{"id":562,"date":"2018-04-02T13:36:36","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T12:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=562"},"modified":"2018-04-02T13:44:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-02T12:44:21","slug":"562","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=562","title":{"rendered":"Review of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Many books receive plaudits and yet fail to live up to them, but Mythago Wood<\/em> <\/a>falls into that rare category of books that for all of its awards, exceeds the expectations of the reader, or, at any rate, this particular reader writing this review. Its concept is both original and deftly executed, breathing life into Jungian archetypes and the lost lore of Britain in the wildest of wildwoods that you could possibly enter.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, the novel opens with a homecoming, but as with all such returns, the protagonist \u2013 Stephen Huxley \u2013 finds that all is not as it was. With his father now deceased, and his brother Christian behaving in a decidedly eccentric manner, we are gradually introduced to the enchanting, and sinister, world of Ryhope Wood. From the fragmentary notes of his father\u2019s diary, the disclosures of his brother, and the sightings of shadowy forms that flit about his field of vision on the perimeter of the wood, we are gradually lured, along with Stephen, into the enigmatic and enchanting realm of the mythagos. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The innocuous appearance of the wood, set amidst the tranquillity of the Herefordshire countryside, conceals a primal and ferocious domain, in which time and space are stretched beyond what the imagination could conceive from its external bounds. It is a place that exerts a teasing fascination that at once both attracts, and yet physically repels, those who attempt to penetrate its shaded depths; it is where men find their deepest desires, and fears, realised in a profound physicality, where the psychological, the psychic, and the mythic merge into an eternal and yet malleable \u2018reality\u2019. Wild and bloody rites, magic, lust, vengeance and the quest for personal wholeness through union with a significant, Pygmalionesque, other, constitute the meat of this engaging fantasy, in which the reader encounters plausibly imagined Neolithic tribespeople, Celts, Saxons, and many others who have called the English landscape their home through the passage of the ages. All coexist within the wood in an eternal present.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ryhope Wood is a profoundly pagan place, so it strikes me as no mistake that Holdstock chose to bestow the name of Christian upon Stephen\u2019s brother, and it is Christian\u2019s presence that proves to be most destructive to the world that he enters. However, the destructiveness of the elder Huxley brother is in no way linked to any proselytising on his part, but merely to the vicious impulses that lie deeply embedded within the structure of his own personality. <\/span><\/p>\n

This book came to be the first of a series, but can be quite happily read as a standalone novel. Whether its successors lived up to this initial promise, I cannot say, as I have not yet read any of them. Still, this is a book that I heartily enjoyed, even though fantasy is not a genre that I normally read. Highly recommended. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>It was interesting to see that Holdstock allowed a cameo appearance for the Celtic goddess Epona, who lies at the centre of my Victorian gothic ghost story of the same name<\/a>. In the latter tale, however, it is the downland of Wiltshire rather than a pocket of ancient woodland that provides the backdrop against which the drama unfolds. <\/span><\/p>\n

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