Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock

[mrissa]

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I haven't revisited this fantasy classic in this millennium--which is to say, not in my adult life. But here's a new edition, so it seemed like the right time. Holdstock's prose is clear and sure, a pleasure to read, and at the time this came out I think he was doing something really new with the echoes of legends and archetypes resonating through both the land---in this case Ryhope Wood in England--and the men who inhabit it. The way he's chosen an archetypal brother-against-brother plot redoubles and resonates with the speculative conceit that way.

The down side is that this is one of the 20th century books that has not really thought through treating women as anything but adjuncts to men. Guiwenneth, the only woman who gets really any degree of page time at all, is defined by her sexual potential and/or as a love interest--she wants to stay with Steven but is under threat from his brother, Christian, whose violence and anger are (not very explicably) heightened to fever pitch with his time dilated stay in Ryhope Wood. This is not a book that cares about how that threat hits Guiwenneth at all: she exists as a token, more or less scorekeeping between the brothers. Nor are there any substantial female supporting characters who can balance this problem out. This is not uncommon for a book from 1984--but given that Chanur's Venture came out in 1984 as well--and Native Tongue, and Clay's Ark, and The Hero and the Crown, among other things--it's definitely not obligatory.

So do I recommend Mythago Wood. Hmm. It's certainly historically interesting, and once you're braced for it being wall to wall dudes plus the token GIRRRULLL WHO LOVES HIM, there are things happening

Comments

[sovay]

and at the time this came out I think he was doing something really new with the echoes of legends and archetypes resonating through both the land---in this case Ryhope Wood in England--and the men who inhabit it.

I think of him in strong continuity with Alan Garner, Nigel Kneale, even Susan Cooper, though the parapsychological aspect is closest to Kneale. I was hit-or-miss with a lot of his work, especially when he tried to move outside of his English countryside falling away into the gulfs of the Ice Age, but I loved Mythago Wood and Lavondyss and The Bone Forest and I find all of them genuinely weird in a way that sometimes I argue with and sometimes just sink into and which even more so now strikes me as unusual for the decades in which they were written. His protagonists tend to be devoured by their archetypes and it is not as clear to me as it is in Garner that the motif is always deliberate. I was sorry when he died. I still wanted to see what he did next. I have yet to read his last novel, Avilion.

[mrissa]

I thought of Susan Cooper when I was reading it! she's not doing the same thing with the old stories being psychologically relived and communally remembered, but she was definitely one of the people who came before him in terms of Britain And The Old Stories in modern fantasy writing.

...and also did not do nearly as much with women as the old stories in question would have allowed. Ah well.

[sovay]

she's not doing the same thing with the old stories being psychologically relived and communally remembered, but she was definitely one of the people who came before him in terms of Britain And The Old Stories in modern fantasy writing.

The Lost Land feels to me like a direct forerunner of his ancient landscapes lying just beneath the roads and fields of the present day, so much so that when Emily Tesh worked with the idea in Silver in the Wood (2019)/Drowned Country (2020), it reminded me far less of Holdstock than of Cooper.

...and also did not do nearly as much with women as the old stories in question would have allowed. Ah well.

Have you read Lavondyss? The protagonist of that one is female and one of the things I like about the novel is how it doesn't fall into the clichés of the Girl Hero's Journey, although after twenty years I still can't decide if the structure really works for me or not.

[edit] I agree, for the record, that Mythago Wood is late for its female character to be inorganic as she is; it's partially lampshaded by the myth she comes from, but Holdstock made up that myth.

[mrissa]

I haven't reread Lavondyss since 1999. Maybe I should. Then either I'll have interesting thoughts about it or will decide that I just don't like it any more. And yes, Holdstock making up that myth means that the lampshade really doesn't work for me.

I totally agree about Emily's novellas having more of a Cooper feel than a Holdstock feel. Yeah.

[sovay]

Then either I'll have interesting thoughts about it or will decide that I just don't like it any more.

I liked it within the last ten years. It was my favorite of the two to begin with. Mythago Wood was much more proof of concept, however enthrallingly written, to me: I love it, but not for its plot.

[thistleingrey]

In 1990 those choices of roles already felt a little awkward. I remember really wanting to like Holdstock's books but couldn't quite get there, and haven't reread. Thanks for this post's inadvertent and belated agreement with younger me's sense of Guiwenneth as token. :/