fantasy, page 11 of 88

First published in the US in 1997 (and in the UK in 1998 as Gate of Ivory), this is the first full-length novel in the Ryhope Wood sequence since 1993’s The Hollowing — and one that, along with Mythago Wood itself and the 1991 novella The Bone Forest, forms a series-within-a-series focusing on the Huxley family. The youngest, Steven, was the protagonist of Mythago Wood; father George was the protagonist of The Bone Forest; here, the main character is Christian, Steven’s elder brother, who in the first novel enters Ryhope in search of the Celtic princess Guiwenneth — or his mythago-version of her, anyway — then returns as an aged and grizzled warrior, leader of a piratical band, and proceeds to hang his younger brother. Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn was originally meant to be the story of how Christian became that dark, would-be-fratricidal monster, but, as Holdstock says in his afterword to the Gateways Essentials edition: “In the end, I didn’t take the story as far as originally intended. A deeper and more exotic tale of love and frustration took over” — that tale being the story of Issabeau and the man known throughout most of the novel as Someone Son of Somebody. (A slightly annoying name, as I’d quite often have to go back over a sentence beginning the likes of “Someone touched his right hand to his breast” when I realised the someone referred to wasn’t just someone, but this specific Someone.)

The novel starts out dark enough, with the boy Christian witnessing — and being unable to prevent — his mother’s suicide. Later, once his father disappears into the wood and his younger brother is overseas recovering from the Second World War, Christian encounters the mythago Guiwenneth — at first his father’s version of her, then his own — and, falling in love with her as all the Huxley males seem doomed to, follows her deep into the forest’s mythogenic depths. There, he becomes part, alongside her, of a band of adventurers known as the Forlorn Hope (among whom are the French sorceress and shape-changer Issabeau and the Celtic warrior Someone Son of Somebody). He learns that the Forlorn Hope (whose name made me realise for the first time that Ryhope Wood could be read as “Wry Hope”) is part of a much larger band — or rather, army — known as Legion. Legion is a 4,000-strong gathering of mythagos from the entire mythic spectrum, united by a leader, Kylhuk, as part of his attempt to fulfil a quest he took on as a young man. Cursed by his stepmother to be unable to wed any woman till he has first won the hand of the giant’s daughter Olwen, Kylhuk was given three tasks by Olwen’s father, one of which involved seeking a simple answer from one person, whose whereabouts were only known to one other person, whose whereabouts, in turn, were only known to one other person — on and on, until this quest had come to encompass “a total of thirty-six individual deeds”. Legion, the army Kylhuk has gathered along the way, has expanded into a sort of business, which carries out a constant stream of side-quests to gain favours, achieve sub-aims, or simply to get enough fodder to keep this army of mythagos going — an army that warps the very fabric of reality when it moves.

It’s when the Forlorn Hope rejoin Legion, and Christian gets to meet Kylhuk (whom he met, and was marked by in a mysterious way, as a boy), that the novel has a change in tone unprecedented in any of the Ryhope Wood books: it becomes playful, even funny. But the style of humour fits, because it’s a folkloristic style of humour. The way, for instance, that Kylhuk’s quest to find so-and-so, by way of so-and-so, by way of so-and-so, expands person by person into a virtually lifelong task, is told in the way it would be in a folk tale, as a series of repeated formulas that become humorous through repetition. Or, there’s the way that, when Christian finds himself having to fight a friend and fellow member of the Forlorn Hope after some imagined (and humorous) slight, he argues that yes, the fight should go ahead, but it’s most fitting that it be fought entirely with the feet. Or, a joke on the tangled folklore around King Arthur, when it’s revealed that Uther in fact had three sons, and named them all Arthur, and “because they were identical, their exploits far and wide became known as the exploits of one man only, and Arthur’s name became associated with magical appearances and the ability to ride the length and breadth of Albion in a single night.”

Kylhuk himself is a semi-comic figure. A commanding presence, feared and respected by the mythagos he has gathered around him, he becomes somewhat ridiculous when it’s unintentionally pointed out he’s gained a bit of weight around the middle, and goes into a sulk, claiming to have been insulted, only coming out of it when he finds some fittingly heroic way of going on a diet — which he breaks as often as he can, given the most spurious (but superficially honourable) excuse.

