Why would a child re-read Elidor?

Alan Garner’s Elidor is a radically vicious piece of work.

Garner has called it his anti-Narnian book. It is the portal fantasy, subjected to a truly hostile interrogation. Perhaps it was a necessary stepping stone that allowed him to dispense with the portal altogether in The Owl Service.

It’s not satire. Garner internalized a form he disliked and then instinctively made its assumptions fail one by one (when he can be bothered to narrativize them).

Narnia says: You thought you were an ordinary child, but another world has recognized your hidden importance.

Elidor says: Another world needs something done. You’re available. Hurry up already.

Revelation isn’t therapy. The universe isn’t arranged around the developmental needs of the protagonist.

Elidor is saved. The fantasy restoration is performed. But we’re told immediately that it “isn’t enough.” And the children are excluded from it, and effectively wounded by the experience. The door really does slam shut. The children are disposable, and the happy ending happens somewhere else, if at all. There is no Narnian reward waiting to reassure them that everything had a benevolent purpose. Even the restored Elidor is suspect.

The children are hunted, terrorized, deceived, used, disbelieved, and finally abandoned. A majestic unicorn is brutally slain.

Because Garner is so contemptuous of fantasy wish-fulfilment, he removes the things adults tend to imagine children require: lovable protagonists, comprehensible lore, benevolent mentors, moral reassurance, a desirable magical kingdom, rewards, a consolatory ending.

The book’s ruthlessness should baffle and dismay, according to convention. Yet the book is beloved by many children and has never been out of print.

The book wasn’t part of my childhood, and it encourages me to remember that we actually loved unpleasant imaginative worlds as kids. Garner has razed his world, but left behind things children really do adore: danger, secrecy, ruins, unexplained rules, forbidden spaces, frightening images, fucking around in condemned buildings, and the conviction that something enormous is happening which nobody will properly explain to you. The pleasure is in being given an intensely charged imaginative space and being allowed safely to revisit it. Elidor does all this without condescending.

Why would a child read this, and then read it again?

Best guess: You don’t return because you want to live in Elidor. You certainly don’t return because you want to spend time with whining Roland and his shit-ass siblings.

You return because the letterbox is still there.