Elidor [Hardcover]

Although Elidor is usually classified as a Children's book and is indeed fairly short and easy to read, it will astound readers of any age. I first read this book at the age of ten and have re-read it on a regular basis over the last 30 years!
The plot is essentially a classic tale of Good against Evil where the fate of a whole world is held in the hands of four ordinary children.
However, what makes it so special is the way the Author intermingles our everyday, ordinary world (in this case, the back streets of Manchester) with the mystical world of Elidor. Characters, objects and magic "leak out" of one world into the other, making it quite a scary read for children , but by the the same score, totally captivating. At the end of the story you are left with the feeling that there really might be other worlds just beyond our vision.
If you have enjoyed this story you may well enjoy other books by Alan Garner, such as "The Weird Stone of Brisingamen" "The Moon of Gomrath" and "The Owl Service" where the theme of a more magical and mystical world lying just below the surface of our ordinary lives, is again explored.

Older readers of 'Elidor' might notice first its period detail: we're in mid-sixties Manchester, a fragmenting city of slum clearance, bomb sites and sprawling new council estates. The more inquisitive might seek out the story's mythic underpinning: a very little online sleuthing will reveal the elements of Welsh and Irish mythology on which Garner has drawn. Some will admire the terse, driven prose: stripped back and sandblasted, bearing nuggets of poetry that gleam like gemstones. Every word necessary.

Younger readers will simply be seduced by the tale itself.

Its enduring power lies in its unresolved mystery. Garner primes his protagonists by dislocating them - literally. The children are moving house, out from the city to a country cottage that's now surrounded by suburbia. The mundane world is fracturing around them; it's through the rents torn by demolition that the other world erupts.

What's clever is that we learn so little about that world. Only once do we enter Elidor for any extended period; mostly we glimpse it, as do the children, through keyholes and porches. We, like them, never fully understand the source of the darkness that threatens this realm, or the reason for the conflict that tears it apart. After all, as Malebron tells them: "Darkness needs no shape. It uses. It possesses."

The children - led by Roland's troubled imagination - embrace their mission unwillingly; even as they redeem Elidor on the book's final page, they remain baffled by the forces that they've engaged. All they know is that, in triumphing over some inarticulate evil, they've condemned themselves to exile from Elidor's reawakened glory. On one side of the imaginative divide, "streams danced, and the rivers were set free, and all the shining air was new". On the other, the children are abandoned, "alone with the broken windows of a slum."

'Elidor' isn't fantasy. It shows imagination for what it is: confusing, demanding, and painful. And because young people know these qualities from experience, they respond with recognition to Garner's book. It was great in 1965, and it's great now.

Elidor is not at all like the "Weirdstone..." books, rather it owes a lot more to the "Owl Service", i.e. far more mystical and mysterious. This does not take away from the book itself though, which is very readable, and takes the reader away to places beyond the immagination. It is unlike the "Owl Service" however, as the book is far easier to read, and the narrative far less locked up in the mystery of the book.

All of his books are on my "must read" list though, along with Harry Potter, David Eddings,Terry Brookes, and Stephen Lawhead.