Kylhuk is a kind of figure that’s appeared in the Ryhope Wood sequence before: he reminded me, with his legion of mythagos picked from the entire spectrum of myth, of Jason in The Hollowing, who’d progressed from capturing the Golden Fleece to leading his Argonauts on an endless pillage of all the treasures the many worlds of myth had to offer. Kylhuk isn’t pillaging treasures, but he’s gathering a band around him in a similar way, and has that same singleminded air. He’s nowhere near as dark a figure as The Hollowing’s Jason, though, so to make up for that lack of darkness, Kylhuk gets a rival, Eletherion, another leader of another band, this time a band that is dedicated to plundering — who wants to use the ultimate object of Kylhuk’s quest (locating a man called Mabon, who’s imprisoned near the gates of the Underworld) to enter the Underworld and plunder that most fantastic of realms of its many treasures.

(And I can’t help drawing a sort of parallel between these myth-plundering figures and Holdstock himself. What else is he doing in writing the Ryhope Wood sequence, but making free of the many imaginative riches of myth and folklore, and forming his own bands of plundered heroes from their many worlds, to enact his own singleminded quest — not for treasure, but to write novels.)

The singlemindedness of these figures’ quests, and the way they can darken or dehumanise a character, makes me think that one theme of the Ryhope Wood stories — and in particular those that involve the Huxley family — is masculinity in its darker aspects. George Huxley, the patriarch of the family, is the essence of a domineering masculinity, whose family become not just sidelined by his obsession with Ryhope, but victims of it, as typified most of all by his wife’s suicide, which in the first novel at least seems to be down to Huxley’s emotionally abusive neglect. Each male member of the Huxley family then becomes obsessed with his own version of Guiwenneth — who is, as a mythago, a personally-tailored fantasy, unconsciously designed by each man to encapsulate all the missing femininity he longs for… But who, it’s subtly pointed out, may just be an echo of that initial loss of the wife/mother, Jennifer. (When Christian mentions his mother’s name to the boatman-of-the-dead Elidyr, the man mishears it at first as “Guinevere”, which is just a half step towards “Guiwenneth”.) If the Ryhope Wood sequence is about masculinity, it’s about that part that’s defined by the loss of all that’s centred around the feminine. If the grizzled warrior that Christian becomes in Mythago Wood is grizzled by anything, it’s that loss of, obsessive quest for, and masculine need to control/own, the feminine as represented by Guiwenneth/Jennifer.

But in this novel, Holdstock was perhaps in too good a mood to take Christian all the way down the dark path we know he follows. Unable to give Christian a happy ending, though, he displaces this book’s resolution onto another figure: Someone Son of Somebody, who gained his lack-of-name when his father was killed on the battlefield before being able to name him. Taken away from his mother and left in a sacred grove to fend for himself, he echoes Christian’s lack of a relationship with his distant father, and the loss of his mother. But Someone gets his name in the end, and also gains his love — Issabeau — while Christian, burdened by the role he must play in Mythago Wood, does not.

Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn is a much less striking novel than the first two. Mythago Wood remains essential for introducing the idea of mythagos, and Lavondyss — the only novel in the series to focus on a female character — remains the most powerful in its exploration of loss, and the stark lengths required to achieve redemption. Holdstock’s imagination now moves with too much momentum to recapture the subtlety of the first novel, and perhaps no-one could be expected to write something as harrowing and redemptive as that second novel twice in a lifetime. Now, I think, the Ryhope Wood books are to be read as grab-bags of ideas, events, images, as opportunities to dwell in this strange realm of the mythic imagination, and experience its many facets, moods, and ways of working. It doesn’t have the same sense, as those first two books did, of raw contact with the sheer unforgiving, starkly inhuman dream-illogic to be found at the deepest roots of myth — but perhaps that can’t be sustained by anyone. Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn at least feels like it’s trying out new things (humour), throwing out new images, even if it doesn’t feel like an essential read in the Ryhope Wood sequence.

