© 1984 by Robert
Holdstock
[minor spoilers]
This book has
been on my radar for … hmm … how does thirteen years sound?
I first spotted Mythago Wood on one of the shelves in my
honeymoon suite out in Napa Valley in 2001.
Strange choice of book.
Hardcover. I flipped it open,
ruffled the pages, greatly intrigued by the pencil sketches of various fantasy
creatures within. Couldn’t figure out
what the book specifically was about, even after reading the back cover. Maybe I even read a page or two, but I had
other things on my mind that week.
Anyway, I
spotted a paperback version of it on a dusty old bookshelf in a dusty old
bookstore in a dusty old town in rural Pennsylvania. Recalling my encounter with it from six years
previous, I bought it, brought it home, stuck it on a shelf … where it remained
for seven more ears.
Finally got
around to reading it.
My verdict? Well, it was an interesting read. Didn’t like it but didn’t not like it, either. If you were to graph my experience of the
book with x-axis approximate to page number and the y-axis my degree of
enjoyment, you’d have something resembling a bell curve.
The set-up’s
clever, I’ll grant it that. Imagine a
magical woodland that somehow imagines our myths – into reality. You walk through it and the flow of time and
space is altered, lengthened beyond comprehension. You come face to face with our racial
memories enfleshed. Robin Hood is
mentioned in passing several times, but never makes a cameo. Similarly King Arthur. Instead, Mythago Wood pulls out deeper shared
memories, dating back hundreds and even thousands of years. This being England, Celtic legends come to
life in all their glorious, Roman-fightin’ barbarity.
A family at each
other’s throats lies at the heart of all the tension. After all, what can go wrong when a trio of
dysfunctional men traipse into Mythago Wood, creating living myths with every
step they take? Besides everything, that
is. Eventually the plot devolves to two
brothers fighting to the death over the stunning mythago named Guiwenneth, with
the specter of an evil father, reimaged as a boar-troll-man-bear-pig thing,
stalking them both. Ice Age tribes join
the melee, and, man, do those Stone Age warriors know how to handle a blade
compared to us “civilized” modern-day men.
The book is
interesting to me in the fact that it presents a respectable alternative to
Tolkien. It has long been my contention,
and I suppose the contention of many, many others, that Tolkien made the mold –
trailblazer, standard-bearer, shining city on the hill. Imitated by dozens, if not hundreds, of other
fantasy writers, and whether those writers called their derivative works
homages or just plain rip-offs, the bottom line is Tolkien set the bar
high. Holdstock came up with a way of
dealing with agrarian fantasy without having elves battle dark lords. For that, the book gets an A+.
However, I found
it hard to get into, hard to lose myself within its pages. Harking back to that bell curve image, the
middle parts of the book were the best, where beautiful, ancient Guiwenneth and
our dour young hero Steven discover each other and tentatively come to love one
another. It was both romantic, exciting,
and dangerous (when you consider what else was happening in the novel at the
time). Good writing, authentic
writing. My heart, as was Steven’s, was
all a-flutter.
The major
problem surfaces a little past two-thirds of the way in, after Steven’s
now-evil brother, Christian, abducts Guiwenneth. Steven and his friend Harry Keeton must enter
the Wood, overcome its mysteries and malignancies, and rescue the girl (who has
more often than not rescued Steven time and again). A sense of urgency devolves into the
stumbling upon of new tribes from various eras in the past every five to ten
pages or so. Convoluted myths and
legends are chanted, danced, sung, and ultimately explained to us, a piece is
taken here or there, what’s of significance is told to the reader, and on to
the next ancient tribe. I got lost,
found myself easily distracted, wondering only if Steven was going to kill his
brother to get the girl.
Needless to say,
if anthropology is your thing, you’ll love the book.
Again, it was
not bad, not bad at all. Tweaked I would
have loved it. Instead, I only mildly
liked it. I’m happy I traveled the pages
of Mythago Wood, but I wouldn’t want
to revisit it or its sequels.
Unless …
Grade: C+
No comments:
Post a Comment