Just finished this rather extraordinary book about two magicians. I'm actually a little surprised I did because it's so slow and so dense. Even most of the way through the book I wasn't able to keep the secondary characters straight, although eventually I got interested enough to finish it. (I'm already wondering it it'll make a lot more sense on second reading). I also wanted to finish it because the book itself is a remarkable achievement in recreating early 19th century prose (it's apparently a homage to Jane Austen's style, but since I've never read Austen, that's lost on me) and what one reviewer calls "imaginative scholarship" (there are acres of detailed footnotes about background matters that Tolkien would heartily approve of including, although he did his in appendices), but more importantly in creating a world where concern over "English magic" in Great Britain is a topic of popular interest. As some reviewers were, I was attacked by self-doubt the first hundred pages or so wondering if there really was such a thing, since the book made clear that no one was actually practicing it - they were just pining for the old days when there were magicians (or so they thought, I thought). So what was fiction and what was historically accurate? The book did a masterful job of weaving the two together, and creating a compelling imaginary world where magic lay behind everything, and England really did have a magician king - at least northern England did.
In the end, I thought that the book was perhaps not the best medium for the story - the dark and dreary Faerie world and the grandiose landscape changes were something that Lovecraft could have gotten across in prose (unhampered by the need to keep the tone appropriate for a 1817 narrator) but here they require a bit more imagination than is comfortable (again, I'm not giving credit for the writing style, so I don't mean this as a negative in general - just that it wasn't written in the manner I'd have related to the best). They really require a movie screen, and I think this book would benefit greatly from screen treatment, which would condense down the story lines and do justice to the scope of the story. I understand New Line has been working on a screenplay for a couple of years now, and I hope it pans out. It would be a really great film.