If you're going to be annoyed by archaic spellings and slightly pretentious footnotes (and, reading reviews before I started reading the book, it seems a lot of people are) then you'll find this unbearable. I stopped noticing the spellings after a few chapters. I enjoy reading fantasy, but I'm often disappointed in the implementation of magic, when the full implications aren't worked through. Clarke sidesteps this neatly by positing the loss of magic from England - so our heros are themselves working with very little information about what is and isn't possible. The novel spands several years, so although it's long it's very fast, and we follow a number of characters along their parallel paths. The characters are believable and suitably flawed (I enjoy books where the characters are human, all with good and bad features, rather than neatly divided into 'good guys' and 'bad guys') and the ending made me cry.