The delightful surprise of a box of Montezuma chocolate truffles, twice - once when
glitterboy1 presented it to me on Saturday morning, and the second time when I found it while unpacking my overnight bag, as I'd forgotten all about it in the meantime. Gosh, they're good. I don't think they'll last very long.
I'm back from the second of three trips to London in a fortnight, and have been using the journeys to reread Alan Garner's recently completed trilogy - The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Boneland - the cover on the last of these calls them the Weirdstone trilogy, but I think I prefer the Edge Trilogy. I originally read the first two in the late 1960s/early 1970s, and the third last year. I'm looking forward to revisiting it on the next journey, but today I finished Gomrath, which was marginally my favourite forty-odd years ago (I would say that, for the Old Magic is woman's magic).
One thing that surprised me this time round is that the wizard Cadellin is not nearly as prominent as I remembered. He's essential to the plot, of course, as well as being the character taken directly from local legend, but I think the children meet him four times, briefly, in Weirdstone whereas they spend several days under the protection of the dwarfs Fenodyree and Durathror. It always puzzled me that my Puffin edition (20p) had a picture of Fenodyree on the front cover, but maybe it makes sense after all; he's the non-human they know best. (Though, come to think of it, the cover pic for Gomrath shows Fiorn the north-king, who's an extremely minor character.)
But by Gomrath Fenodyree has disappeared, and the children's primary protectors are the dwarf Uthecar and the man Albanac. There are clear explanations of how each of them came to be at the Edge, but no reference to Fenodyree and what has happened to him. If it were a television series, you'd assume the actor couldn't come back, but obviously that's not the reason here. So why Garner did choose Uthecar and Albanac rather than Fenodyree and Gaberlunzie (a character who appears for a few pages in Weirdstone and shares Albanac's attributes of a supernatural horse and close relations with the elves)? Uthecar is the most strongly drawn of the four, though I do like Fenodyree (described by Gowther as "a supercilious little feller"). I suppose, at a Doylist level, the lack of explanation is because Garner firmly rules out a recap: "How Colin and Susan were first drawn into the world of Magic... is not a part of this story." As a Watsonian, I have concluded that the children don't ask why Fenodyree has gone because they already know; between the two books he's decided he's too upset about Durathror to stay on the Edge and he's said goodbye to them.
I was rather pleased by the following passage. Susan has just awoken from a magical sleep to find herself near an unidentified river, at night. I am not sure what I would do in the circumstances, but this is her response:
"But then where was she? And in what direction was Alderley? She found her bearings with the help of the Plough: the uphill path ran nearly due west. Which is the right way if I'm in the Pennines, she thought, but not much good if this is Wales. But if it is Wales, I'm forty miles from Alderley, so it'd better be the Pennines. She set off up the hill."
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.