We have waited 50 years for Alan Garner’s Boneland, the adult sequel to his earlier children’s fantasies The Weardstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. Both were published in the early 1960s, featuring 12-year-old twins Colin and Susan, who come to live in Cheshire with the kindly farmer Gowther and his wife Bess, in a haunted landscape of secret places evoked in exquisite detail — caves, stones, mines and woods where “fingers clawed and ropes hissed like snakes” and swamps are awash with “a mass of bodies”. They encountered dwarfs, goblins, elves, a crow with an evil eye, Morrigan the wicked shape-shifting witch and Cadellin the good wizard who guards the sleepers who will save the world.

Boneland concludes Garner’s trilogy for children. He returns to Alderley Edge in Cheshire, where the twins once faced danger fearlessly, but now adult Colin anguishes over his sanity and the world’s future. We meet him recovering from a breakdown, a deeply troubled, brilliant, highly qualified astrophysicist who “cannot access anything before he was 13”.

When he is not at Jodrell Bank searching for his sister in the Pleiades he is questioning his sanity with the dubious help of Meg, the less than sympathetic and questionable psychiatric therapist, who could be Morrigan. Echoes of the earlier novels recur — the malevolent crow and Susan’s tear-shaped crystal whose light changes with good and evil. Garner captures this charged world with his sensory feel for landscape, old place names and the naming of his otherworldly beings.

Garner met JRR Tolkien before he dropped out of Magdalen College, Oxford, but never read The Lord of the Rings. However, his disturbing yet compelling book seems to recall Tolkien, as well as the Mabinogion, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian tablets and the timeless, lyrical, earthy cadence of the Bible — “He cut the veil of the rock,” and “the lamp brought the moon from the blade, and the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang”.