Roland looked through the windows out over Elidor. He saw the tall figure on the battlements of Gorias, with the golden cloak about him. He saw the life spring in the land from Mondrum to the mountains of the north. He saw the morning. It was not enough. [loc. 1854]
I've been meaning to reread Elidor for a while, and after reading Thursbitch I became curious about how much Garner's early works foreshadowed his later fiction. Elidor was published the year that I was born. (It's aged rather better than I have). I suspect contemporary children would have little patience with its narrow focus, its innovative language (the Mound is 'supple to evil'), and its defiantly downbeat ending: but it is a compelling read.
Spoilers for the plot from here on.
Four children -- David, Nick, Helen and Roland -- are wandering through an urban wasteland when they find a ruined church and a mysterious fiddler: separately, they find their way to a twilight, monochrome realm. This is Elidor. Roland encounters Malebron, the last defender of the land: he enters an eldritch Mound, and saves his elder siblings from a magical trap. The four discover, or are led to, the four treasures of Elidor: and then they return to the mundane world. None of them will ever visit Elidor again.
But the story has only just started, because Elidor is about the intrusion of the fantastic into the real. The Treasures are disruptive. They cause electrical interference. (Will contemporary readers have a clue about 'vertical hold' on a television?) After the children bury the Treasures in the garden, birds and animals avoid that spot. And someone or something is coming after the Treasures. There are man-shaped shadows where no shadows should be; there are watchers in the porch of the Watsons' suburban house, because Roland envisioned their front door as the entrance to the Mound. There is a sense of peril, but also of the lull before the storm. It's over a year later when matters come to a head: the unicorn Findhorn enters the mundane world, is mortally wounded by Elidor's foes, and sings the song that restores Elidor to its former glory.
And dies.
Garner has called this novel the 'anti-Narnia', and I think I see what he means. The Watsons feel more rooted in reality than the Pevensies. Mr and Mrs Watson -- very present parents -- aspire to be middle class, with their nice house in 'a decent area' and their hopes of making friends with the Brodies, whose children go to boarding school. Instead of embracing the magic, the Watson children (except Roland) try to deny it. The Treasures are too much trouble, too disruptive to the real world, too dangerous. (Too frightening.) They intrude on the real world of school and children's parties and bike rides in a way that Narnia never could. “We didn’t volunteer for this.” ... “We can’t hide them, and we can’t fight for them.”
There is no joyous resurrection here, no cheerful animal friends, no playing dress-up as kings and queens. Elidor is, if anything, bleaker than the slums of Manchester, and we only see impressionist glimpses of golden towers on dark hills. Apart from Malebron (possibly a king) and the warriors who come through to the real world, Elidor is as unpeopled as the razed slumland. When Findhorn's sacrifice '[sweeps] the land with colour', the focus remains on the real world, the broken windows of a slum, the distraught children, their refusal of the golden promise.
Brilliant, haunting, bleak. That last line: "The song faded. The children were alone with the broken windows of a slum."
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