Between Two Worlds

I came late to magic. The stories of my childhood were mainly Greek myths (there was a Cyclops at the bottom of our garden) or the plots – with copious quotations – of Jane Austen’s novels, my mother, the storyteller, having a deep love for and knowledge of both. Later, with pretensions to intellectual sophistication, I had no time for kids’ stuff. So it was at a relatively advanced age that I discovered Lewis Carroll, George Macdonald, James Stephens, Masefield of The Midnight Folk, Tolkien, T. H. White. They burst upon my reading, fresh and new. Of the more modern books, the one that has gripped me most is Elidor by Alan Garner.

Garner has a long list of children’s books and plays to his credit – perhaps his best known being The Owl Service (1967), in which three adolescents are caught up in the re-enactment of an ancient tragedy, one of the saddest and most beautiful of The Mabinogion stories, and The Stone Book Quartet (1976), in which he returns to his own family and their Cheshire village at four different points in time. Elidor, published in 1965, is the third book Garner wrote. The first two, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), are both good reads and contain some striking magic – Garner has said of them that he wanted something thrilling to happen on every page – but it seems to me the sources are a bit too near the surface: dangerous creatures that live underground and come out at night to capture our heroes; a powerful talisman that must not be allowed to fall into the enemy’s hands; even the way in which magic penetrates the everyday world. These are all familiar and I find nothing special in the way Garner treats them. But in Elidor he made this territory his own. Elidor is a story of parallel worlds. Not another, I hear you groan. Well, yes, but not just any other. It was published before the genre had been Disneyfied to death. It is a short book: the Harper Collins edition runs to barely 200 pages. The writing is plain and taut, the plot worked out with coherence, conviction and economy. Briefly, the worlds of 1960s Manchester and of Elidor, ‘Green Isle of the Shadow of the Stars’, are not strictly parallel but touch at certain points, and what happens in one reverberates in the other. Elidor is fighting for survival, overrun by forces of destruction and about to give in to an insidious invasion which is like a malignant disease:

The darkness grew. It is always there. We did not watch, and the power of night closed on Elidor. We had so much ease that we did not mark the signs – a crop blighted, a spring failed, a man killed. Then it was too late – war, and siege, and betrayal, and the dying of the light.

Four children, three brothers and a sister, unaware that they have a role to play in Elidor’s struggle, come, apparently by chance, to a crossing point between the worlds, and from then on the interaction of the two begins. Of twenty chapters only four take place in Elidor; all the rest deal with Elidor’s impact on the children’s known world. They meet only one person in Elidor and there is only the barest indication of the character of its threatened society; the evocation of the ruined and ravaged land is more powerful for being extremely economical. Here is Roland, the youngest of the brothers, alone in Elidor, passing

charred stumps of buildings, and fields rank with nettles . . . The sky was dull, yet there was a brittleness in the light that hurt . . . There was the silence of death over everything: a silence that was more powerful for the noises it contained – the far off crash of trees, and the voices of cold things hidden in the fog that moved in ribbons where there was no wind. Oaks became black water at a touch.

There is no heroic or archaic or invented language, just a discreet touch of formality in the speech of the man of Elidor. The evil force is not personified. Its effects are just sketched in by the choice of imagery – ‘wounds do not heal in Elidor’, ‘Night’s dungeon’, a place ‘built for blood’ and ‘supple to evil’. Elidor and its peril are suggested rather than described, and the reader’s imagination is mobilized to fill in the outlines. In contrast, the children’s individuality comes out very clearly, especially in the way each reacts to the experience of Elidor. Nicholas, the eldest, can’t deal with it and wants to explain it away as a collective hallucination. David, the middle brother, a budding scientist, doesn’t seem unduly interested until certain phenomena occur which he can analyse in scientific terms. Their sister, Helen, the next in age, tries to keep the peace and look after anybody or anything in difficulties. She makes no bones about finding the whole thing frightening – until the end when she has a crucial part to play. It is the youngest, Roland, who is completely open and committed to Elidor and who turns out to be the strongest. His ability to resist and fight lies in the power of imagination, the conjuring up of images. Thus a doorway can be revealed in what appears to be a blank wall, or another can be blocked by the evocation of falling masonry. The other children have this ability to a much lesser degree, and it can be used against all of them as when, in Elidor, they are pursued by terrifying monsters which afterwards they recognize as creations of their own memories, of things which have frightened them in their own world. Throughout, Elidor’s fate hangs in the balance, threatened within by dark forces and in the children’s world by scepticism, denial and fear and, most dangerously, by Roland’s inability – through no fault of his own – to master the power of his own imagination to open crossing points. And Elidor is pitiless. The children are endangered, used in the battle, and abandoned when it is over. This is not a comfortable book. It’s obvious that a deeper significance may be found in Elidor. It is indeed about the ways in which people of different characters and temperaments perceive reality. It is not unintentional that the child who is the most disturbed by the incursion of Elidor into the everyday world is the eldest, and that the one who is at the same time the most powerful and the most vulnerable is the youngest and not yet at the age of puberty. These are unstated givens which simply add conviction to the events of the story. The reader may take them or leave them, the author never thrusts them upon us. I choose not to load the book in this way by treating it as some kind of parable; the telling is good enough to stand on its own. The physical descriptions too are arresting, whether Garner is talking about a back street in Manchester –

They were in an alley that ran between loading bays and storehouses lit by unshaded bulbs: the kerb was low and had a metal edge, and there was a smell of boxwood and rotten fruit. Fans pumped hot, stale air into the children’s faces through vents that were hung with feathers of dirt.

– or Elidor, where a distant castle ‘shone as if the stones had soaked in the light, as if the stone could be amber’. What makes Elidor rereadable is the austerity of the language and the sure way in which the author anchors unknown – fantastic – reality in known reality. The world of Elidor, without being in any way a pot-pourri of familiar themes, has its roots in myth and legend, as did the work of earlier writers in this field, so that the reverberations multiply. As I read and reread I am always entirely convinced and involved, and I’ve never yet failed to weep at the end. Is Elidor a children’s book? Yes, in that the protagonists are children, with whom young readers can immediately identify. Yet this isn’t a book about children doing things (such as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons) but a story of things happening to children – as, for instance, on another level, in The Turn of the Screw. In Garner’s characters, so economically drawn, there is much for the adult reader to identify with: Nicholas who tries to rationalize fear away, David the scientist to whom solving a problem in recognizable terms is all that matters, Helen the peacemaker, and Roland who has the potential of a mystic. His imagination opens the way into and out of Elidor. Garner, using suggestion and economy, does the same, for readers of any age.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 23 © A. E. Roberts 2009