I've nearly finished Paul Hoffman's The Left Hand of God -- only about 40 pages left out of 500 -- and I'm contemplating ditching it. All the issues which irritated me in the first half -- lack of world-building, use of real-world names in unreal places, the religion, the omniscient narration -- have continued and got worse, with Silbury Hill alongside Memphis and York, Jesus of Nazareth name-checked in passing (a Jonah figure inside a whale) and Jews in the Ghetto. Added to that the plot has slowed, what was implausible has become unbelievable, characters are brought in then not used, irrelevant scenes come and go and could be removed without loss, huge plot points have been apparently forgotten and never mentioned again, and Hoffman is repeatedly dropping genuine quotes (eg James I on smoking) into the narrative and his characters' mouths. And I suspect that the approaching climactic fight is going to be a blow-by-blow copy of one of the most iconic battles of English history. All of this looks less like homage and more like theft and complete failure of imagination. I'm not impressed.
By way of contrast the fantasy I'm reading alongside it is hugely imaginative and like nothing I've read before, Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott, the notable QC, and published by Jo Fletcher Books. A secluded valley in a loop of the River Rother has been the site of a great mystery since 1558, when a dozen strange and precocious children were brought to a manor house to be educated, and 450 years later a town has grown up which is bound by its own laws, including one which stops anyone from researching or asking questions about its past. Omniscient narration again, but this one works, though it gives a rather detached feel to the writing, and that writing isn't always as clear as it might be, and characterisation is mainly concerned with bizarre names (I offer in evidence Jonah Oblong and Sir Veronal Slickstone) and strange behaviours. There's an air of Gormenghasterie to it -- the names, the higgledy-piggledy jumbled towers of the town -- but it also reminds me a little of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in the matter-of-factness in dealing with the supernatural. I'm 100 pages in of 450 and I'm still not sure what to make of it.