spirit of his ancestors." Taylor notes that Garner had studied Welsh mythology in relation to his native Cheshire, and had then expanded his "idiosyncratic" understanding of this "into a wider conception of a universal mythic consciousness". In Taylor's view, Garner portrayed in the novel "what he saw as the psychologically restorative powers of mythological narratives and imagery." The Tolkien scholar Jason Fisher, reviewing the book for the Mythopoeic Society's Mythprint, calls it "a remarkable, luminous, difficult book", and "the most purely mythopoeic of all Garner’s novels". Fisher warns that the work "is not for all readers", and not like Garner's other novels, either. In Fisher's view, it depicts "Garner's deep, almost baptismal immersion" into folklore and then an "alien mythology". The reader, he states, has to work actively to unravel "its abstruse layers". He found it "very much worth the effort". Another Tolkien scholar, Patrick Curry, lists Moby-Dick, The Master and Margarita, Le Grand Meaulnes, Riddley Walker, and Out of Africa as among the few works of "mythic fiction" that could be considered comparable to The Lord of the Rings, commenting that most of these were their authors' life's work. He wrote in 1997 that Strandloper might perhaps find a place alongside those books, but that it was too early to tell. References 1996 British novels English novels Historical novels Novels by Alan Garner Novels set in Cheshire Novels set in Australia Novels set in the 19th century Harvill Secker books