Stephen Hayes reviewed Elidor by Alan Garner (Armada lions)
None
5 stars
I've just finished reading [b:Elidor|292654|Elidor|Alan Garner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875908l/292654.SX50.jpg|2987303] for the seventh time (or is it the eighth?), and was quite surprised to see that it was nearly 25 years since the last time I read it.
What prompted this reading was that someone wrote a rather nice review of my children's book [b:Of wheels and witches|23715217|Of Wheels and Witches|Stephen Hayes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1418051156l/23715217.SX50.jpg|43325109], and I began to wonder if it was worth trying to write a sequel, and I began to re-read Elidor to get me in to mood to think about it.
That's because [b:Elidor|292654|Elidor|Alan Garner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875908l/292654.SX50.jpg|2987303] is, in my view at least, a kind of paradigm case of what a children's fantasy novel should be.
It's a bit like a combination of [a:C.S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1564671804p2/1069006.jpg] and [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg]. Though Lewis wrote stories for children, Charles Williams never did, but I imagine that if he had he would …
I've just finished reading [b:Elidor|292654|Elidor|Alan Garner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875908l/292654.SX50.jpg|2987303] for the seventh time (or is it the eighth?), and was quite surprised to see that it was nearly 25 years since the last time I read it.
What prompted this reading was that someone wrote a rather nice review of my children's book [b:Of wheels and witches|23715217|Of Wheels and Witches|Stephen Hayes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1418051156l/23715217.SX50.jpg|43325109], and I began to wonder if it was worth trying to write a sequel, and I began to re-read Elidor to get me in to mood to think about it.
That's because [b:Elidor|292654|Elidor|Alan Garner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875908l/292654.SX50.jpg|2987303] is, in my view at least, a kind of paradigm case of what a children's fantasy novel should be.
It's a bit like a combination of [a:C.S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1564671804p2/1069006.jpg] and [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg]. Though Lewis wrote stories for children, Charles Williams never did, but I imagine that if he had he would have written something like Elidor. The first 50 pages are like Lewis -- some children are snatched away into another world, the devastated dying world of Elidor. But the rest of the book is like Williams -- the other world irrupts into this world.
The protagonist of [b:Elidor|292654|Elidor|Alan Garner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875908l/292654.SX50.jpg|2987303] is Roland Watson, the youngest of four middle-class siblings who live in Greater Manchester. In various parts of the story [a:Alan Garner|47991|Alan Garner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1363273417p2/47991.jpg] satirises bourgeois tastes and values and contrasts their tameness with the wildness of Elidor, which only Roland really appreciates until, in the end, the wildness of Elidor overwhelms them all.