"The Moon of Gomrath" by Alan Garner

This is the sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, in which Colin and Susan, with the assistance of a couple of dwarfs, helped magician Cadellin find the lost Weirdstone, fighting off the forces of wickedness led by evil witch The Morrigan. 

The Moon of Gomrath finds the two again fighting the Morrigan, this time with the aid of Susan's magical bracelet, another dwarf and a troop of elves. In the course of their adventures they light a fire on the Beacon on the eve of the Moon of Gomrath, "one of the four nights of the year when Time and Forever mingle" (Ch 11). This conjures up The Wild Hunt, with Herne the Hunter at their head, and assorted aspects of Old Magic. 

As always, whenever all seems lost a dwarf or an elf or The Wild Hunt or another piece of magic come to the aid of the children: the book, like its predecessor, solves all problems with such a deus ex machina. It makes a cracking read and the battle near the end is superbly told. But even that, in the context of the plot, is futile and meaningless; one can understand the frustration of the dying elves.

There are times when the author writes prose at least as magical as any of the spells cast:

• "voices that were like an ache and a desolation of the soul." (Ch 14)
• "It was a wind that would take hair from a horse, and moor-grass from the ground: it would take heather from the hill, and willow from the root: it would take the limpet from the crag, and the eagle from its young: and it came over the gritstone peaks, howling and raging, in blazing sparks of fire." (Ch 14)

Magical moments:

• "The world of Magic that lies as near and unknown to us as the back part of a shadow." (Ch 2)
• "I thought it was time for me to take my legs along with me." (Ch 4)
• "Who now brings fire to the mound at the Eve of Gomrath?" (Ch 9) This question, awakening the Hunt, at near enough the centre of the story, is a phrase that I can remember from when I first read this book, aged about ten, in the Puffin edition priced 3/6d that I still have.
• "We shall have to act quickly, or wide numbers will go to sleep with light in their eyes, and only the raven will find profit." (Ch 10)

It may seem strange to modern sensibilities that a book written for children, starring two pre-teens, has so much slaughter in it. The death of a friend is traumatic and much mourned, but the death of scores of goblins and wildcats and others is reckoned as no more than notches on the swords. There is a limit. When Colin suggests the use of guns the response from the efficient killer that is the chief dwarf is: "You may look here, and find us at the slaughter, but we know the cost of each death, since we see the eyes of those we send to darkness, and the blood on our hands, and each killing is the first for us.I tell you, life is true then, and its worth is clear. But to kill at a distance is not to know, and that is man's destruction." (Ch 18) A strange sentiment for the author, an ex-lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, perhaps. But even with this proviso, even with the elf-leader bitterly counting the cost to his folk for saving a single human boy from captivity ("One life to save a man"; Ch 17), much of the book seems to celebrate killing.

Nevertheless, this remains a book from which I can quote when more than fifty years have lapsed. It's hugely strong narrative arc and the brilliance of its descriptions carried me along with the story then, as they do now. And if my adult self finds it poorly plotted it still impresses with the beauty of its prose.

October 2020; 168 pages

Garner is author of a number of novels, mostly aimed at children, in which ancient legends and magical worlds impact upon everyday life:

• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and the distinctively different concluding part to the 'trilogy', Boneland.
• Elidor, a Narnia-style children's fantasy
• The utterly brilliant Owl Service (aimed at young adults)
• Red Shift, also aimed at young adults and perhaps the darkest of Garner's novels. A line in Elidor - "The legend says that there was once a ploughboy in Elidor: an idiot, given to fits. But in his fit he spoke clearly, and was thought to prophesy." (C 6) - seems to be a link with one of the characters in Red Shift.
• The definitively adult Thursbitch
• The hugely allusive Treacle Walker

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" by Alan Garner

Colin and Susan go to stay for six months at a farm on Alderley Edge with a Cheshire farmer called Gowther Mossock and his wife, who used to be the children's nurse. The book was written in the 1960s, so the middle-classness is rather taken for granted. Susan's 'tear stone' turns out to be the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, stolen from a nearby cave where wizard Cadellin keeps watch as one hundred and forty knights lie sleeping, to be awoken "when England shall be in direst peril". Tolkien-esque adventures ensue with friendly but sword-wielding dwarfs, witches and warlocks, elves and troll-spawn, and all the bestiary of fantasy.

Garner borrows heavily from Norse mythology. The place where the arch-fiend dwells is called Ragnarok, the Norse Gotterdammerung; the goblins are called svarts (in this magic white represents good and black bad), the chief witch is the Morrigan, from Irish legend (she casts spells in Latin, like Harry Potter), the baddies control the weather, bringing fimbulwinter, which in Norse myth is the winter that destroys all life on Earth as an immediate precedent to Ragnarok; Managarm is the wolf that chases the moon.

In common with books of that era, it is allowed a slow start. Recognition that Susan's 'tear' is the Weirdstone doesn't happen until the 25% mark; it is almost instantly taken from them. There are no moral ambiguities although the dwarfs are experienced, efficient and ruthless killers who boast to one another about how many they have killed. There is little scope for character development. Perhaps more seriously, there is little opportunity for the heroes to display strengths other than endurance. Whenever the children are faced with a challenge they are aided by yet another magical helper who appears from nowhere, such that the deus ex machina is almost a leitmotif. It is only at the end that triumph and disaster become imposters, and for that the children are bystanders and witnesses. 

