meanings is tantamount to its having no meaning at all. But perhaps the opposite could once have applied. Perhaps a thing that could be thought to have a multitude of meanings, then, gained strength and importance from the ambiguities." Red Shift , the primal Garner text, starts with a conversation: "Shall I tell you?" "What?" "Shall I?" "Tell me what?" said Jan. There, we have someone (the writer?) trying to find a way into telling his story, but meeting only with misunderstanding and obfuscation, a block that ultimately becomes the book's tragedy. Boneland starts in a similar, but subtly different, way: Here, while one voice says it's going to tell a story, the other tends a wound. Which could be said to have been Garner's work, from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Boneland -- telling stories to heal a wound, to reconcile the irreconcilable, to breach the divide. As the grown-up Colin says, "Someone has to look after the Edge. There always is someone; always has been." And of course he means Alderley Edge, but "the Edge" could also be the dream/reality boundary the shaman Strandloper walks, and the "Wasteland and boundaries" that are the "gates of Elidor", or the corpus callosum that links the left and right hemispheres of the brain, the point at which intellect and emotion must meet to make a whole, healed, human being. Boneland is by no means a traditional sequel to the Alderley Edge books, but neither is it (as I feared it might