It certainly doesn’t, to me, feel it’s adding to the characterisation of Christian Huxley, who comes across as pretty much indistinguishable from every other male protagonist of a Ryhope Wood novel — and so doesn’t really fit in with the image of him as presented in Mythago Wood. But perhaps it’s the wrong approach to expect this series, of all series, to be adding up to one single story — rather, each subsequent book is a mythago sprung from the original, and mythagos are individually different, fitting the needs of the person who calls them out of the wood (the needs, in this case, of Holdstock himself as he progresses through his creative career). The Christian of Gate of Ivory, then, is not the Christian of Mythago Wood, but another Christian who grew from the same mythic mulch — and he, unlike that initial Christian, might go on to have a happy ending, or he might not. He might go on to hang his brother, or he might not. All we can know is he was used to tell this story, this time.

There’s one more novel in Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood sequence, Avilion, which I believe revisits Steven from the first novel. I intended, when I reviewed Mythago Wood back in 2017, to work my way through the series as swiftly as I did Le Guin’s Earthsea, or, more recently, the Harry Potter novels. (And it’s odd to think Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn came out in the same year as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and Pullman’s The Subtle Knife.) But I don’t think these books can be read so quickly — at least, not by me. I’ll read Avilion, hopefully soon, but certainly — when the time is right.

The Waterfall Box was John Gordon’s fourth YA novel, published in 1978. The box of the title is a small (“no higher than a teacup”) box of heavy, dark wood, ornately carved and bearing the words “IN TIME OF NEED” on the outside. It belonged, a few centuries back, to Silas Waterfall, known as Potter Waterfall for his founding of the Waterfall Pottery and his invention of his own unique green glaze. The box has been passed down — not to Waterfall’s descendants, as he had none, but to those of his housekeeper — until, in the present generation, it and the item it held (a small, sealed flask containing an unknown liquid) have been inherited by sisters Alice and Martha, one of whom has the box, the other the flask. There’s a family injunction never to sell these items, but whereas Martha married into money (her husband Richard now runs the Waterfall Pottery), Alice isn’t so well-off, and when she’s approached by antiques dealer Harman (“buying up the past to sell to the present”) offering her a substantial sum for the box — enough for her, her husband, and teenage son Bran to escape “this narrow house, squeezed by its neighbours in a crawling ant-run of a street” — she at first refuses, but, when Harman’s gone, changes her mind. She and her husband go out to celebrate the decision, and are killed in an accident.

Bran inherits the box, and is moved in with his aunt Martha, uncle Richard and his teenage cousin Sandy, who falls into an instant flirtation with him. (Even though Sandy’s parents are well-off, she’s impressed by the fact that, because he has the money from the sale of his parents’ small house, Bran is “rich”.) But it’s not long before Harman is back, claiming the sale of the box was agreed (even though he couldn’t know Alice changed her mind and decided to sell it after he’d gone). And by this time Bran has learned there’s more to the box than its being a mere antique. As well as a potter, Silas Waterfall was an alchemist, and it’s possible the liquid in the flask is the Alkahest (the “universal solvent” required as part of the process of turning lead into gold), while the pottery base of the box might be the Philosopher’s Stone.

By this point, the novel is following two strands. In the one, we have the development of Bran’s relationship with Sandy, in the other we have Harman’s desire to own the Waterfall Box. We never learn much about Harman, why he wants the box or how much he knows, only that he seems to know more than he rightly should. He approaches other people in the village, including Sandy’s best friend Stella, recruiting them to gain information about where the box and its now-reunited flask are kept. Harman has the patient-impatient air of a man who knows he’s close to getting what he wants, something he’s wanted for a long time, and believes he’s entirely capable of getting, by whatever means necessary. And there’s more than a spooky air about this shadowy figure, as we learn he’s able to call on a supernatural strength at times.

But it’s clear the relationship strand is Gordon’s focus. Bran is attracted to Sandy, and Sandy is flirtatious with Bran, but the situation is more complex than boy-meets-girl. Prior to reading The Waterfall Box, I read Gordon’s first book of short stories, The Spitfire Grave and Other Stories, and noted there how a four-person teen relationship dynamic showed up in several stories, most notably “Better the Devil You Know” (about a girl deciding how much gruff masculinity she wants in a boyfriend, and gets a close encounter with something perhaps-supernaturally both beast-ish and man-ish to help her decide). There, you have an intelligent, sensitive, slightly loner-ish main boy; a tough, at first belligerent, but ultimately principled rival boy; an attractive, though superficial, better-off girl who flirts with both boys, even playing them off each other; and a quieter girl, the other girl’s “best friend” in an uneven relationship, giving way to her but clearly more sensitive and worthy of the main boy’s love. That quartet is here, too, with Bran as main boy and Sandy as flirtatious girl, then Sandy’s “best friend” (as in “She’s my best friend and I hate her”) Stella as the quieter girl, and her amateur boxer of a boyfriend Griff (who Stella knows is really attracted to Sandy) as the belligerent rival. It’s obviously a tangle Gordon himself felt the need to revisit and rework, a mess of male identity (being tough versus being quiet and sensitive) and sexual attraction (the more flirtatious and outgoing girl who too-quickly changes loyalties, or the more serious girl who puts herself in the background), all superheated by teenage hormones, and with an added dose of class tensions (the more flirtatious girl is more well-off, the quieter girl is poor) just to keep things difficult. (Or, now I think about it, is it to keep things simple?)

