The Hollowing by Robert Holdstock

UK cover by Geoff Taylor

The Hollowing (first published in 1993) begins a year after the previous Ryhope Wood book, Lavondyss, and has a brief, baton-passing connection with that book’s characters. Early on, James Keeton, the father of Lavondyss’s protagonist Tallis Keeton, emerges from Ryhope Wood, ragged and wild-looking, a year and fifteen days since he disappeared in search of his still-missing daughter. Obviously broken by this loss (and, no doubt, by his time in the mythic depths of Ryhope), Keeton is taken to a sanatorium, where he’s visited by this book’s main character, Richard Bradley, and Richard’s son Alex, who had something of a connection with Tallis. But Keeton came back clutching one of Tallis’s masks, and when Alex picks it up and looks into it, he opens a “Hollowing” to the heart of Ryhope — a sort of wormhole shortcut by which you can leap from one distant location to another, even one world to another. Alex falls unconscious, and when he recovers, he’s not fully there, only capable of mumbling a few strange words, like “chapel” and “giggler”. Some time later, he disappears, and when his somewhat woody-seeming and highly decomposed body is found at the edge of the wood, Richard and his wife Alice can only mourn for his death. A few years later, though, Richard (now separated from Alice) receives a message from a group of scientists camped in Ryhope Wood, saying they’re in contact with his son and need his help to reach the boy. Alex is not dead, just lost deep in Mythago Wood.

Reluctantly but inevitably, Richard enters the wood, acclimatises to its peculiarities, and arrives at the scientists’ station at Old Stone Hollow to meet its bunch of investigators:

When the Station at Old Stone Hollow had been established, three years ago by the time-standard of the world outside of Ryhope Wood, there had been twenty assorted scientists and anthropologists, all gathered in by Alexander Lytton, all with a specialist field, all made privy to the secrets and oddities of the realm of the wildwood. They had been divided into ten teams of two, but only five of these duets remained extant. Three had disappeared more than two years ago and were presumed dead…

The backstory of the first Ryhope Wood book, Mythago Wood, has a pair of scientists, George Huxley and Edward Wynne-Jones, attempting to use early-20th century instruments to understand the wood’s mythogenic powers, but now we get a whole campful of them. These are not, though, quite the same as The Stone Tape’s band of experts trying to crack the secrets of a haunted room; they’re a bunch of jaded, irritable, and emotionally scarred men and women as far from understanding their object of study as ever, except that they’ve come to know, and be wary of, its many dangers. The station is surrounded by an electronic barrier that repels most mythagos, but also by more traditional warding methods: scarecrows, masks, shields and weapons hung from trees, totem poles. Anything that works. The scientists of Old Stone Hollow are prone to wander into the wood on their own private quests, driven as much by personal stories of loss or need (“Everybody’s looking. Everybody’s seeking. Everybody’s dreaming”) as the desire for scientific understanding. Many have had the experience of going “bosky” — entering so deep into the wood and its mythic world, they lose touch with their modern selves and start to behave like the very myths they’re living among. And they accept this as part of the deal.

One of the leaders of the expedition, a scot named Alexander Lytton, has read George Huxley’s journal and has an obsessive need to somehow make contact with the man himself (even though he knows he’s long dead). He believes the wood was woken to its present active state by George Huxley, and is annoyed that Alex’s destabilising presence is overwriting Huxley’s traces. Alex, Lytton believes, was damaged mentally when he was snatched into the wood. The boy was stripped of the many inner aspects of himself, each becoming a separate mythago, many of them created from his enthusiasm for various myths and legends (he had a particular interest in the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight, but even his interest in dinosaurs has its effect on the wood). Somewhere, though, there’s what Lytton calls the boy’s “protogenomorph”, the “first form of the dreaming mind of the boy”, “the part of him that has waited for you, the part that has been fighting the battle”. Richard, then, has to find his son in the depths of Ryhope Wood and somehow bring him back to wholeness.

One of the new things Holdstock does in The Hollowing is show us the mythically-entangled stories of characters from other parts of the world. There’s Arnauld Lacan, whose entanglement with mythagos began in Brittany where, like the first book’s Stephen Huxley, he fell in love with, and lost, a woman who seems to have been a mythago. More interesting, though, is Helen Silverlock, a Lakota Sioux (Richard is reminded of “Cher from the pop duo Sonny and Cher” — one of the book’s few references to the pop music of its time, it mostly being set in 1967). Her family has been “regularly attacked, abused and destroyed by Coyote”, and she has come to Ryhope in the hope of meeting this particular form of trickster and sorting things out.

