A Surprisingly Good Read by Paul May

In 1965 the Carnegie was won by a book which I don't think is much read today, The Grange at High Force by Philip Turner. All I knew about the book before I read it was that many people thought Alan Garner's Elidor should have won the Carnegie that year. Aidan Chambers in particular was damning in his criticism of Turner's book and made the contrast between it and Elidor the focus of his criticism of the Carnegie committee. Here's what he said:

"The Grange at High Force is typical of the kind of book, in story, writing and production, which, over the last ten years, has come to be considered, it seems, by 'discriminating readers' among adults, the epitome of good-quality children's literature. It is intellectual, sophisticated, over-written, unremarkable for anything in the slightest questionable in thought, word or deed. It reflects an adult's rather sentimental view of childhood. It is passionless, cautious in its opinion, conservative in its theme and treatment. It is one of the 'well-produced books of good quality' that gives a glow of satisfaction when, in their sparkling plastic covers, they line the library shelves, and the publishers' offices. There in the main they stay. In a way one is grateful they do. Yet what a waste of time and effort; and what an encouragement to reluctance."

Reader, I loved it!

Cover illustration by Papas

Now, I should add that on his website Aidan Chambers says that he doesn't now agree with all the opinions expressed in his book, which was published more than 50 years ago. Whether he still agrees with this opinion I don't know. Having read his criticisms I was prepared for a bit of a slog, but Chambers neglects to mention Turner's gift for creating interesting and sympathetic characters, his evocative use of landscape and his talent for writing lively and entertaining action sequences. The cast of characters is mainly male, but in Mrs Cadell-Twitten, the elderly and slightly demented (in a clinical sense) inhabitant of Bird Cottage, Turner has created something wonderful. The old lady actually seems rather modern in her passion for wild-life conservation (and not at all like the bird-loving spinsters who Richmal Crompton likes to mock in the William books). The boys rescue her at the climax of the story when she is cut off in her freezing cottage without food or heat in the middle of a blizzard. I found these scenes particularly touching and sensitive.

There are other great characters, too - a retired Admiral and his servant, Guns, who are tremendously competent at all things mechanical and supremely unconcerned about convention and the law. I really enjoyed the scene where the Admiral attempts to order the ingredients for making a large quantity of gunpowder from the local chemist and I loved the emphasis in the book on making things. David's father is a carpenter whose business is threatened by mass-produced furniture, and as a long-time cyclist and bike-tinkerer myself I just loved Peter's bike, the Yellow Peril. '...the dashboard . . .would not have disgraced an airliner. There was, of course, a speedometer, and a mileometer. There was also an altimeter out of a crashed German aircraft . . .There was a small ship's compass . . . a clock converted from a cheap watch, two rear-view mirrors and an electric klaxon horn operated by a battery and a push button on the handle-bars.'

Peter was ahead of his time. Most of that stuff now is in the Garmin that sits on my handlebars. 

Cover illustration by Charles Keeping

The Carnegie panel's scoring for 1965 can be found in Keith Barker's history of the Carnegie, In the Realms of Gold. Books were scored out of 10 for Plot, Characterisation, Style, and Format, and it doesn't surprise me to learn that the judges gave The Grange at High Force 8 for characterisation and Elidor only 5. In fact The Grange at High Force was ahead of Elidor in all categories except format. There were rumours that Elidor lost because of judges disliking the Charles Keeping illustrations, but this is clearly not true. It would be understandable however if they had marked The Grange at High Force down because of its illustrations by Papas, which often veer into caricature.

Illustration by Papas from
The Grange at High Force

Illustration by Charles Keeping
from Elidor

In any case, there's plenty of room for both kinds of book, and both are good in their own way, though I think it was a bit much for Chambers to criticise The Grange at High Force for being 'intellectual and sophisticated'. That, surely, is Elidor. And if you doubt me have a read of Neil Philip's essay on the book in A Fine Anger. My feeling is the same as that of the Carnegie judges: the characters in Elidor never really come to life, and the minor characters, especially Mum and Dad, are slight and unconvincing, but this shouldn't surprise anyone because, in Garner's novels, characters often seem to be trapped by events which are beyond their control. Ursula Le Guin dissected this aspect of Garner's work beautifully in her review of his most recent novel, Boneland.

"Alderley Edge is the scene of a timeless ritual that must be re-enacted over and over by ignorant and ephemeral mortals. Personal tragedy and redemption are subsumed in the cosmic vision.

No wonder that the people of his story are less characters than masks, types, archetypes. But as imaginative literature reclaims the territories forbidden it by realism, and moves back from Elfland towards the outskirts of Manchester, it treads on risky ground. Readers looking for more than mere adventure expect characters whose behaviour and reactions are humanly comprehensible." (The Guardian 29/8/2012)

It may seem a stretch to relate these remarks to Elidor, but Garner nearly always uses myth to structure his fiction, and this can make us readers feel that the characters are a bit two-dimensional.  And despite this weakness Elidor is a different order of book to The Grange at High Force. It's a tight, controlled, intense, deeply serious piece of work which opened up new possibilities in children's fiction. It is appropriate that it's concerned with boundaries: between this world and others; between the real and the imaginary; between childhood and adulthood, because its publication marked a watershed. The action of The Grange at High Force could be taking place at any point from the 1920s to the 1960s, despite one brief mention of a television, the first in any Carnegie winner. In its tone especially it feels like a book from the 1950s, whereas Elidor feels like a modern book, not so much in its setting or characters, but in its terse, poetic style and its use of dialogue. And of course with hindsight we can see that it's a signpost to Garner's later work. I'm glad Elidor didn't win the Carnegie in 1965, not because it didn't deserve to, but because if it had then The Owl Service wouldn't have won two years later, and The Owl Service is, for me, the greatest of Garner's myth-based fictions.

Paul May's website is here