The TLS review of The Waterfall Box (1st December 1978, by Gillian Cross) criticised the incompatibility of these two narrative strands:

“In practice, however, the two elements of the book act against each other. The fate of the alchemist’s enigmatic legacy is almost totally subordinate to the interaction of the characters. The violent implications of the mystery undercut the more prosaic teenage romance. It is hard, for example, to be patient with the long accounts of Bran’s reactions to Sandy’s sexual teasing when his grief for his parents—who are killed a quarter of the way through the book—merits only half a page of description. The final effect is one of insubstantiality, of a sketch for a powerful book with neither the incidents nor the characters to flesh it out.”

But I think the point is that Bran can’t resolve the situation with Harman and the box till he resolves the inner tangle of his relationships, and so sorts out his own values and priorities. Just as Harman’s offer to buy the box means easy money, in a crude way Sandy is easier in terms of sexual relationships, but ultimately both are shallow and perhaps (though we’re never given an explicit reason to feel Harman is evil, only that he has the air of it) immoral. It’s only by coming together in the right combination that Bran and the others can see Harman off, once his more supernatural aspects come to the fore.

Still, I do agree it’s not an entirely successful novel — but more because the supernatural aspects are worked out a little too quickly, with a lot of rushing about and characters intuiting things about Harman at the last minute, as a means of defeating him. I think that aspect of the novel needed more laying out of a few clues as to how Harman could be defeated, and perhaps about his motives, too, just to make the victory feel a bit more morally satisfying.

The Waterfall Box, as far as I can tell, seems only to have been published in hardback in the UK, with no subsequent paperback edition. This makes it quite difficult to find (and a little more expensive than I’d normally pay for a book of this vintage). Still, I think it’s an interesting part of Gordon’s work, clearly developing some of his concerns (and a better novel, on a first read at least, than The Ghost on the Hill, which I read last year but didn’t write about because it was too confusing on a first read — but which did get a paperback edition). Valancourt Books have recently reissued Gordon’s most well-known (among readers of weird fiction, anyway) novel, The House on the Brink, and I wonder if they’re going to work through his others, in which case The Waterfall Box might get a paperback edition at last. Who knows?

Writing about Finlay’s 1973 YA novel Beadbonny Ash, I quoted Jessica Kemball-Cook on how that book, and Finlay’s previous novel Singing Stones (1970), were a departure for the veteran children’s writer into “fantasy of the Alan Garner kind”, and that Beadbonny Ash was her masterpiece. Despite the only copy costing about £30 secondhand, I was intrigued enough to want to read the earlier of these two novels as well, so I gave in and bought it.

Singing Stones is the story of Christie, an “imaginative and highly strung” teen holidaying with her brother and his schoolfriend in Scotland, mostly staying with her Gran. (Christie is noted as being English, at least in accent, but her mother is Scottish, and works in Aberdeen, lecturing on Scottish history. Why she’s called English, then, is a mystery, unless, like her brother, she has been sent to a boarding school in England.) Her high-strungness is, initially, presented as her being strongly affected by the histories of places she visits, particularly if there are violent stories attached. Shortly before the novel begins, she finds a small stone, “cold and smooth and green, with claw marks round the edges where it had been set as the centre piece of a brooch or pin, and engraved in the middle a queer little creature with long snout and curled feet and tail” — this queer little creature being, Christie says, what scholars call “a Pictish Beast”. Wandering around Edinburgh in the first chapter, she enters the antique shop of one Hildebrand Dalton Cunningham and finds the stone’s twin. She asks how much it is and the shop assistant goes to ask the owner, then comes back and says it’s worthless, but she can have it for “three and six”. She buys it. Holding both stones together, she hears a strange and beautiful music and feels a deep longing to see a certain loch… Spooked, she leaves the shop without her change, then is pursed through Edinburgh by the shop owner, who may just be seeking to give her her money, or who might be after her, she can’t help feeling, for some more sinister purpose.

