Elidor is a children’s fantasy story that is set in the modern world, or at least the world of sixties England, when it was written. Four children find a way to travel to another world, and enter on a quest for treasures to save this world. Later, the other world, (Elidor), bleeds into ours, putting the children at risk. They must fight back, closing the gap between worlds.There are 188 pages of text, and a few black and white illustrations to help the imagination of readers. The language of the text reflects the time that the book was written. For instance, children no longer say “it’s smashing,” or “Titchy, isn’t it?” Many of the things that happen in our world also reflect those times. Most households no longer have a supper trolley of sandwiches and cake; much less have all the family sitting together in the evening for such a meal. Nowadays no group of children would be left to roam freely about the City of Manchester, or indeed stay home alone for the evening whilst their parents attend a dinner dance.The story uses sound as a means of opening a path to another world. This is a fresh idea for me, as is the concept of an old man playing the fiddle to create the right song for the process to work. The fact that this old man is later revealed as a slightly younger man in his world, the warrior Malebron, adds to the initial confusion and complexity of the new world. As this is exactly how the children feel, this is intended to help us travel with them on their journey. As they find out information, so does the reader.In fact, the reader participates mostly through Roland, the youngest sibling. It is he who is identified as the strongest by Malebron, and he is named to save that world, and his siblings, whilst he is doing it. This creates a wish for Roland to succeed, not just for a good story, but in the traditional triumph of the underdog sense as well.The fact that the children know what is going on and the adults do not, creates a bond with the reader. We are in on the secret too. As this book is aimed at children, I’m sure that they would enjoy the sense of being more in the know than adults.A quest is a traditional element to any fantasy story, and there is an element in this story. The four siblings, Nicholas, David, Helen, and Roland, are all asked to retrieve “treasures” from inside a mound. It is dangerous in the mound, as the darkness will try to trick you. In fact the older three siblings try first, but end up trapped by the darkness. It is left to Roland, who saves his siblings, and organises the recovery of the four treasures in order to save Malebron’s world. Malebron then urges the children to take these treasures home with them to keep hope alive, preventing the darkness from winning. They agree to this.As the treasures pass into our world, they transform into everyday objects to protect themselves. However, they give off static electricity, and begin to cause problems for local people. The treasures also become the focal point for darkness trying to send shadow men after the children in our world. This cause chaos, and only the children know what is really going on. In this story, the children are the heroes, and they bring resolution to the tale.I thought that it was a good story with some intriguing ideas, and I didn’t mind the sixties setting in the least. However, I found the ending rushed in comparison to the rest of the novel, and the resolution was not as clear as it could be for my liking. Having said that, it is still worth a read on a rainy afternoon.
In 1967 Stephen King first got the idea to write an epic series inspired by the poem "Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning in 1855. And Browning took the line from King Lear, written by Shakespeare in 1607 ... in which it is a line of nonsense from a man pretending madness.However King was not the first fantasy writer to draw inspiration from the line and write a book whose hero, Roland, engaged in an epic struggle. Alan Garner (under-sung giant of fantasy literature) published Elidor in 1965. The Shakespeare quote is printed on its own page immediately before chapter one, and Roland, the youngest of three brothers and a sister, is the hero of this piece.I thought I'd read this book as a child, but no - reading it to my daughter Celyn this week has convinced me that I just remember passages of it from drama classes in my primary school when I was very small.I did read some Alan Garner books as a child though, and they stuck with me because the man is a remarkable wordsmith. He uses the language to its full power, especially in descriptions, bringing every scene to life with prose that treads the outer borders of poetry.Alan Garner writes (yes writes - he recently published the third book in the Tales of Alderly series after a 50 YEAR gap!) in the way in which I try to write. Much of his work looks to me like mine would if I were better at it.Anyway, to the story. It's a short book, probably around 45,000 words, but a lot happens. It's a story rich in themes, rather less rich in characters. The children never become that much more than name tags with a bit of sibling interaction and a nice slant-ways glance at life in a suburban family in 1960s Manchester. The real interest is in their passage to Elidor, and on their return their struggle to keep the treasures they been given safe and to play their role in restoring life to the doomed world that seems to intersect ours at the fringes of society.I enjoyed the story, it's full of imagination and no small amount of dark threat. Celyn enjoyed it too, though the passage of 50 years, combined with her own limited experience of the world, did require me to explain a number of things.A book well worth pointing an intelligent child at, or using a child as an excuse to get to grips with just for the pleasure of the imagery Garner paints on a page. .
