In a way, the book feels like it’s in dialogue with the Narnia series - Elidor’s main character, Roland, insists on the importance of the magic world, as the Pevensie children insist on the importance of Narnia, but Roland’s brother and sister are less sure than he, even though they’ve had much the same experience as him. It adds an unsettling layer to the whole novel. As you read the story you can’t help but think that the alleged forces of good are manipulating the children for their own purposes. In fact, the magic itself feels untrustworthy. The children’s story itself ends abruptly there’s no denouement, and there’s a sense in which, having done their part, they have nothing else to do with magic. The battle the children have become involved in is never really defined, and we never really learn how it works out.
Mostly, though, the story works because it’s content to work through suggestion to be meaningfully reticent. It stands out partly because the early, more fantastic, parts of the book have some very distinct images, original and oddly potent. A group of children wander into a deserted church, and cross over into a primal fantasyland they become guardians of four treasures, which they then have to guard in the real world against agents of evil. I was impressed.Įlidor, the first book in the omnibus, was actually written after the other two stories. Since I’d picked up an omnibus collection of three of Garner’s books - Brisingamen, Gomrath, and the non-related Elidor - the announcement prompted me to sit down and take another look at Garner’s work. I had vague memories of reading Brisingamen when I was very young. Not that praise from adults is lacking the fiftieth-anniversary republication of Brisingamen contained testimonials from Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and Susan Cooper. He’s said that he’s never written specifically for children, but for whatever reason children seem to respond more directly to his work than adults. In the interim, Garner’s published fairy tale collections and several non-fantasy novels. The first two books in the series came out in the early 1960s, so this really has been some time in coming.
Why did it take so long for Boneland to gestate? All I can say is that it took as long as it took.” The links to the book-not-written had become subliminal cliffhangers. There are nuggets in the text that hint of unfinished business. The lack of the third book, I discovered, gave the readers of the first two a sense of urgency.
His next novel, Boneland, to be published this August, will complete the trilogy he’d always envisioned. In mid-March the news emerged that writer Alan Garner was returning to the storylines of his first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath.
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