The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.

The book is a spell, and the writer has self-ensorcelled in such a way to access this “tone” or “mode” of observing that is so far removed from the normal day-to-day that you sometimes feel drunk emerging from his universe.

All of this brings to mind Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. In some way a spiritual antipode to Blood Meridian — it’s a