A plausible secondary world

Crow from an illuminated manuscript in the Bodleian Library

Alison Croggon The Crow:
the third book of Pellinor
Walker Books Ltd 2006

All novels, and especially fantasy novels, provide the opportunity for authors to create their own worlds in which to place their characters, and in large measure what makes the story convincing is the plausibility of that secondary world. Croggon’s land of Edil-Amarandh is given credible substance by its characters’ interaction with the geography, climate and changing seasons, and the success of The Crow and the other Pellinor books is enhanced by the impression that Maerad and Hem, Cadvan and Saliman are all inhabiting a real landscape: we are with them, almost in real-time, every step of their journeys, every rest in their tasks. It may or not help to imagine their world as perhaps that straddling what is now the mid-Atlantic ridge between Newfoundland and western Europe, sometime towards the end of the last Ice Age when sea levels were lower, but it is not essential, particularly as Croggon’s storytelling skill provides the verisimilitude to convincingly transport us to this sprawling continent in the grip of unfathomable changes.