Elidor is the third long novel by a writer much involved with the meeting of ancient world and new: this, if the least wildly poetic, is also the most skilful of the three. It is ambitiously imagined and worked out with a hard economical tension: the reader is kept—except for some dazzling visionary moments—well on the present-day human side of the arena. It is, you might say, a reanimation of the Roland/Burd-Ellen legend in a modern industrial setting. There are cracks where the fabric of time and place is weak—and a Manchester bomb-site with a ruined church, already on the eve of demolition, is such a one…. The climax, a peak after chapters of mounting terror, is brilliant. The threads of myth make a nice unravelling. (pp. 748-49)

[It] is clear that The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath have created for the author a reputation which will take a lot of keeping up. It will not be kept up by such hastily germinated hybrids as Elidor in which four Manchester children "break through" into a benighted kingdom in which, it seems, "light" can be restored only through their agency as the chosen. The individual incidents are exciting and stimulating but the balance of elements is less certain than before. One feels not only that the magic is too thinly and too meanly spread but that the humorous and domestic elements of real life are better reading on the whole than the magical. Perhaps Mr. Garner is reacting to reader and critic reaction of a kind not revealed to us; he would do better to go his own way. (p. 361)

[Like Garner's other books, Elidor] sets a conflict between a mythological good and evil against a contemporary background. Four Manchester children, exploring a half-demolished church, enter the strange world of Elidor. They bring back to Manchester four "treasures"—apparently mere rubbish—yet which must be kept safe if good is to defeat the evil ruling in Elidor.

Again, of course, one thinks of Tolkien. Yet here, unlike in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen or The Moon of Gomrath, the myths are the mere backbone of fantasy, enriching it, while the story is worked out economically in contemporary, even scientific terms. The result is Garner original as the earlier books for all their power are not, perhaps because the children there never seem quite vivid enough to balance the primeval fascinations of witches, warlocks and goblins.

Here are no witches; the terrors are more modern and subjective, some taking the shape of the children's half-conscious fears. Their struggle is partly to overcome these fears, and also, accepting their responsibilities, to face the implications of what is happening rather than to reject it as nightmarish hallucination, as all except the youngest, Roland, wish to do.

Tension mounts through quite ordinary things…. Fantasy and reality exactly balanced interweave logically and subtly.

The writing, moreover, has a bared even bleak precision, quite new it seems, forcefully though Mr. Garner wrote before. Each detail, ordinary or sinister, establishes atmosphere, background or character exactly. One reservation comes to mind as it does with Tolkien; that by contrast with the vitality of the evil, the good—golden towers and all—seems hazy, conventional, even self-indulgent. The solid contemporary reality may help a little here, but the reservation remains for all that.

Nevertheless Elidor is a remarkable book; intelligent, rich and terrifying. Too terrifying? Perhaps for the impressionable but worth ten of most prettier things.