Christie recognises the two “Pictich Beast” carvings on the twin stones from the Dunfallandy Stone, a carved Pictish cross-slab within walking distance of her Gran’s house, and visits it the next day. The presence of the Singing Stones brings the Pictish Beasts — here identified as water-horses, faerie beasts who’ve been known to coax a man into riding them before taking him down to the bottom of a loch — out of the stone. They assure her they’re not going to drag her into the nearest loch. Since the coming of Christianity, they were given the option of either leaving the land or only doing good, so they opted to do good. Instead, they’ve come to tell Christie that she is to be part of a desperate struggle to save Scotland — and, presumably, the rest of the world — from the machinations of Loki, who wants to bring about a second Ragnarok and end the power of “the One and Only God”. Christie’s task is to recover the lost Tale behind the Pictish sculptor Talorcan’s greatest creation. It was Talorcan who carved the Dunfallandy Stone, but his greatest work is now lost. The story of how it came to be lost — and, hence, the clue to its present location — needs to be recovered to prevent Loki from using its power, and the way to recover the Tale is for Christie to relive its key moments, using the Singing Stones.

Just as in Beadbonny Ash, Christie experiences these trips to the past by becoming someone back then, but here these are only brief dips, episodes rather than that novel’s feeling of being completely transported to former years. Christie is also much more cognisant that, as well as being (for instance, in one such episode) an old woman recently made homeless by English soldiers and wandering the Scottish countryside when she sees two monks hiding a large carved stone, she’s also the modern teen Christie. Her experiences are much more like vivid dreams.

Each chapter, she dips into the past, but there’s also a lot about her life in the present, holidaying with her Gran, visiting Edinburgh or the site of the Battle of Culloden, squabbling with her younger brother Iain or taking her Gran’s dog MacDougall for a walk. Unlike Beadbonny Ash (whose central character was dealing with the death of her father and a break in her relations with her mother), there’s no real plot to these present-times sequences, they’re more there to provide a bit of light comedy, and to give Christie time to wonder what’s going on.

Until, that is, she meets the antiques dealer Hildebrand Dalton Cunningham again, and this time knows he’s really Loki, “the evil one, the shape-changer”, who’s after her because she can get him access to the sculptor Talorcan’s greatest creation. But even then, the real supernatural action — which brings on Jormungandr the Midgard Serpent and the Fenris-Wolf, along with a host of faerie beasties — takes place in the dreamlike world of Christie’s dips into the folkloristic past.

Finlay is obviously fascinated by the point at which the ancient culture of Scotland gave way to Christianity. In Beadbonny Ash it was presented more realistically, in terms of gods as cultural rather than supernatural powers, while here she brings on faerie creatures and a pagan god in a magical battle for the world that now belongs to “the One and Only God”. The feeling is, perhaps, less like Alan Garner and more like some of the episodes in The Box of Delights, with their actual trips into the mythic past, though in this case building to an overall supernatural confrontation that mixes the powers of gods with the more mundane but equally potent power-sources of friendship and family.

I have to agree that Beadbonny Ash is the better of the two books, largely because of the way it mixes a difficult modern storyline with a weird dip into the pagan past, but Singing Stones is interesting, too, for the way it slips Christie into inhabiting people from the past — including, at one point, a faerie woman, or a “Woman of Peace”, as they were known — and how, just as in dreams, she sees the other major characters in those past events being played by people she knows in the present. It would have been good to read more from Finlay in the same vein, but she stopped writing fiction after Beadbonny Ash (largely, it seems, due to health reasons). If nothing else, she added a Scottish element to the 1970s British folk-fantasy genre, which otherwise tended towards Wales as the locus of mythic power and supernatural shenanigans. Like Garner, she based her fantasies on very real landscapes already haunted by the past — here, Christie visits a series of carved stones, battlefields and so on, real places a reader might actually visit, bringing their folkloristic past a little more to life.