You know how you read things for the adventure and the excitement and the danger? Thrill-seeking, one of the more basic forms of escapism, where you can slip into the adventurer's skin and and experience their wild ride by proxy. I loved that. I was addicted to that. How on earth did I find this, then, and keep going back to it? Obviously I picked it up because it's a fantasy novel and I was all Lord Of The Rings yay! But this... this is a carefully crafted, masterfully controlled piece of literature. It is full of adventures and physical and spiritual dangers, but it's not written as an adventure narrative. Look, this is all my way of saying that after rereading it for the first time in about twenty five years, i found myself on the verge of tears every second or third chapter. It is a book full of deeply moving moments, and of profound, human insights and tenderness and friendship and redemption and finding wisdom after folly and hard experience. It's an adventure story, all right. The story of a young man who makes a dreadful mistake and who must confront the mistake before it consumes him. I just don't remember ever before putting the book down when the young men have returned and Yarrow runs to greet them with tears in my eyes. On a Monday morning in the middle of the dismantling of the Electric Picnic, no less.