This is provisional. I read this book in a single sitting. I may delete this and begin over.
Well, anyone expecting Garner to simply pick up from the end of The Moon Of Gomrath, as if fifty years had not intervened, will be dissappointed. Colin is older now, in middle age. As will be everyone who read the books as kids. This is a different sort of resolution more in keeping with Garner as a mature writer.
The book is a multifaceted jewel. Everywhere you look you can see a different explanation. Garner is perhaps playing with us, and pointing out that every explanation you can conceive for the two original books will be "true", for a given value of true. Quantum intrudes: the multi-worlds explanation is there. It owes a lot to Robert Anton Wilson and his ideas of "Illumination". Indeed, the literary referent is Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati:
True Initiation Never Ends.
Which explanation do you go with for the adult Colin's near-psychosis?
i) Child-abuse
ii) Serious serial trauma as a child
iii) Serial "abandonment" by those he grows close to - he loses his parents, his sister, his foster-parents, even his childhood home, in fast succession as a child. (And even "loses" Meg, an adult who attained extreme closeness to him).
The common-sense explanation is that this tragedy was externalised as an epic struggle of good versus evil, rationalising his abuse as something imposed from outside by an external force of evil. You nearly believe this is all there was to it.
Then the plane-crash killing his parents comes out of left field. Look up the quoted details. You can time this to a precise date and place. How far back into Europe did the unseasonal spring blizzard of Brisingamen extend that April? Then the details about Susan's presumed drowning. But no body was found. Then you cross-relate to events in the two previous books. Susan really wanted to rejoin Celemon and the sisters riding in the starfield. Which lore and science identify as M45, the Pleiades. You want the events of Brisingamen and Gomrath to be "true" and you begin to hope and wonder. And at the end of the book you wonder about Meg. Who was she- really? Angharad? A reformed Selina Place? Or even... Susan? But you'll never know for sure.
Literature Songs to ageing children come (Joni Mitchell)
This is provisional. I read this book in a single sitting. I may delete this and begin over.
Well, anyone expecting Garner to simply pick up from the end of The Moon Of Gomrath, as if fifty years had not intervened, will be dissappointed. Colin is older now, in middle age. As will be everyone who read the books as kids. This is a different sort of resolution more in keeping with Garner as a mature writer.
The book is a multifaceted jewel. Everywhere you look you can see a different explanation. Garner is perhaps playing with us, and pointing out that every explanation you can conceive for the two original books will be "true", for a given value of true. Quantum intrudes: the multi-worlds explanation is there. It owes a lot to Robert Anton Wilson and his ideas of "Illumination". Indeed, the literary referent is Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati:
True Initiation Never Ends.
Which explanation do you go with for the adult Colin's near-psychosis?
i) Child-abuse ii) Serious serial trauma as a child iii) Serial "abandonment" by those he grows close to - he loses his parents, his sister, his foster-parents, even his childhood home, in fast succession as a child. (And even "loses" Meg, an adult who attained extreme closeness to him).
The common-sense explanation is that this tragedy was externalised as an epic struggle of good versus evil, rationalising his abuse as something imposed from outside by an external force of evil. You nearly believe this is all there was to it.
Then the plane-crash killing his parents comes out of left field. Look up the quoted details. You can time this to a precise date and place. How far back into Europe did the unseasonal spring blizzard of Brisingamen extend that April? Then the details about Susan's presumed drowning. But no body was found. Then you cross-relate to events in the two previous books. Susan really wanted to rejoin Celemon and the sisters riding in the starfield. Which lore and science identify as M45, the Pleiades. You want the events of Brisingamen and Gomrath to be "true" and you begin to hope and wonder. And at the end of the book you wonder about Meg. Who was she- really? Angharad? A reformed Selina Place? Or even... Susan? But you'll never know for sure.
And that's the undying legacy of this book.