The most interesting section of the book, for me, was a longish chapter where Richard, living alone for a while in Old Stone Hollow, encounters a whole ship-load of mythagos, a grizzled crew of cynical Ancient-world warriors with a hold full of plundered wonders and treasures — some of which are living, including a pair of centaurs, a cyclops blacksmith, and the still-singing severed head of Orpheus. This is a gritty, aged version of Jason and his Argonauts, a Jason interested in nothing but gaining and owning treasures, pillaging them wherever his ship lands, and caring nothing for their value except as trophies. In a way, he could be the embodiment of the worst direction the scientists of Old Stone Hollow could go, if they thought of the wood simply as a thing to classify, dissect, and extract exploitable knowledge from. Jason, in this purely possessive aspect, can be seen as the worst possible attitude to take towards the “treasures” of the mythic and imaginative inner worlds. (In many ways, he and his band recall the dark, plundering “Outsider” Christian from the first book.)

US edition, cover by John Jude Palencar, from ISFDB.

In contrast to Jason is Sarin, a woman Jason keeps as one of his items of living plunder in the hold of his ship. She comes from a time when everyone could speak a single language, known as the “Tall Grass language”, as well as each having their own private language (“which they spoke alone, to the moon, or to hidden forces, or to God”). In her time, a great tower was built, stretching high into the sky, before being struck down by the gods as a warning against overreaching arrogance, after which people forgot the Tall Grass language, and could only speak a confusion of their own, secret tongues. Sarin, however, emerged from the fall of the Tower of Babel with her memory of the original language intact, and using it, she can understand and speak all languages, given a little time to work them out. She, in a way, provides a different way of seeing the inner worlds of myth and imagination: as ways to access the one “language” of myth and symbol we all, at some deep level, share, before it’s distorted by individuality and isolation. As Lytton later says of the many mythago-selves Alex was stripped of when he was brought into the wood:

“This is an encyclopaedia of what we have all inherited!”

It’s been a while since I reviewed Mythago Wood and Lavondyss, though I intended to read through the entire series at the time. Lavondyss was just too rich and harrowing an experience to leap straight into another book in the same vein. I’d say The Hollowing is no way near as powerful or focused as Lavondyss, though it’s hard to imagine any author producing another book as powerful as that one. In fact, I found it hard to imagine how Holdstock could ever follow that book, so having his next novel in the Ryhope Wood sequence feel somewhat half-powered is forgivable, even if I would have preferred a more focused story, to make the reading flow a bit better. (I was never drawn back to this book to see what happened next, only to get a bit more reading done.)

The Hollowing’s mythagos are much more fantastic, its world much more plastic, bending and warping far more than Mythago Wood’s did, and so it lacks the first book’s ability to make you feel you were being confronted by living, breathing, often stinking, emanations from a real historical past. It also feels much less connected than Lavondyss did to its main character’s personal darkness, much less singularly focused. Rather, The Hollowing feels like a slice of life in Ryhope Wood — eventful, certainly, but rather scattered and fragmentary. It’s not really clear what Richard Bradley has to do to bring his son back from being lost in the heart of the wood, so for most of the book it feels we’re just sitting around waiting for things to happen. And yes, things happen, but it all feels somewhat disconnected, until, finally, Richard too goes “bosky”, and has his period of living wild in the wood, casting off the shell of his daily self and accessing something more primal. And perhaps this was the necessary step he had to take in order to reach his son, but it still felt that it was something that just happened, rather than something he had any active part in initiating. Still, The Hollowing left me feeling Holdstock has more to say, so I’ll hopefully be reading the next book in the Ryhope Wood sequence soon.

Comments (2)

  1. Aonghus Fallon says:

    “The Hollowing’s mythagos are much more fantastic, its world much more plastic, bending and warping far more than Mythago Wood’s did, and so it lacks the first book’s ability to make you feel you were being confronted by living, breathing, often stinking, emanations from a real historical past. It also feels much less connected than Lavondyss did to its main character’s personal darkness, much less singularly focused.”

    I’ve mentioned ‘Where the Time Winds Blow’ before – I think in response to your review of ‘Mythago Wood’ – and the similarities. On the basis of your description, ‘The Hollowing’ sounds even more like WTWB, plus there are a number of people (a science team, I think?) all trying to investigate the same phenomena.

    I see ‘Bosky’ is derived from the Polish ‘Boski’ meaning – appropriately enough – ‘godlike’.

  2. Murray Ewing says:

    It seems to be a theme of Holdstock’s books (those I’ve read, anyway — which is by no means all of them!) — science and the supernatural. I thought, while reading The Hollowing, that the scientists themselves would turn out to be mythagos, as scientists studying the supernatural are a sort of modern mythic type, one I keep coming across at the moment.

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