Exile and the Kingdom

Alan Garner - Elidor

It would be too staid a thing - too bourgeois and dusty - to refer to Alan Garner as a ‘national treasure.’ There is a spikiness to his writing - an ‘archetypal edge’, you might say - which resists back-slapping and vacuous forms of self-congratulation. Garner is 87 now. He may yet become ‘Sir Alan Garner’, but he will always stand at one remove from the mainstream currents of late-twentieth and early-twenty first century British fiction. Garner will understand this. This is where the prophet and the visionary have always stood, and this sense of displacement has been a constant thread throughout his work. It is there at the beginning of the book we will look at in this essay, Elidor (1965):

Roland stood a few yards away, turning the handles of the street map. (p.6) ¹

So, right from the start, Roland, the youngest of the Watson children, is differentiated from his brothers, Nicholas and David, and sister, Helen. He is standing apart from the group, doing his own thing, open to the promptings of supra (or infra) mundane forces in ways which they are not.

Elidor is set in Manchester in the early-1960s. Manchester, for what it is worth, is my home town - the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the self-styled ‘world’s first modern city.’ Manchester has many qualities, but it does not give itself naturally or easily to those with a visionary or contemplative temperament. In this respect, it serves as a proxy for modernity as a whole. The visionary has no place in the modern world. He is an exile here - a refugee - banished from his Kingdom, which ‘is not of this world.’² As noted in my previous essay, all of us who live through these times are exiles from the Garden, from truth, beauty and goodness, and the Grand Tradition that embodies and reflects these qualities. Some people feel this loss more acutely than others. For those of a visionary temperament, this can be especially acute. Where do you go with such a gift? Where in this hard-edged world do you take the capacity to see beyond and through the screen of surface appearances? Who cares? Who notices? Or, as they say in Manchester, ‘Who gives a toss?’

There are no easy answers and this makes life a potentially lonely business for individuals like Roland. You long for a meeting of minds, an encounter with a kindred spirit, someone on the same wavelength, someone who understands and 'gets' you. Roland meets such a figure in the form of Malebron, King of Elidor, who calls the children out of Manchester and into his own world to retrieve his kingdom’s four captured Treasures - a spear, a sword, a stone, and a bowl. Roland and Malebron have a symbiotic relationship. Like calls unto like. Malebron sees something in Roland that his parents and siblings do not. He gives him a mission and a purpose, one that only he can fulfil:

Roland thought of the gravel against his cheek. This is true: now: I’m here. And only I can do it. He says so. He says I can bring it all back. Roland Watson, Fog Lane, Manchester 20. What about that? Now what about that?

‘How do you know I can?’ said Roland.

‘I have watched you prove your strength,’ said Malebron. ‘Without that strength you would not have lived to stand here at the heart of darkness.’

‘Here?’ said Roland.’It’s just a hill.’

‘It is the Mound of Vandwy,’ said Malebron. ‘Night’s dungeon in Elidor. It has tried to destroy you. If you had not been strong you would never have left the stone circle. But you were strong, and I had to watch you prove your strength … You are to save these Treasures. Only you can save them.’ (pp.36-37)

Roland's age is not specified in the text but he seems to be about ten or eleven. His siblings and parents regard him as a highly sensitive and over-imaginative child. Nicholas, Roland's eldest brother, reminds him of this in the first chapter:

'Oh, come off it, Roland,’ said Nicholas. 'You're always imagining things.’ (p.13)

His mother joins in later in the book:

‘You mustn't let your imagation run away with you. You're too highly strung, that's your trouble. You'll make yourself ill if you're not careful.’ (p.100)

What is perceived as weakness at home, however, becomes a force to be reckoned with in Elidor. Through the power of his imagination, Roland builds a door in his mind, through which he is able to enter the Mound of Vandwy and rescue the Treasures as well as his brothers and sister who have failed where he succeeds.

Elidor begins and ends in a warren of smashed-up streets just north of the city centre. It is an unpropitious mise-en-scène, but it is here that the Treasures find their way into our world and it is here that they are returned. It is a gateway and a portal - this wasteland of bomb damage and slum clearance, pockmarked with the jagged, skeletal ruins of streets and houses where people lived and communities once thrived:

He twisted down alleyways, running blindly, through cross-roads, over bombed sites and along the streets again … The ruins hemmed him in. Doors and windows stared at him: abandoned furniture crouched among the rubble. A tin can rattled down a pile of bricks in the shadow of a building. (pp.156-157)

Malebron, disguised as a blind fiddler, draws the children into his world. Once Roland has saved the Treasures, he commissions them to take them back to Manchester where they will be safe, he believes, from the enemies of Elidor. These powers have a long arm, however, and they find a way of breaking through, compelling the Watsons to return to the wasteland and find a way of giving the Treasures back to Malebron.

