Mythago Wood
Robert Holdstock
Gollancz, 1984
ISBN 10-0-57507-970-3
WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead! They won’t ruin the book for you, but they do give some things away. Steer clear if you like to start a book completely ‘fresh’.
Mythago Wood is one of those classic fantasy novels that I always felt I should read but never got round to doing so. Until now, that is. The book has drawn comparisons to the work of Alan Garner, and it’s easy to see why. Like Garner’s spellbinding The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath (two books I adored as a child), Mythago Wood is part of a subgenre of ‘mythic’ fantasy fiction (as the title implies) set not in a secondary world but in the English countryside, into which seeps the magical occurrences. And, like in Garner’s novels, this juxtaposition of normality with the fantastical generates a bittersweet and haunting atmosphere.
The events of Holdstock’s novel take place just after the Second World War. The protagonist, Steven, has recently returned from the fighting to Herefordshire and his childhood home, Oak Lodge, which sits next to a ‘primary’ oak forest called Ryhope Wood. Steven’s father has recently died, but during his life he was obsessed with Ryhope Wood, so much so that he used to neglect his family and disappear for days into the forest. Steven arrives at Oak Lodge expecting to find his brother and his brother’s new wife there to welcome him – but instead he finds that this enigmatic wife has already vanished and that his brother, Christian, has in turn become preoccupied with Ryhope Wood. His father’s diaries record mysterious findings about the forest, and Steven soon finds himself similarly drawn in by its allure…
Holdstock does an excellent job of putting the reader into a state of excited bafflement from the very first page of Mythago Wood. The novel begins with an excerpt from Steven’s father’s journal, which offers tantalising hints from the get-go:
… I have discovered a fourth pathway into the deeper zones of the wood. The brook itself. So obvious now, a water track! It leads directly through the outer ash vortex, beyond the spiral track and the Stone Falls. I believe it could be used to enter the heartwoods themselves…
There’s a danger that pseudo-scientific language can get a bit cheesy, but here, where the character is attempting to organise his findings into some kind of intelligible system, it really works. And, like Steven when he later comes to read the diaries, I was immediately dying to know what ‘the deeper zones of the wood’ held, not to mention why they could only be accessed by certain pathways, and, indeed, what on earth an ‘outer ash vortex’ was…
As the concept behind the novel was revealed, I was still impressed. The idea that fantastical beings called ‘mythagos’ could be formed from the mind’s unconscious knowledge of national mythology was a truly original idea. I also liked that the mythago’s connection to the characters’ unconsciouses (how to pluralise ‘unconscious’??) meant that the fantastical events were inextricably linked – indeed arose from – the characters’ relationships, something that worked to great effect to explore the complex feelings between the father and his sons. And I was absolutely enthralled by the expanding, incomprehensible forest interior, peopled by bizarre and potentially threatening forms. It helps that the wood’s manifestations appeal to folktales that the reader knows or knows of – or at the very least that they can imagine existing. A version of Robin Hood makes an appearance, as well as a medieval Knight, and beings called ‘Jack-in-the-Greens’… amongst many others. This makes me wonder, though, whether I engage with this in a particular way due to being British? (I’d love to know what readers of other nationalities think about this!)
As you can see, I really enjoyed the book. However, there were a few things that niggled at me, so that I can’t say I was absolutely blown away by it. The tone of the narrative, for one, is at times a little stuffy and distancing. Perhaps due to when it is set, and the first-person narration by Steven, it has a distinctly old-fashioned ring to it, and is laced with good ole’ British understatement. My favourite example is on page 238 when Steven introduces the commencement of a deadly attack by a terrifying storm of elementals by saying, merely: ‘What happened next was quite odd.’ Heh, that made me chuckle, though I don’t think it was supposed to…
Also, I didn’t quite get what I wanted from Steven as a protagonist. This may have been partly due to the narrative tone, but I didn’t feel like I was granted as much insight into his character as I would have liked. In fact, I ended up feeling much more affection for his ‘sidekick’, Harry Keeton. This might also have been because Steven’s motivation for a most of the book is his love for the mythago Guiwenneth – indeed, the relationship dynamics between Steven, his brother, and his father centre on their passion for her. Whilst I thought Holdstock brought this out with intelligence and originality, what with the mythago forms mirroring the characters’ feelings for each other, I did feel a little alienated from this, being as it was the key tension in the novel. Again, it makes me ponder about the specificity of reader response… Perhaps this one is gendered? Perhaps it as a woman that I couldn’t quite engage with the three men’s intense competition over Guiwenneth? I suppose, though, that Guiwenneth could hardly not have elicited such passionate emotions – after all, due to the mythago’s link to the unconscious, she was not only the men’s ‘fantasy’, but their ‘phantasy’ also…
Besides, she was pretty cool, I’ll admit. Or at least that version of her was. (You’ll have to read it if you want to understand!)
In conclusion, then: Mythago Wood is a wonderfully original novel, spinning the everyday and the fantastical into an atmospheric tale about the power of myth and of human emotion. The book is not without some flaws, but it is definitely worth putting up with the slightly old-fashioned narrative voice in order to immerse yourself in the secrets and perils of Ryhope wood.
I wonder what the sequels are like…
