"[9] Flieger shows that Tolkien "undoubtedly" used Dunne's "dream mechanism" for his two unfinished time-travel novels, namely The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers.
[9] Flieger suggests that the idea of the Lost Straight Road embodied in the novel's title stems from "the deliberate presentation of time as space.
[9] Alongside the analysis of the time-travel novels, Flieger examines the nature of time in Lothlórien, the seemingly timeless land of Elves in The Lord of the Rings.
[10] Flieger concludes that "When we read his work we—like Ramer [in The Notion Club Papers]—fall 'wide asleep' into a dream more real than ordinary waking experience.
[13] David Bratman, in Mythlore, writes that the book "set[s] the standard for scholarship on [The History of Middle-earth]", and that Flieger followed it with "a full-length meditation on the framing of the series in Interrupted Music (2005)".
[7] Richard C. West, in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, writes that Flieger places Tolkien both as a man of his time, among the Inklings and other authors including modernist writers, and "quite ready to travel outside it.
In West's view, Flieger "admirably" sums up what he was hoping to do in The Lost Road: "Tolkien's grand design, had it come to fruition, would have interwoven selected episodes of Western history with suggestions of his own personal and familial history and made it all the epilogue to his own mythology", which West glosses as "a project worthy of [the modernist writer James] Joyce.
"[14] Carol Leibiger, also in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, calls A Question of Time and Splintered Light "two valuable and highly readable critical studies of Tolkien's work."
In particular, Wood writes, she misses Tolkien's "deliberate resistance to the occult and the psychic", instead taking the Christian view that God "subjected himself to the conditions of time", leading to the one-off "unrepeatable, space-time events" of the death and resurrection of Christ.
[15] C. T. Fitzgerald, in Extrapolation, wrote that Flieger's book takes readers to an additional level of understanding of The Lord of the Rings beyond the simple "satisfied warm glow—feeling all is right with the world".