Nicholas, David, Roland and Helen guard the Treasures for a year before the pressure becomes too great and the men of Elidor burst through into the suburbs. During this time the facticity of Elidor diminishes in the minds of Roland’s siblings, but not for him. Roland never forgets, never falls asleep, as it were, on the job. He calls them to attention like an Old Testament prophet urging the people back to the burning, primary reality of the one true God:

‘I’ve never liked the porch,’ said Roland. ‘I used it to open the Mound, and ever since it’s felt wrong.’

‘What?’ said David. ‘Open what?’

‘The Mound,’ said Roland. ‘In Elidor.’

‘Oh, that,’ said David.

‘What do you mean, “Oh, that”?’ said Roland. ‘Elidor! Elidor! Elidor! Have you forgotten?’

‘O.K,’ said David. ‘We don’t want the whole road to hear.’

‘Elidor,’ said Roland. ‘So why can’t we talk about it? You and Nick always change the subject.’

‘I think you ought to cool down a bit on this Elidor business,’ said David.

‘You’re mad!’ said Roland. (pp.94-95)

Roland is correct about the factual truth of Elidor and his brothers and sister deceive themselves in the way they pretend that nothing happened. Yet Roland’s understanding is far from objective and detached. His relationship to Elidor is deeply subjective and personal. He pours his whole being into it. He wants and needs it to be true in a way that the others do not.

Roland can be compared in this respect to Lucy Pevensie in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, the youngest of four children, repaid for the gift of spiritual insight with scepticism and mockery from their supposed nearest and dearest. Both children are Cassandra figures in this sense. In Roland’s case, however, we detect a sharper note of frustration and borderline despair. This is a soul in torment, a victim of what Martin Heidegger called Geworfenheit - being flung without apparent rhyme or reason into a spiritual and cultural climate which is profoundly alien to one’s nature and essence.

Chapter Six, The Lay of the Starved Fool, lasers in on this theme. It is the cornerstone of Elidor, the root and source, in my view, of the keen-edged air of mystery which pervades the book. I would argue as well that it is potentially the most revealing and significant chapter in Garner’s whole oeuvre. Malebron and the children are sitting on a ridge not far from the Mound after the reclamation of the Treasures. Malebron unwraps a package in front of them. It is a book …

Roland was looking at a page of script written in a language that was unknown to him. And at the top of the page was a picture of himself, with Helen, Nicholas, and David by his side … They stood close together, cradling the Treasures in their arms, their heads tilted to one side, a blank expression on their faces, their toes pointing downwards. Next to them was a round dolmen in its side, and by it another figure, smaller than the children: Malebron. His arms were spread wide, and he held the fiddle in one hand and the book in the other … ’ (p.48)

It is a book of prophecies, ‘written so long ago,’ says Malebron, ‘that we have only legend to tell us about it.’ He goes on:

‘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. And he became so famous that he was taken into the king’s household, where he swore that he would starve among plenty, and so it happened: for he was locked in a pantry, and died there.

‘However it was, his prophecies were written in this book, which is called The Lay of the Starved Fool.

‘Through the years it has been read only for its nonsense. But when the prophecies started to be fulfilled, when the first darkness crept into Elidor, I saw in The Lay of the Starved Fool not nonsense, but the confused fragments of a dream: a dream that no sane man could bear to dream: a waking memory of what was to be.’ (p.49)

Who is this starved fool really? He is Roland, for sure, but also, I would say, Alan Garner himself. He is a she as well - Cassandra, Antigone, Joan of Arc, and more. He is Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the prophets, he is Christ before Pilate, he is a native of Paradise nailed to the cross of the material world. He is the visionary and contemplative spirit, the lover and devotee of Tradition, pinned down and trapped in the grey zone of René Guénon’s ‘reign of quantity’, starving spiritually in the midst of material ‘plenty’.

Because Roland feels out of place in the modern world, because it doesn’t speak to him or answer his deepest need, he clings onto Elidor like a life raft. There is another world, after all, and where he is under-appreciated in England, his potential is recognised and acted upon in Elidor. In Neil Philip’s study, A Fine Anger (1981), Garner remarks that Roland mistakes Elidor for the true, super-sensible, Platonic heaven of the archetypes. He mixes up his levels. Elidor is a parallel world to this one, Garner continues. It is not a higher world. Ultimately, it is just another strand of Plato’s cave. ³

This undoubtedly rings true, but there seems to be an implication in what Garner is saying here that once the Treasures are back in Elidor then Malebron will have no further use for Roland and will never contact him again, leaving him all alone to bear the burden of his memory and experience in an uncomprehending, doggedly materialistic world. I have often wondered if this would inevitably be the case. Maybe there is an equivalent in Elidor of Israel’s ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ award for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Or maybe not. Malebron does strike one in the book as something of a hard-nosed pragmatist, a student of Realpolitik with the tunnel-vision and lack of sentiment required to pull a country back from the brink of extinction. Either way, Roland is vulnerable and exposed and entirely dependent, it seems, for his sanity and well-being, on the goodwill of this moody and intense personage who has his seat of power in a completely different (albeit not unrelated) world.

