In The Golden Shadow [Garfield and Blishen] have combined a number of stories from disparate sources into a literary whole. Gods, demi-gods and god-like humans strive, love, lust, inhabiting a landscape whose very rocks and stones, whose tides are alive with menace and promise. The stories are linked through the figure of an aged story-teller who wanders from place to place, always, like the hero of Ted Hughes's Bedtime Story, inattentive at the crucial moment; so that he is there when the events happen, but never sees them happen…. It is an interesting device, and a successful one, as if the authors had imaginatively become this archetypal figure, and tried to eavesdrop on the scenes they described.

Since so many stories are packed within 150 pages, some, inevitably, suffer. At times the authors try too hard to work up to a climax in too short a time…. The result...