Elidor

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Although Elidor doesn’t quite equal the rich, complex texture of his best work, The Owl Service for example, it’s still an immensely satisfying experience, packed with memorable images: all presented in evocative prose that suggests Garner’s expectation that his young audience would be more than able to cope with unfamiliar language or references.

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. Elidor was his third book, following two previous fantasy novels – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath. 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.

Alan Garner’s variation on the quest narrative draws on a range of sources from pagan myth to traditional ballads. 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! Garner uses the power of myth in his stories – even myths that are not well-known – letting their ancient and often violent power blend with his spare, direct prose style.

We loved the slice of 60s life, the details of the television set problems, the vertical hold, putting on the set to 'warm up'!

At the time of publication they served to disperse the tension, and also make the reader yearn to be back in the fantasy world of Elidor.

But storytelling has simply come so much farther since this book was written, there's no way any publisher would have approved this for print in this century. This is also an allusion to the English folktale of " Childe Rowland", from which several elements of the plot of Elidor are drawn. When only Roland is left, he finds that the heavy iron-handled door which the mysterious lame fiddler urges him to open, is a portal into the troubled land of Elidor.It is a typical children’s book, where the adults don’t play much of a role and if they do they are made to sound stupid (which I think is wrong). Part folklore, part adventure and part fantasy, Alan Garner’s Elidor is a modern children’s classic. Nicholas falls back on the idea of mass hallucination, David on coincidence, as explanations of their experience. 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).