What lifts the book beyond the ordinary is the two journeys that the children, with accompanying dwarfs, make: one through mine shafts and tunnels, fleeing from goblins, and one through the surface landscape. In both cases minute attention is paid to descriptive detail. The author must know ar first hand what it is like to wriggle through tunnels little bigger than yourself, sometimes flooded, and to climb down rock faces. He must know every rock of the landscape he describes: "Any movement would have set the leaves dancing at the end of their snake-like branches. It was as though they were dangling in a snarl of burglar alarms." (Ch 16) In this book the hills and forests and rocks and caves are characters more vividly described than the humans.

Some great moments:

• "Owls ... fly like drunken elves by day." (Ch 7)
• "Men thought to drain that land and live there, but the spirit of the place entered them, and their house were built drab, and desolate, and without cheer; and all around the bog still sprawls, from out the drear lake come soulless thoughts and drift into the hearts of the people." (Ch 7)
• "He did not like witch-magic: it relied too much on clumsy nature spirits and the slow brewing of hate. He preferred the lightning stroke of fear and the dark powers of the mind." (Ch 9)
• "This crude magic had weight. It piled force on force, like a mounting wave, and overwhelmed its prey with the slow violence of an avalanche." (Ch 9)
• "The yellow walls were streaked with browns, blacks, reds, blues, and greens - veins of mineral that traced the turn of wind and wave upon a shore, twenty million years ago." (Ch 10)
• "They cried or laughed, each according to his nature, but the sound in all cases was the same." (Ch 14)
• "It had the tumulus's air of mystery; it was subtly different from the surrounding country; it knew more than the fields in which it had its roots." (Ch 17)

A fairly standard fantasy hero's adventure story, written for children, but lifted into excellence by the quality of the descriptive writing.

October 2020; 236 pages

Garner is author of a number of novels, mostly aimed at children, in which ancient legends and magical worlds impact upon everyday life:

• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and the distinctively different concluding part to the 'trilogy', Boneland.
• Elidor, a Narnia-style children's fantasy
• The utterly brilliant Owl Service (aimed at young adults)
• Red Shift, also aimed at young adults and perhaps the darkest of Garner's novels. A line in Elidor - "The legend says that there was once a ploughboy in Elidor: an idiot, given to fits. But in his fit he spoke clearly, and was thought to prophesy." (C 6) - seems to be a link with one of the characters in Red Shift.
• The definitively adult Thursbitch
• The hugely allusive Treacle Walker, perhaps Garner's masterpiece

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula Le Guin

This children's book is about a young boy, Ged aka Sparrowhawk, of unusual talents who grows up as the son of the smith on an island in an archipelago and is apprenticed to a wizard. Then he goes to the wizarding school on the Island of Roke. He is clever but he is full of pride and summons a spirit of the dead. This brings Ged's own shadow which then seeks to hunt him and to kill(?) him. It is the story of his quest to overcome this monster and right the wrong that he has done.

Classic hero quest. Classic fantasy. Wizards and peasants. OK. So its sounds a little bit Harry Potter. A little bit Star Wars. But it is clearly informed with the anthropological understanding of the author's father which gives it a reality; not a gritty reality, no grit, but a reality rooted in fertile soil.

And this book is written with such lyrical prose, like the sound of the waves on the sea, and with such perfect descriptions, that it has a beauty which far transcends any attempt to pigeonhole it. The sentences are long, with many clauses, but there are rhythmic and rounded and this seems to carry one through. The vocabulary is extensive, far beyond what one would normally expect for a children's book, and this of course excludes the neologisms invented within the context of this alien, faraway and enchanted world, but this adds to the magic. I was, from time to time, lulled by the insistence of the tides of the prose, and found myself nodding off, but most of the time the beauty of this work wrapped me in its spell.

"Nameless and naked he walked into the cold springs ... He crossed to the far bank, shuddering with cold but walking slow and erect as he should through that icy, living water." (p 22)
"There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say. Then he said it: 'But I haven't learned anything yet!' 'Because you haven't found out what I am teaching.'" (p 25)
"In a land where sorcerers come thick ... you may see a raincloud blundering slowly from side to side and place to place as one spell shunts it on to the next, till at last it is buffeted out over the sea where it can rain in peace." (p 26)
"It seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight." (p 46)
"Even foolery is dangerous ... in the hands of a fool." (p 57)
"No shadow came crawling through the moonlight seeking the rent through which it might clamber back into its own domain." (p 78)
"Go to bed; tired is stupid." (p 87)
"As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do." (p 89)
"past the wharves of Nesh, the rainy pastures of Dromgan, the malodorous oil-sheds of Geath..." ([p 115)
"Only shadow can fight shadow. Only darkness can defeat the dark." (p 142)
"He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun." (p 177)
"Before the springs of the open sea, beyond the source, behind the gates of daylight." (p 204)
"A man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life is therefore lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark." (p 216)
"Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life." (p 216)

Wonderful and wise but most of all beautifully written. January 2017, 218 pages

The tale of Sparrowhawk and Earthsea continues with:

• The Tombs of Atuan: spooky!
• The Farthest Shore: the prince and the archmage
• Tehanu: retirement?