Moon of Gomrath: A compelling magical fantasy adventure, the sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

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I've been eye-balling this book on my shelf, wondering if I actually want to read it, and since I've been having a hard time reading anything lately, I naturally thought it was the perfect time to try this. At the very least, I thought, it would be really easy to put the book down if I didn't like it, given my current mood. Except that this was so short and nostalgic, I ended up reading it in a single afternoon. The Moon of Gomrath by Alan Garner is the second of "The Alderley Tales". The first of which I have also reviewed. Old Magic: The Wizard Cadellin is a Guardian of the High Magic and speaks, in a somewhat sniffy and condescending way, about the wild untamed Old Magic being a thing for women and witches, and that it's a damn good thing this was tamed and shut off from the world. He is not best pleased that Susan gave it a doorway to return when she lit wendfire on Gomrath Eve. Possession Burnout: an ancient Celtic demonic entity, the Brollochan, is released from its prison cell by human interference. The Brollochan is an entity that lives vicariously through the senses of people and animals it serially possesses - but no host can contain it for long without burning from the inside and crumbling to death.

Alderley Edge, Macclesfield, Mobberly, Lindow and Wilmslow are all real places in Cheshire. Most of the places mentioned in the book along the Edge; The Wizard's Well, Goldenstone, the Beacon and so on are also real. Although Garner is describing the Alderley Edge of fifty years ago, when it really was an isolated farming village in Cheshire a long way away from the nearest city, a long time before it became popular with professional footballers and other people with lots of money and no taste. South Manchester has also encroached vastly in the fifty years since this book was written.

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However, her sojourn to other levels of existence has sensitised her to the powers with which she and her brother have been coming to associate and the story takes a new dramatic turn. On walking home across the Edge on dusk, they are inspired to build a fire to keep warm, Susan almost manically so. This fire includes rowan and pine which unintendedly act as a wendfire, which on this night of the year has the power to call ancient spirits from their mounds. Colin and Susan release the Wild Hunt, which return several times during the course of the novel. In the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published by HarperCollins in 2010, several notable British fantasy novelists praised Garner and his work. Susan Cooper related that "The power and range of Alan Garner's astounding talent has grown with every book he's written", whilst David Almond called him one of Britain's "greatest writers" whose works "really matter". [20] Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, went further when he remarked that: This is an altoghether different proposition from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. The prose is still bleakly beautiful, but the characters are better developed, more assertive and more independent after their experiences of the last novel, and the story is far more creative. The imagination which created elements like the mara and the lyblacs for the last book is given full rein here. The bodachs, the palugs, above all the Brollachan, are all weird and disturbing creations not found elsewhere in fantasy.

At the climax of the story a great battle takes place on a hill near Alderley during which the children and their companions make a desperate last stand to protect the Weirdstone. However the enemy forces prove too strong and Durathror is mortally wounded. Grimnir takes the Weirdstone for himself and, in the ensuing chaos, Nastrond sends the great wolf Fenrir (in some editions Managarm) to destroy his enemies. As the remaining companions begin to despair, Cadellin appears and slays Grimnir, whom he reveals to be his own brother and who in the final moment accepts defeat and drops the stone into Cadellin's hand. The Morrigan flees in terror while Cadellin uses the power of the Weirdstone to subdue once again the forces of darkness. In the 2011 BBC Radio 4 adaptation Robert Powell played the narrator; he has known Garner since he was a schoolboy at Manchester Grammar School. Struan Rodger, who played the dwarf Durathror, was in a radio production of another Garner story, Elidor, when he was thirteen years old. [29] This adaptation was broadcast again in November 2012. Gillies, Carolyn (1975). "Possession and Structure in the Novels of Alan Garner". Children's Literature in Education. 6 (3): 107–117. doi: 10.1007/BF01263341. S2CID 144402971. Butler, Charles (2006). Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. Lanham MD: Scarecrow. ISBN 978-0-8108-5242-6. And yet, and yet … "something's going on, and the shape it's taking is interesting in that it's complete at whatever stage I finish it. In other words, provided I get a few paragraphs down and then I just drop dead, it's still complete. It's intriguing me. It's making me think here we go again, perhaps, but in a quite different way," says Garner. "I cannot conceive of not writing. Because everything is so interesting. I've got lots of other things I could pretend to retire into, such as doing more on the academic side, doing more archaeology, doing more historical research, but there are other people who can do that. And I am actually quite haunted by this idea of having to do what only the individual can do."From 1976 to 1978, Garner published a series of four novellas, which have come to be collectively known as The Stone Book quartet: The Stone Book, Granny Reardun, The Aimer Gate, and Tom Fobble's Day. [24] Each focused on a day in the life of a child in the Garner family, each from a different generation. [23] The story roars along at a good pace, but unfortunately the main plot and many sub-plots are left unresolved. It is a common frustration on message boards that there was not a third book in the ‘Alderley’ series, but unfortunately after forty seven years of waiting, it does not seem likely to be forthcoming, which is a real shame. Power at a Price: When Angharad Goldenhand gives Susan the horn Anghalac, she warns that it is only to be used when all else is lost, because once it is sounded you will never know peace again for the rest of your life. At the end, when it is used, this is stated to be its effect on Colin. This is a theme to be developed in the concluding book of the trilogy, Boneland. I re-read this in preparation for Boneland! It was a wonderful re-visiting of a past pleasure. This second book is perhaps the more writerly, edgy (no pun intended) and sophisticated book, but I have to say the first book still stands out for its unbelievably gripping underground scenes and great storytelling. As for Boneland.... have read it now :-) It goes further again from traditional storytelling and more towards edgy and sophisticated... but it's not a kids' book, so must be looked at differently. I'm inspired to read more Garner fiction for adults now. If The Weirdstone (Garner's first novel) leans a little 3-, this leans 3.5 or maybe a little more. Weirdstone has a lot of unfortunate-nesses like a goblin named Slinkveal, the general batch of bad guys called the morthbrood, and of course the main villain, Grimnir. The best decision in Weirdstone is to make the tunnel scary because spelunking is terrifying, not because of lurking fell beasts. Gomrath gets more complicated, the kids, especially Susan, develop as characters, and so does the mythology. I was interested to learn, upon Googling, that the wizard story is real. That is, Alderley is an actual place, it has an ancient legend of a wizard stopping a farmer from Mobberley (seriously, where do the English get these names), buying his horse, showing him the sleeping riders, etc. Garner grew up on the Edge, and so I can see him having played with his friends or maybe alone, making up some of these stories.