The creation of other worlds … leads, naturally, to a preoccupation with landscape and terrain…. [This] is a natural development but in the case of Garner it's something more than this. All his work shows a strong, mystical sense of place….

Often, as in Garner and [Ursula K.] le Guin, there's a strong sense of a vague, disembodied but menacing force which is just hovering around waiting to be loosed, a process which might be as accidental as springing a trap. This is very noticeable in Garner. (p. 146)

[Class antagonism and manipulation] is in its most obvious and usual form in Garner's The Owl Service: it's strange that very few people seem to have noticed that this book is riddled with anti-working-class feeling. (p. 147)

What comes out very strongly, especially in Garner's first three books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Elidor is the overpowering sense of black evil. Towards the beginning of the second novel, we read that men have 'loosed the evil a second time', in a typical Garner expression. But what's it all for? What do the forces of evil want? What's the matter with them?—There aren't any answers to these questions…. (p. 149)

In Garner's later work, The Owl Service and Red Shift, two elements that were there but not very noticeable in the books already mentioned, come to the fore. In general, taking Garner's work as a whole, his characters grow in importance with each successive book although they never free themselves from the domination of place. However, as they grow in importance, social conflict grows, so that, because of Garner's class stance, in The Owl Service he foists upon the reader an ending which just doesn't seem to grow out of the rest of the book, at all. He gives us the unlikeable, selfish prig, Roger, as hero, and passes over Gwyn, who has been more attuned to the legendary background of the book all along. Garner has tried to pass over this class prejudice by saying that it's Gwyn's illegitimacy which makes him 'incapable of coping with the epic quality of the situation'. Thankfully, it's very much to be doubted whether anyone else will share such a weird and destructive view. The class prejudice, in fact, could be foreseen in Elidor….

The other element which has now come to the fore in Garner's latest book, Red Shift, is perhaps more to the point in this chapter though not separable from Garner's attitudes as a whole. A rather doom-laden and pretentious manner could be seen as far back as The Moon of Gomrath. In Red Shift it has developed into a general atmosphere of hopelessness and degeneration which recalls William Golding, a writer Garner admires, at his worst. (p. 150)