Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Third reading; first read about 1985.


I remember really liking this book when I first read it, and even when I read it again 5 or 6 years later. I have kept it for almost 30 years, but now I can't really understand why.

Maybe I really liked it because the basic premise was fascinating and new to me. A relatively small dense woodland in England is revealed to be a "ghost" wood, where the further in you go, the bigger it gets. Inside the wood, primal mythological creatures and characters (mythagos) can be brought to life, presumably through the human racial unconscious of the modern day explorers. Two brothers become obsessed with the wood, mostly because both fall in love with one of the mythagos, Gwynneth, the prototype for many of mythology's warrior princess characters. As they become rivals and enemies, the two find that they, in a sense, have become mythagos--the Outsider, who is destined to be killed by his Kin.

Some of the obvious source inspirations for the plot are John Crowley in Little, Big and Jungian psychological theory, but this was not obvious to me when I first read it, so I was quite taken with the plot.

With this reading of the novel, however, I realize that so much more could have been done with the story to impart a dreamlike sense of wonder and fear. The fault is in the presentation, which is "telling" rather than "showing," in a very straightforward, factual, and ultimately boring narrative voice. Both the miraculous and the horrific are stripped of emotional content because of the tone.

Mythago Wood won the British Science Fiction Association Award for best science fiction novel. It is still considered by some to be a classic of the fantasy genre.