So upsetting: this book could have been another Dream of Scipio or Instance of the Fingerpost, but it just totally copped out at the end and devolved into the story of a stupid love triangle. So disappointing because it set up this intellectual and moral conundrum that would have been amazing to see realized, but was totally dropped in the last section of the book. It felt like the author just got tired of writing and decided to slap on some generic ending. ( )

Now, I love this book, and would re-read it without question but it does have its faults. First of all, it is too long. It builds tensions brilliantly over many chapters but does not deliver an appropriately cathartic ending - mostly in my view because it continues to amble along for some 50 pages or so more than it should. Also, there's a major theme in my opinon that is unresolved - the nature of the 'Green Man' motif - it appears at the start in the mind of the poet protagonist, Alex Darken, and it seems to have a remote but important connection to the magical and hermetic aspects of the work in regard to the main theme of alchemy, transformation, and the essence of the male and the female. It seems to serve initially as a counterbalance to the equally pagan figure of Gypsy May but the Green Man himself gets lost in a trackless wood somewhere, and gets only a brief mention towards the end as a symbol of Alex's powers of returning literary ability and therefore 'new' manhood. Finally, the appearance of the political world of the 1980s is awkwardly done - you do not get the impression that there is any real sympathy on the part of those who are espousing the cause of peace for the crux of the matter, and Darken's tardy running with it is wooden and unconvincing. There is a slight feeling that the author doesn't quite know what he is aiming for socially speaking: on the one hand, there's a sort of working High Toryism with the Victorian Agnews and their seemingly benevolent attitude towards the servants and estate workers. On the other, there is their modern progeny, Ralph Agnew, whose youthful sexual dissolution and gratingly condescending manner make a character whose social background is disapproved of by Darken. Yet further, the poet-turned alchemist Edward Nesbit is a man of high intelligence but lowly origin, who is fickle, cantankerous, slippery and difficult, as well as charming in his own mercenary way.However, there are some very striking passages both of descriptions of the land and especially of relationships; there is also a thoroughgoing and at times inspiring, waspish and jubilant critique of materialism as opposed to of the merely material necessities of existence.Others have done much better in this territory: Fowles (The Magus), Garner (Red Shift) and M. John Harrison (The Course of the Heart), either for brevity's or completeness' sake, or their ability to represent the shifts between chronological and internal time, or in their examining of how mythological and symbolic thinking arise out of the tangle of both sensual, felt needs and humankind's propensity for imaginative fancy, once the rational work of the cortex is done. ( )