How did things end up this way? Is there anything Roland could have done differently or better? Is there anything he lacks? Allowing, of course, for his extreme youth, my sense is that he is short of two key elements, which otherwise would have allowed him to flourish - a sense of Self and a sense of God. The two go together. To believe in yourself, to have a strong sense of self - this is what gives the individual the ballast to follow his or her own path in life and not to be blown around by every passing fad or to be bullied and browbeaten by louder, more strident voices.

This is just a base camp though. We need to take the analysis deeper and further. We need to be bold and imaginative in our conception of the Self and our mission and vocation in this world. This is more than the strength required to keep negative influences at bay. This is what plugs us into the Divine. It baptises us with fire and imagination and the capacity to live prophetically-intense, epoch-defining lives. It lifts us out of passivity and blesses us with agency, direction and purpose - inner sovereignty, in short. We are victims no more, but victors.

We chose, on some level, to be born and live and have our being in this specific time and place. That is what we have to acknowledge and embrace. Either we were handed a task by God, as Aslan commands Jill to ‘remember the signs’ in The Silver Chair, or we set ourselves our own task and volunteered to come. To put it crudely, we are here to win. We are called to triumph over the world of liquid modernity, to slay it, even, and to set the agenda for the age to come, not to suffer and waste away under its battered, shop-worn aegis. Julius Evola nails it down concisely at the end of Ride the Tiger, a book written (1961) around the time that Elidor is set and aimed specifically at men and women who feel profoundly out of place in these anti-Traditional times:

If one can allow one's mind to dwell οn a bold hypothesis - which could also be an act οί faith in a higher sense - once the idea of Geworfenheit is rejected, once it is conceived that living here and now in this world has a sense, because it is always the effect of a choice and a will, one might even believe that one's own realisation of the possibilities Ι have indicated - far more concealed and less imaginable than other situations that might be more desirable from the merely human point of view, from the point of view of the ‘person’ - is the ultimate rationale and significance of a choice made by a ‘being’ that wanted to measure itself against a difficult challenge: that of living of a world contrary to that consistent with its nature, that is, contrary to the world of Tradition. ⁴

Allied to this is faith in the Transcendent Other - the vertical dimension that pulls us upwards. Christ, in this respect, is the Telos, the goal, the Alpha and the Omega, the ultimate reference point. He knows what this world is like. He made it, He entered into it, He lived, died and rose in it. To connect and align the individual Self to the Self of Christ - which is cosmic and personal at the same time - is to give us the solidity and the inspiration that we need to steer clear of tricks and traps, keep our eyes on what and who is essential, and carry out our pre-ordained mission to its full completion.

Easier said than done, perhaps, especially in today’s climate, but this, for me, is what Roland is missing, and the absence of both Self and God makes him needy and vulnerable. He would have been better off if he had lived a few years earlier and joined the Company that Elwin Ransom, the Pendragon, gathers around him in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945). This strong, luminous figure would have seen and recognised Roland for what and who he is straightaway. He would have taken him onboard and given him everything that he needed and desired and far more besides - a mission that would bear rich fruit both in this world and in eternity.

Ecco Homo - Behold the Man - and in Ransom we see Man as he really is - as he was, as he should be now, and as he one day will become again - Man as he was originally created: Steward and Guardian and Vicegerent of the Lord. Ransom has a deep-rooted, hard-earned sense of Self and an active, dynamic relationship with the Divine. The King, when he returns to the West, will look, I am sure, something very much like this. Ransom is not ambiguous, like Malebron. He is unashamedly, unabashedly good. He revels in goodness, which for him is power and strength and regal majesty. He is a forerunner, a precursor, a wielder of the secret fire, a herald and an exemplar of the Great Monarch to come. He takes his stand in the bleak heart of modernity and smashes the whole dismal simulacra to pieces, as St. Michael flung Satan down into Hell. He lets the light come flooding back, and that, more than anything else is what we need and cry out for right now in 2022, and so it is to Ransom and his Company that we will turn our attention to next.

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1. Alan Garner, Elidor (Puffin Books, 1967). All extracts are taken from this edition. Illustrations by Charles Keeping, except for the Russian front cover at the top of the page.

2. John 18:36

3. Neil Philip, A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction the the Work of Alan Garner (Philemon Books, 1981), p.49.

4. Julius Evola, Ride The Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (Inner Traditions, 2003), p.227.