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 at such moments is a sub-Keatsian, orgasmic kind of writing, over-laden with imagery. Here for instance is Atalanta running her final race:

The rushing wind painted her tunic against her breasts and flying thighs … she laughed aloud; she and the inquisitive air were one. She was a spirit—a dream in men's minds to be possessed only in sleep and death.

Good. Yes very. But you can have too much of a good thing.

However, when the authors settle down to the central episode, the story of Heracles, his childhood, his madness, his crime, punishment and expiation, his heroic act of mercy towards the chained Prometheus, and his eternal reward, the book becomes very good indeed, moving with remarkable narrative power. Here the myth is transmuted into something new: utterly modern in its writing and still Greek in feeling. (p. 782)

In The God Beneath the Sea [Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen] dealt mainly with the birth and conflicts of the gods and only incidentally with man. This new book, The Golden Shadow, is less lofty in its theme and all the better for it. The Olympian framework is still there,… but this time it is man who holds the centre of the stage.

As in the earlier book, a number of different stories have been woven together to make a more or less coherent whole. The threads of continuity are provided by the adventures of Heracles and by the tale of Peleus and Thetis. The connecting link is a shortsighted storyteller, wandering from place to place, always arriving just too soon or too late, before or after the event, missing the gods or not knowing them and forever fated to inspire belief in others while unable to experience it himself for longer than the space of his song.

Oddly enough it is in this character of the compulsive artist, yearning after the ineffable but unable to resist pulling it to pieces to pluck out the heart while ordinary mortals simply marvel and accept, that the authors have come closest to the real quality of myth. Aging, tired, cynical, endlessly inquisitive, trudging the blinding roads, turning his head from side to side "with an eager, desperate smile—as if at any moment his short-sighted eyes would at last see a god": this is a creature that we recognize. Elsewhere, too often, it is still Charles Keeping's staggering illustrations which carry the burden of imagination, soaring onto a plane of pity and terror never reached by the laboured, adjectival prose.

Often, but not always. The writing has its moments. And as there is more humanity in this book, so there is less need for the inflated phrase. The descriptions of Heracles's madness, falling like warm rain out of a clear sky … have their own staccato horror…. There is humour, too, in Heracles's relations with Iolaus (not here his nephew), and in the cleansing of the Augeian stables. Certainly, there is a depth and texture often missing from the run of retellings.

So far, so good. Allowing for a somewhat Procrustean attitude to the time scale, Messrs Blishen and Garfield have succeeded in weaving their chosen myths into the likeness of a continuous narrative. What they have also done, in clothing these bones with flesh of their own, is to impose a specific character on them. There is nothing against it. It is what writers have been doing ever since Homer. It is even what they must do. Whether, supposing one had never heard of the Greek myths, one would wish for this or that version as an introduction to them, remains a matter of individual choice. Where the authors may be held to fail is where the flesh is inadequate to the bones it has to cover, and in this case that happens at some point between the human and divine worlds. Prometheus glimpses as a tormented cliff shape through the wreathing mists of the Caucasus is fine, but in action he lacks the stature of the Aeschylean Titan. The creatures of myth are scaled down, Chiron the Centaur is reduced to running a kind of public school for heroes, and in the end, what we are left with is no more than crude couplings in caves, a poor exchange for the triumphant mating of a goddess with a man. (p. 675)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1973; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), June 15, 1973.

[The Golden Shadow] is a companion to The God Beneath the Sea which was the subject of one of the most controversial of all Carnegie Medal Awards. It is likely to arouse equally violent passions of love and hate.

Let us waste no time in discussing whether it is for children. Neither [Garfield nor Blishen] is likely to believe in the existence of a separate category of "children's books"; both have been concerned to make a book as eloquent, true and passionate as human limitations permit.

Like the Greek tragedies—and it is a measure of the book's importance that one makes a comparison with no sense of incongruity—The Golden Shadow presupposes in the reader a knowledge of the subject-matter…. One must start with the ground-plan of Greek legend clearly in mind. Then one may relish the subtlety and the profound logic of the Garfield-Blishen interpretation which reconciles inconsistencies in the familiar versions and squeezes universal truths out of the irrational and often immoral behaviour of gods and mortals.

This is a book in which one cannot isolate for critical examination theme and style, for every element … depends on all the others. The flexible, highly artificial language is entirely at the service of the subject, and the writers, each a master of his craft, at no time indulge their virtuosity. The book is long and complex but tightly interwoven and constructed with strict economy. The principal themes, of Prometheus, Thetis, Hercules and the story-teller, interact and mirror one another in the most complex and satisfying counterpoint.

An important book? Unquestionably. A great book? Maybe; time must be allowed to work on both book and reader to determine this. An enjoyable book? Yes; the kind of enjoyment which grows as the book progresses and continues long after it is finally closed. (p. 330)

The Junior Bookshelf, October, 1973.