie and unsettling, the story unfolds in fragments, and the ending is abrupt and bizarre. I finished the book feeling as though I’d been handed a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

So trying my best to make sense of it all, and knowing that Alan Garner draws on the myth of Blodeuwedd from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, I went back to the source and read that legend. 

Here Blodeuwedd is a woman crafted from flowers — oak, broom, and meadowsweet — by the magician Gwydion. She is given as a wife to a man named Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who, due to a curse, cannot marry a human woman. But Blodeuwedd falls in love with another man and conspires to kill her husband. As punishment, she is transformed into an owl, cursed to haunt the night.

The Blodeuwedd myth is just a small part of this part of the Mabinogion, which features several characters being transformed into animals and back again. And if anything, reading the original legend left me even more bewildered than before. 

If you’re looking for a book that wraps everything up neatly, this isn’t it. But The Owl Service is an unforgettable story. Just be prepared to feel a little unmoored by the end.

Have you read The Owl Service or the Mabinogion? I’d love to hear your thoughts — especially if you have theories about what it all means!

I hoped to find something magical from Wales, and I definitely did.