Illustrated by Charles Keeping
For J. H.
“Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came”
King Lear act iii, sc 4
CONTENTS
6. The Lay of the Starved Fool
By Jonathan Stroud
How old was I? About ten. I took an Alan Garner book (it was The Weirdstone of Brisingamen), flopped into a chair and opened it up. And that was that. The Sunday afternoon grew old; my family moved about me, talking loudly, making the tea, calling questions in my ear – their sounds were muted, far away. Alan Garner’s magic had me captured: I sat like a stone in the midst of all the humdrum bustle of the house, walking with wizards, gazing on sleeping kings. The fantastic and the ordinary were overlaid upon each other – and I was trapped between the two.
In all Alan Garner’s work the mythic and the mundane collide, and Elidor is no exception. Odd things happen in everyday places and to everyday things, and the results are strange and sinister: an eye stares in through a letterbox – but the porch beyond is empty; the shadows of two men (who are not present) are seen in a suburban garden – hanging vertically in mid-air; all the electrical equipment in a house starts by itself, and continues to buzz and whirr even with the plugs pulled out… The characters in the story who experience these events find themselves just as trapped as I was in my reading, but they cannot close the book and set it down.
How does it all begin? Four children in mid-Twentieth Century Manchester find a doorway to another world. You might expect (having read other stories with such doors) that this is the beginning of a quest in which the other world is thoroughly explored, evil defeated and the heroes return home triumphant.
But it doesn’t work that way.
The land of Elidor is dying, almost dead. It is an empty, unpopulated waste and the children spend very little time there before returning home with four treasures that might one day help Elidor be reborn. And from that instant the power of those treasures and the threat of the enemies who seek to break through after them turn the family’s cottage into a border between worlds, and the pleasant adventure the reader might have anticipated becomes something much more desperate and defensive.
All borders are no-man’s-lands, where the known and unknown meet, safety and danger overlap, and meanings shift and blur. They are populated by fools, vagrants, tricksters and the tricked. And now, thanks to the children’s actions, their house is such a gate. The front door opens on to their street and on to a wilderness in Elidor – and it does so at one and the same time. And something nasty is seeking to get through…
How old am I now? Late thirties. And when I read Elidor again I realise that the wizardry that captured me a quarter of a century ago still holds me tight. Like all writers of my generation, I owe Alan Garner an unpayable debt. Novels like Elidor are themselves a boundary, set like standing stones between earlier tales of movement between worlds and recent books (so common now) that mingle magic with the day-to-day. But Elidor is more rigorous and less complacent than anything that came before or after. It brings the logic of myth to bear upon modern children’s fiction and does so without a shred of sentimentality. After forty years it is knife-sharp still, and not a word is wasted. It thrums with a wild, harsh beauty and a power that most fantasies can only dream of. Read on, and let it transfix you too.
Jonathan Stroud
Jonathan Stroud is the author of the world acclaimed Bartimaeus Trilogy. The three titles of the trilogy, published between 2003 and 2005, have been on the Bestseller lists in the UK, US, Japan and Germany. Formerly a children’s book editor, Jonathan has also written three previous novels for young adults. He lives in St Albans with his wife, a children’s book