Elidor

Elidor is Alan Garner's strange, cold little fantasy for 10 year olds, and it begins with four bored children and a street map in Manchester.

What happens

Nicholas, David, Helen and Roland have run out of money and do not want to go home, because home is another house move and newspapers on the floor. So they spin the index wheel on a public street map and pick a name at random. Thursday Street. Roland thinks it sounds funny and suggests they go and look at it.

The walk there is the part that stays with you. They cut behind the shops into loading bays that smell of rotten fruit. Then rows of houses with boarded windows and grass growing in the cobbles. Then no houses at all, just cobbles and lamp posts and fields of rubble.

Thursday Street is a salvaged nameplate balanced on a heap of bricks.

In the middle of the waste ground stands a black Victorian church with a demolition lorry parked outside and nobody working. The lorry engine is still warm. An old man is playing a fiddle on the corner under a broken lamp post.

Roland finds a football under the lorry and kicks it. It goes much further and much faster than he kicked it, straight through the church window.

Then his brothers and sister go in to fetch it. One at a time. And they do not come out.

What Roland walks into is Elidor, a country that is going dark, and a man called Malebron who has been waiting a very long time for exactly these four children. There are four Treasures to be carried out of a dying land, and an old book of prophecies that nobody took seriously until it started coming true.

Garner does not soften anything. The sentences are short and flat and he trusts your reader to keep up. Nobody explains the rules. You work them out at the same speed Roland does, and half of them are never explained at all.

Be warned that the unease is the point. Children going into a locked church one by one and not answering. The feeling of being watched from empty windows. A long climb up a sea cliff where Roland cannot look down. There is no blood in it, and it is far more unsettling than something with blood in it.

The back streets are also drawn the way a book of this age drew poor streets, with old women in sacking aprons and boys on the corner, and the children walk through frightened. It is worth a word afterwards.

For a child who found the usual magic doors a bit tidy and wants one that hurts, this is the book. It is not an easy read, and it sticks.

What to read next

If they want more of Garner, try The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. That one is set on a real hill called Alderley Edge and a lot of it happens underground.