It seems to me that Over the Hills and Far Away and A Game of Dark are as important for their exploration of time and place as ever they are for the stories that they have to tell. In both books we stand like Magra and Korva 'surrounded by a misty edge where one time ran into another' and it is the uncanny skill with which Mayne summons up … an utterly convincing past and mingles it with the present in a particular place that gives these two books their peculiarly haunting quality. The effect is fairly obvious in Over the Hills and Far Away, but has not been so widely noticed in A Game of Dark. Reviewers, with a whiff of Freud in their nostrils, have gone chasing phallic symbols and Zeus/Cronus patterns and have neglected what is emotionally and technically one of the book's triumphs: Donald's ambivalent relationship with his Other World and the absolute reality of that place as a paradigm of his home world.

The skill that has gone into this book and its predecessor can be seen emerging gradually through Mayne's whole writing life—like [Earthfasts's] Nelly Jack John from under Richmond Castle—and the success with which it is carried out can perhaps be measured by comparing Mayne's work with that of Alan Garner in the recently published Red Shift. For all the force of Garner's historical imagination he does not achieve that fugal intensity with which William Mayne plays off past against present simultaneously so that the reader too feels the chill of 'being in a place before the map knew about it'.

It is through their intricate play with time that Over the Hills and Far Away and A Game of Dark can be seen as closely related to William Mayne's latest novel The Jersey Shore…. With considerable daring he has elected to set the scene for what he has to say in the United States in the early 1930's and the small happenings of this part of the story concern a boy, Arthur, and his mother who are spending a longish holiday on 'the Jersey shore' with an oddish aunt. It is quite possible that American readers will find fault with some of Mr. Mayne's characterisations in these scenes and it is for the more knowledgeable to say whether Arthur—who is one quarter escaped Negro slave—speaks, or at least thinks, in a manner altogether too akin to one of Mr. Ardent's young gentlemen.

This part of the book, with the exception of a superb, somewhat enigmatic Negro Preacher, is fairly conventional Mayne family-portrait stuff (however unconventional such may be by most writers' standards of perception). What gives the book its energy are the communings between Arthur and his English grandfather who, incompatible with the aunt, his daughter, ('like two beakers in a bag, we chip off each others' handles') lives farther down towards the shore. In a series of meetings the old man conveys to the boy not just recollections of his own feckless past as a labourer in the Norfolk fen-country, but something which is the essence of that distant locale, its people and the generations of family life. And to say 'conveys' is to be as exact as possible—for communication between the two of them is only partially in words—the brilliantly caught accents of one man from one place—much of it is in transferred images…. (pp. 133-34)

With The Jersey Shore … it seems to me that William Mayne has crossed 'the misty edge' and written a book where the complexity of experience requires more than childish resources for its appreciation. The fulcrum of the story is not Arthur, down there on a visit, but Benj Thatcher and his profound but unco-ordinated recollections. The angle of the obliqueness has shifted decisively against the child, for whom the disparate elements of past and present, place and family will surely not fuse into the compelling unity that they do for an adult. Like so much of William Mayne's writing the tones of the book's voices echo in the mind long after it has been finished, the pictures that it summons up live in the memory, but the truth of its emotion speaks from maturity to maturity. (p. 135)