Steven Huxley has returned home after recovering from wounds inflicted during the Second World War. He is expecting to find his brother Christian living in the family home with his new wife, a young woman named Guiwinneth. What he finds instead is that Christian has been infected with the same obsession about the nearby forest that afflicted their father, and Guiwinneth is nowhere to be found…
Robert Holdstock (1948 – 2009) was one of the powerhouses of the modern British Science Fiction and Fantasy scene. He wrote short stories and novels across a ridiculously wide range of genres and was brilliant in all of them. But he is probably most famous for Mythago Wood (1984) and its sequels.
Mythago Wood could have been a slightly tawdry historical fantasy about a love triangle (or square). But it becomes a superb exploration of how landscape affects the myths and legends we create; how our ideas about our history can be affected by changing ideas; and how an obsession over what these legends mean and how we can personally have an effect on them leads to tragedy.
I want to talk about the setting first. Ryhope Wood, the wood of the title, is a wilderness that has been largely untouched since prehistoric times. While it has been encroached upon by the surrounding farmlands, the core of it has been left alone. George Huxley (Steven and Christian’s father) discovered a psychic vortex at its heart which throws out energy that can be moulded by our own psyches into the form of real people created by our subconscious desires and knowledge.
The idea of forests being the hiding place of supernatural creatures is ancient, dating back to ancient times. In the last century the concept has been explored by other writers, ranging from forests being a hiding place for people who were trying to escape from the “advanced technology” of the Bronze and Iron Ages, to them being a haven for all sorts of fairy/faery/fae creatures, which range from Tolkien’s Elves to Thomas Burnett Swann’s mythical beasts to the dark forest spirits that live in the primeval forests in the work of Guy Gavriel Kay.
Holdstock places an almost scientific rigour in his writing about the notion. George Huxley and his colleague Edward Wynne-Jones take measurements using primitive equipment to record the psychic energy of the wood, while patiently waiting to see what fragments of mythology – “myth imagos,” hence “mythagos” – they encounter. They also learn that time runs differently the further into the wood you go… just like in the legends and myths.
Holdstock explores the idea of all cultures having legends that can be experienced through the mythagos. It’s made explicit in the sequels where the characters of those books experience psychic creations based on Greek myth (among others), but Steven also experiences a more recent example of myth creation when he explores the wood with his traveling companion, Harry Keeton, a former RAF pilot searching for his own release from a world that has become hellish to him.
At first, we experience the wood through the reminiscences of Steven, who recalls the fond memories of growing up in an idyllic landscape, similar to Richmal Crompton’s William books, or Arthur Ransome’s Swallows And Amazons. It slowly becomes more sinister as he meets some of the mythagos himself. He begins the novel regarding his homecoming as essentially brief, wanting to move on from his past there and forge a new beginning for himself. But through Christian and his mysterious behaviour and disappearances, he finds himself trapped by curiosity and loyalty.
Christian’s motives, though, remain selfish: he wants to “recreate” Guiwinneth. Like his father, he has become obsessed with her as a physical manifestation of the psychic energy of the wood, believing that she has been created for him alone.
Christian disappears into the wood for long periods of time, returning each time as a more seasoned warrior, more in touch with the “spirit” of the forest… and more brutal in his treatment of those around him.
I shan’t talk any more about the plot lest I head into spoiler territory. Let’s focus on some themes and ideas that the book explores and inspires instead.
The obvious one is of the wounded soldier coming home. Steven has been wounded in the war and has come home after recuperating (the idea of a soldier coming home from a far-off conflict to find trouble brewing in places he thought were quiet and safe is at least as old as Homer). This also gives us glimpses of him as some kind of “Fisher King”, a wounded figure who must heal the land and make it whole again.
And with Steven’s brother being named Christian, we can draw a host of ideas in regard to what he represents: the obvious one is religious; Christian has run rampant throughout the wood trying to find Guiwinneth again, desecrating sacred spaces and changing myths as he goes, similar to what happened in more recent times – compared to the myths, that is – when priests and kings brought Christianity to other lands.
But he could also be inspired by Pilgrim’s Progress as well. John Bunyan’s 1678 novel features a man named Christian as its protagonist, and chronicles his journeys through various symbolic landscapes to the Celestial City. Christian in Mythago Wood appears to be making his way through the wood and leaving damage that Steven must later remedy. But he’s also the young hero in one of the later books, a prequel which details the trip he made through the wood with an earlier incarnation of Guiwinneth, suggesting that people don’t always start out as a villain.
I came quite early to Mythago Wood. I first read it in 1986 when I was just beginning to really widen the spectrum of what I was reading and was searching for books that were not just clever but also intelligent. I’d just read the first volume of Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia books and was searching out more like that, when I found this. I already knew Holdstock from his work on the misnamed Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction and thought I’d give him a try.
I was stunned. Steven came across as someone who was wary, having been hurt before, but who was also yearning for a childhood that wasn’t as pleasant as he remembered. His growing disbelief and eventual acceptance of what had happened to his family and the world they had let themselves into was slow in coming – the book takes place across a couple of years – but more believable for it.
I sought out any other novels Holdstock had written over the next couple of years and was duly pleased when a sequel eventually arrived. It was named Lavondyss and told the story of Tallis, the younger sister of Harry Keeton, who travels deep into the wood.
Lavondyss is a haunting tale which received even more plaudits and success than Mythago Wood. It takes many of the themes and ideas of that earlier book and explores them further, laying out more territorial markers in Ryhope Wood than we would have believed possible. There followed several other novels over the intervening years, but none of those really captured the mythological heft and weight that the first book has, or that the sequel develops.
But in other good news, I discovered that I had read a lot more novels by Holdstock than I believed I had: like many jobbing writers during the 1970s and 80s, he took on work for hire, or wrote potboilers that he didn’t want associated with his more literary work.
Two of these series of potboilers were the heroic fantasy series Raven (co-written with Angus Wells under the name Richard Kirk) and the fantasy horror series Nighthunter (written as Robert Faulcon). I’d read several books in both those series and quite enjoyed them, but I got the shock of my life when I learnt that they had been written by the author of Mythago Wood. The Raven books, about a warrior woman wandering through a secondary world, were good fun but you could tell that not much thought had gone into the development of setting and theme, although Raven herself was an interesting character. Nighthunter was a different story: it was the story of Dan Brady, a man whose wife and children had been kidnapped by a satanic cult, and the six books in that series detailed his quest to find them and bring them home. They are great, to be honest, and the way that Brady learns to cast spells and create artefacts that can protect him or help him search for his family comes across as well thought-out. It was genuinely scary and unsettling in a lot of places, too, with the formulaic story often delivering some surprises as the quest continued. It mixed popular culture with ancient myth, and was regarded highly by many, but also as just another exploitative series in the British horror boom that had begun in the late 1970s and continued on for about a decade.
Nighthunter covers a lot of ground that Mythago Wood does, as well: the mixing of mythological ideas that mean different things across different times and places being only one of them. But while Mythago Wood sits firmly in a documented past, Mindhunter lives in a time – like many long-running series of books – that masquerades as the reader’s present but will always be somewhere in the mid-80s.
But it’s Steven’s journey through the wood that I always go back to. His mix of no-nonsense pragmatism in a world where his imagination can take flight and become reality hits just as hard now as it did more than forty years ago.
You can find out more about Robert Holdstock at https://robertholdstock.com/
