Something for Your Shelves: Mythago Wood

Another book up for discussion - curiously, once again with an introduction by Neil Gaiman: Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood. I'm going to discuss matters in the book and its wider context below, but, yes,  I can recommend it.

This edition published 2014.

It is curious that quite a few places I have read about this it tends to get touted for it's originality. I don't disagree that it is a well-crafted and unique work, but it does seem to fit into a sub-sub genre niche quite nicely. I'd be tempted to place it alongside Alan Garner, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (and Rewards and Fairies - which is the original context for the much-quoted 'If...' and arguably puts a different complexion on things), bits of TH White and Gaiman's own Stardust (noisms's discussion of rustic fantasy here may be relevant). I don't know if 'wooded wonderland full of historical/legendary figures in the British countryside' is its own category, but it almost feels like it should be, with its own sub-par parody. Categorisation, however, is not everything.

The rural (sylvan, even) setting aside, the proximity of the fantastical realm to the mundane is important and serves to separate this from a whole hinterland of vaguely Celtic fantasies. You'll note also that Mythago Wood is explicitly for an older audience that those mentioned above. It is perhaps easier to conceive that the wood (even a small wood) is full of fairies, knights and hunters as a child; Holdstock takes his time before entering the forest proper, spending at least half the book making the prospect of mythagos and a vast trackless woodland real.

The mythagos themselves - creatures of the imagination, particular to the mind of an individual but springing from wider cultural images - are notable. It is perhaps a sign of the times that I kept waiting   for this to turn into some wider point about the power of imagination (like something from a Gaiman-pastiche or a popular animated movie). Or indeed, for a darker, Pygmalion-esque angle to enter the picture (this makes me interested to read the sequels, the first of which has a female protagonist). In neither case does this happen, I am glad to say. The titular mythagos remain attached to myth: individual mouldings of a known archetype.

In the same way, part of me wondered if one character taking a firearm into the historic otherworld would be somehow punished by the story. There would be something odd about claiming a particular evil for gunpowder and cordite when so many die at the hands of those wielding Bronze or Stone Age weapons. But the mythagos come up to twentieth century, and gunpowder in the British Isles is older than that.

There's something of the Gothic to it. The crumbling ancestral house next to a source of occult terror, the shadow of a family behind and about you - The Fall of the House of Usher or the House on the Borderlands may come to mind. However, our protagonist is no aristocrat (it is a family of well-off yeomen, friendly but not close to the local squire - money is never quite a problem, but often looks like it might be and certainly would be if not for a quest leaving the world of banks behind) or occultist, whatever explorations his father may have made.

I wonder, could this story have been set in any other landscape? The wide places of a plain leave a little too much open to the eye, the featureless wastes of a desert are so barren of human habitation that the density of cultures and myths could not evolve in the same way and the mountains allow for a curious moment of revelation at the peak (a mythago version of Stardock could be something). A jungle seems too dense; a hedge-crossed bocage too cultivated, if almost as mysterious. An Earthsea (or Odyssey) style isle-studded sea could work. Something for the tabletop? Well, noisms casts doubt on that. But it won't hurt your play to read this.

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One other thing: Mythago Wood is written in the first person, and shows a constant awareness of the weariness caused by travel and fatigue. This is an appealing trait in some forms of genre fiction and fuels my appreciation for thrillers like Rogue Male or The 39 Steps or The Day of the Jackal. Low-tech, lone man tales. You'll find out why I mention those next time....