Well, I remember loving Elidor and still admire it, in part because reading it, in contrast to some of Garner other work, does not make you feel as though you're being hit over the head with a compendium of folklore. He is disgraced beyond rescue, but William Mayne used to handle such material with a lighter touch - see his treatment of the legend of the Richmond drummer boy in Earthfasts for an example.
Mars-Jones's central complaint about Elidor is that, having invited comparisons with C.S. Lewis by packing four children off to a magic kingdom, he treats the story differently in every way:
It turns out that in their role as (exiled) champions of Elidor they must wield magical implements known as the Treasures, but these are issued with little ceremony. C.S. Lewis would have taken at least thirty pages to unite the children with the Treasures; Tolkien might have taken three hundred. In Elidor there’s a gap of only three pages between the news that the Treasures exist and the children acquiring them. It’s not much of a quest – barely a trip to the toy shop.
It's not a quest at all, and it's not a trip to a toy shop either. There is a strong sense that the children are being used: given the Treasures and then bundled back into their own world to face danger when other beings from Elidor try to force their way in.
What Garner does is force the reader to question the deepest assumptions of this sort of story.1 Did the children really visit Elidor or just imagine it? Is Malebron, the only being they meet there, as good as they found it natural to assume?
C.S. Lewis has his moments - I loved the scene early in Prince Caspian where the boy is told that the legends about a golden age of Narnia and talking animals are all true, and I loved reading the scene from The Magician's Nephew where Jadis drives a London cab like a chariot. But that latter scene, like much that is good in the book, is a pastiche of Edith Nesbit.
So when Mars-Jones commends Lewis to Garner as someone to study on how to write about relationships between brothers and sisters, you feel he has missed the mark. It would be more economical to send him straight to Nesbit.
But then I have always been puzzled by the reverence with which Lewis is treated as a children's writer and, in America in particular, as a religious thinker. Whatever is good about the Narnia books is progressively throttled by allegory until we arrive at the final book in the series, The Last Battle, which is positively unpleasant to read.
While his religious thought, and treatment of the Problem of Evil in particular, combine the faux mateyness that George Orwell complained of, with a near thuggishness. It's like reading theology written by Kenneth More.
Notes
- Having just written this, I came across an essay on Tyger Tale called The Anti-Narnia: Elidor by Alan Garner.
Garner gives us Colin and Susan in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Lewis: read, learn and inwardly reflect!
ReplyDeleteI loved Elidor, which I read not long after publication, thanks to an enlightened English teacher who gave it to us as a class reader. It was especially interesting as the bombsite which is the entrance to Elidor was a place I knew, and regularly saw from the bus. I never got into Narnia, and never understood why Lewis had such a high reputation.
ReplyDeleteIn a similar vein to Alan Garner is Penelope Lively's The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971), including both what would come to be called 'folk horror', and an interest in social inequality. There is a good article on it by Francis Young, at https://drfrancisyoung.com/2023/11/24/folklore-in-penelope-livelys-the-wild-hunt-of-hagworthy/
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