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A review by rainweaver13
Elidor by Alan Garner
3.0
A sweet and mildly scary children's fantasy story. If I'd read this when I was a child, back in the '60s, I'd have adored it. It has everything: spooky ruins, mysterious passages to other worlds, a dark and growing evil, castles in ruins, a golden prince who needs help from four ordinary British children, treasures, chases, otherworldly attacks on this world, excitement ... and a unicorn.
Hey, I read it at 61 and still enjoyed it, although it was literally nothing new and took less than a day to read. It's very British and dated in the "modern" part of the story (set not many years after the Blitz), which might prove a barrier to children today.
But about that "literally nothing new," Garner was among a small number of people who dared to write in a fantasy setting in the '60s. "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" had begun to enjoy a mild spurt of popularity among young people at that time. (I suspect it was due to mellow hobbits smoking weed and loving mushrooms, but hey, whatever it take to get people into a book. ;) ) Anyway, things that might be read by contemporary readers as trite and overdone were, in fact, part of a bold and new genre - modern fantasy. As unbelievable as it may seem now, in the beginning fantasy was dismissed and (sometimes, by some snoots) denigrated as nothing but fairy tales and not fit reading for adults. Writers like George MacDonald (widely considered the father of modern fantasy) had included "fantastical" elements in their writings as early as the 1800s. But as late as the publication of "The Hobbit" in the late 1930s, such writings were still largely dismissed as "fairy tales" and only for children or non-serious adults.
(Clearly these folks had never read any real fairy or folk tales, which can be harrowing and [do I dare?] grim.)
Anyway, to the contemporary reader, "Elidor" will probably seem simplistic and trite, but those of us who love modern fantasy owe a debt of gratitude to those early writers of the '50s and '60s who dared to enter this world of pure imagination and helped breathe life into the fantasy genre, which is now pretty much everywhere and widely accepted.
Hey, I read it at 61 and still enjoyed it, although it was literally nothing new and took less than a day to read. It's very British and dated in the "modern" part of the story (set not many years after the Blitz), which might prove a barrier to children today.
But about that "literally nothing new," Garner was among a small number of people who dared to write in a fantasy setting in the '60s. "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" had begun to enjoy a mild spurt of popularity among young people at that time. (I suspect it was due to mellow hobbits smoking weed and loving mushrooms, but hey, whatever it take to get people into a book. ;) ) Anyway, things that might be read by contemporary readers as trite and overdone were, in fact, part of a bold and new genre - modern fantasy. As unbelievable as it may seem now, in the beginning fantasy was dismissed and (sometimes, by some snoots) denigrated as nothing but fairy tales and not fit reading for adults. Writers like George MacDonald (widely considered the father of modern fantasy) had included "fantastical" elements in their writings as early as the 1800s. But as late as the publication of "The Hobbit" in the late 1930s, such writings were still largely dismissed as "fairy tales" and only for children or non-serious adults.
(Clearly these folks had never read any real fairy or folk tales, which can be harrowing and [do I dare?] grim.)
Anyway, to the contemporary reader, "Elidor" will probably seem simplistic and trite, but those of us who love modern fantasy owe a debt of gratitude to those early writers of the '50s and '60s who dared to enter this world of pure imagination and helped breathe life into the fantasy genre, which is now pretty much everywhere and widely accepted.