What do You think about Elidor (2006)?
I miss my old edition of Elidor but it seems to have vanished along with its wonderful illustrations. Elidor, that strange halfway-house book between Garner's more conventional children's fantasies and his truly powerful, timeshifting work in Owl Service and Red Shift.Four children find themselves almost randomly in an urban wasteland and pass through to another world. When they return they are carrying four Treasures which must be hidden and protected. As time goes on, the children begin to forget and rationalise their experience, but forces on Elidor are trying to break through, homing in on the Treasures themselves.Elidor is portal fantasy as ghost story. The book is full of strange phenomena: massive build-us of static electricity, shadows on walls, mysterious figures on the porch and eyes peeking through letterboxes. A message comes through on a spiritualist's planchette. It is spooky and unnerving and haunting in every sense of the word. It is also tight, spare and economical, without a wasted word or scene, and the terrible sacrifice at the end has always stayed with me.
—Nigel
I wish there was one more slot for "quite liked it, didn't REALLY like it, but certainly admired it, possibly more than I liked it". Elidor seems like it will be a conventional story of children saving the day in another world, so when the four siblings returned to their own right away it was a pleasant surprise. The "magic" is pleasingly grounded without being overexplained. The main character, Roland's, desperate persistent belief in the magic in the face of his siblings' attempts to forget leads to convincing feelings of frustration and resentment and to an eenie weenie smidge of doubt. The interactions between the siblings are very strong and there's good atmosphere. In terms of actual action and plot the story is a little slender, but what's there is good.
—Lia Marcoux
When I was nine (back in the dim, distant past that we’ll refer to as 1968) I had a teacher called Mrs McEke. She was a strict disciplinarian but she probably needed to be given that her class was full of little oiks from the local council estate (like me!). Mrs McEke used to spend the last half-hour of every school day reading to us. She loved language and was a wonderful orator, bringing the stories to life through the strength of her vocal delivery.Given that we were only nine she made some fairly ambitious choices; The Hobbit, The War of the Worlds, The Silver Sword, The Railway Children and even John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (definitely left-field). However I will always be indebted to her for choosing to read Alan Garner’s Elidor.Elidor had only been published in 1965, so at that stage it was a fairly contemporary novel. Although Garner was ostensibly writing for children the book had some very adult themes. It was a brave Mrs McEke that tried to illustrate symbolism to a bunch of largely disinterested nine year olds. However she would probably be delighted to learn that some forty-four years on at least one of her pupils still remembers the symbolic importance of the sword, the spear, the stone and the cauldron.I was completely entranced by the tale of four children and their rusty relics, which opened a gateway to another world. It seemed like a cool and edgy version of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” but set in the real world, or at least a world that I could identify with.We used to have a travelling library van that visited the estate every Monday evening, and I managed to obtain a copy of Elidor and raced through it in advance of Mrs McEke’s reading so that I was always one step ahead of her. Garner’s writing was a revelation to me and he became one of my early heroes as I worked my way through his other books.Characterisation is not really his strong point as a writer, although his dialogue is an object lesson to any aspiring writer, exploding like little emotional depth charges on the page. As ever with Garner it is the power of myth which is his main fascination.As an adult I do have a few gripes with the novel which weren’t as apparent to me when I first read it. Overall the tone is cold and distant. There is very little to engage the reader in Elidor’s plight, and therefore very little sense of empathy. The ending seems horribly rushed, almost as if Garner had grown tired of his tale and wanted to finish it up and move on. However these minor gripes aside Elidor will always have a special place in the memories of my childhood.
—Ian Kirkpatrick
