Review: Cynthia Zarin on Alan Garner

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner’s tenth novel, starts as most things do, in the middle. Joseph Coppock, a boy of about ten or twelve, peering through an upstairs window of his house—his own bedroom window—hears a ruckus out in the yard, and, poking his head far out, hears the sing-song of the rag-and-bone man before he sees him. What the reader doesn’t know…