In the world of children’s literature, Alan Garner is looked upon as a god. I remember reading Owl Service as a child and loving it. So I was excited when I found this lovely edition of Elidor with illustrations by Charles Keeping for two dollars in an op shop.

It’s short - really short at 160 pages. So there is really very little room for character development or lengthy descriptions of the landscape. Originally published in 1965 it harks from a time when a lot more was left to the reader’s imagination.

We meet the four siblings as they are preparing to move house. This is post-war Manchester, where war damaged homes were being demolished and families moved to new housing estates. As they wander the abandoned streets Roland finds a football and kicks it through the stained glass window of an abandoned church. Haunting music lures them inside, where Roland finds himself transported to another world, where he meets Malebron.

If the above sounds sketchy, it’s because the book doesn’t really tell you much more. Roland finds his siblings in Elidor and they are given four treasures to protect and somehow save Elidor from an unnamed evil. They return to Manchester with the treasures, with no real course of action ahead. The treasures seem to generate a static electrical force of some sort, that plays havoc with the family television (twenty first children will be amazed by how difficult it was to get a television working ‘back in the day’) and other electrical appliances.

The book has some spooky moments, particularly when some ‘shadows’ appear to have followed them back from Elidor to Manchester in search of the treasures. However, for twenty-first century kids, this book will be too brief, with little explanation of why the children were given this task, and the resolution is so abrupt I thought I was missing some final pages!

Many children’s classics stand the test of time, but I am afraid that Elidor is not one of them.

Oh my lord, how to review this book? I’ll give it my best shot!

Did I understand this novel? Not really, but I approached it as I approach poetry, where I often don’t understand all the references and nuances, but I do grasp the atmosphere created by the writing. Treacle Walker took me back to a time when I would get totally lost and immersed in a book - the ‘real’ world disappearing. Rather than grasping to understand all, I went with the flow and when I finished the book (it’s very short, only 152 pages) I had to shake my head, blink a few times, and return to my mundane world. I can best describe it as a fusion of myth, magic and mystery.

Here are two quotes that give you an idea of the beautiful music (and humour) that is Garner’s prose.

It was a tune with wings, trampling things, tightened strings, boggarts and bogles and brags on their feet; the man in the oak, sickness and fever, that set in long, lasting sleep the whole great world with the sweetness of sound the bone did play.

Treacle Walker? Treacle Walker? Me know that pickthank psychopomp? I know him, so I do. I know him. Him with his pots for rags and his bag and his bone and his doddering nag and nookshotten cart and catchpenny oddments. Treacle Walker? I’d not trust that one’s arse with a fart