Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology, ed. Dan Coxon

PS Publishing 2024, cover by Vince Haig

I was immediately intrigued by this anthology of all-new stories set in the world of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. I wavered a bit over reading it, at first, as generally I’m not so much into fictional worlds as I am the works of individual creators, but all the same I was intrigued to see what other writers might make of Holdstock’s ideas, when there’s so much to explore. What finally decided me was the thought that, if nothing else, these stories were sure to throw some interesting light on Holdstock’s own work.

It’s an anthology of roughly two halves. First, we have the stories of people coming to the wood and encountering the mythagos it generates. A lot of these had the same basic pattern (which isn’t a criticism): childhood memories, or the rumours of something strange going on, usually combined with some loss either in the past or the present, would draw someone to the wood, and there they would start to see that characteristic flickering at the edges of their vision. What worked in this sort of tale was the way it was presented. John Langan’s “Et in Acadia” (not a typo), for instance, is told entirely by a group of adult siblings, reminiscing about their terminally ill brother, and the strange games he led them in as children. Here, it’s the unreliability and variability of memory—particularly of childhood viewed from many years later—that allows the magic to leak through: what’s accepted as a child can only be revealed in all its true strangeness when it’s revisited as an adult. My favourite of this type of story was “Voici Les Neiges d’Antan” by Chaz Brenchley, about the easy friendship of an adolescent boy and girl, who have for years been entering a wood near where they holiday, spending time with what they know is no ordinary being—either a fairy or a mythago—but now one of them decides they want to take things further, go deeper into the wood and meet something different. It’s written with a very light touch, but hits the sense of loss—which is embedded in Holdstock’s work and pretty much every story in this collection—spot on.

The other main type of story, here, is tales of mythagos themselves. These often take place entirely within the woods. They tend to be the more impressionistic or experimental pieces, relying less on plot and more on a sort of evocation of the strange state of being that a mythago must experience. Just to name a couple of favourites, I liked “Mad Pranks and Merry Jests” by Jen Williams for its refusal to be consolatory, and “Calling the Tune” by Lucy Holland, which presented, in scenes scattered across time, the development of a particular mythago from its originating event to its most characteristic, archetypal form, and then to a modern-day manifestation. (And one of the points of interest throughout this anthology is how modern elements get integrated into the world of Ryhope Wood, such as podcasts, mobile phones, internet rumours and the mythago-seeking subcultures that chase those rumours.)

There are a few stories that don’t fit either type. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Paved with Gold”, for instance, in which London is treated as a mythago-generating landscape, was perhaps more the sort of thing I was expecting from this anthology, applying as it does Holdstock’s idea to new landscapes. Tchaikovsky brings out some good ideas, such as how national myth-figures, in their mythago forms, might have a particular attraction for certain ideologies. Another story I immediately liked was “Into the Heart” by Alan Stroud, set in a scientific institute where a mythago has been captured for study—but, of course, there’s no possibility of scientific observation of a mythago, because the observer is as much a part of it as its originating myth.

As to the light these tales threw on Holdstock’s work: one thought I found popping into my head after reading some of them was “mythagos aren’t therapy”. In a few of the stories, it seemed, the mythagos went out of their way to work towards the sort of resolution—in one case, I seem to recall, even laying out a psychological explanation in modern terms—that just didn’t fit with the far more savage process in Holdstock’s novels. Can it, though, be said that Holdstock’s mythagos aren’t therapy? There’s certainly a psychological need behind them—one view of the Huxley family’s interactions with the wood, and in particular with the mythago Guiwenneth, is that it all stems from the loss of Jennifer Huxley, George’s wife and the boys’ mother, and their attempt to compensate for that. I’m pretty sure it’s stated in one of Holdstock’s novels that myths emerge when there is an irreversible change or loss. Myths and mythagos certainly have some sort of cathartic purpose, then, but the way that plays out in Holdstock’s novels is usually savage and excoriating. It’s the therapy of being stripped back to nothing and reborn—as in Tallis’s “I feel violated, consumed; yet I feel loved” from Lavondyss. Harsh, savage, dangerous and difficult, it’s hardly consolatory. Just look at how the mythago Guiwenneth plays out in interaction with each of the Huxley males: all of them lose her, usually multiple times, just as they lost their mother. It’s as though the mythago idea of therapy is to keep hitting you with the trauma till you’re so covered in scar tissue it no longer hurts.

Another thing that stands out is just how strange Holdstock’s own imagination could be, in those savage moments that produced, for instance, the image of a rider bound in burning straw on the back of a wild-running horse. There was something just so dark and archaic in his imagination, and it’s only when you see his ideas in other hands that you realise just how unique to him those moments were. (I think Maura McHugh comes closest, in her story, “Raptor”.)

I will say that I was surprised how many of the tales in Heartwood returned to Ryhope Wood. I’d expected a lot more different locations from around the world, and myths from different cultures. (Perhaps there could be a follow-up anthology, Mythago World.)

Mythago stories are tricky. At what point does a mythago story become just a ghost story, or a monster-in-the-woods story? I still don’t know if I could tell what made the mythago idea so characteristically different. (In the first book, it was perhaps the science fictional approach to fantasy material, but that’s not so much true of the subsequent novels.) Certainly, though, a lot of the writers in this volume—clearly fond of Holdstock’s work—have grasped it.

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The Troy Game by Jean Morris

Bodley Head HB

Jean Morris’s YA novel The Troy Game (1987), set in Dark Ages Britain, starts with Brannock, second son of the King of the Seven Kingdoms, being sent on a mission by the druid-like Elder, Mennor. There are rumours of invaders coming from the east, and Mennor needs a message taken to his Order at Caerdroia. He chooses Brannock because of his ability to use a “bob” to detect not just water and buried metal but hidden paths, as the way to Caerdroia is a secret to those not of the Order. Stopping off at his uncle’s kingdom, Brannock is given his eldest cousin Eilian as a guide, as she has accompanied their own Elder at least to the start of the hidden way. And as they embark on the final section of the journey, Brannock and Eilian begin to realise they are tracing a vast troy, like the ancient, now-fading dance-patterns in their own villages.

The book opens with such impatience to get Brannock on his way (entirely excusable in a YA novel) that the reason for his mission feels almost like an afterthought. Vague rumours of invaders from the east, and Mennor never explaining why he’s not able to take the message himself — it’s evident Morris basically wants to get her pair of protagonists onto the vast troy and tracing its weird path as soon as possible. And the troy is obviously the main point of interest, here, not the invaders from the east. It’s presented as not so much a man-made thing as a concentrated mystical aspect of the land itself. Walking the wrong way doesn’t just get you lost, it produces some dark, nightmare-like experiences; try to shortcut the circular path, and you’ll find yourself ejected and unable to find any part of the troy — entrance, exit, or even where you just were.

Chapters within the troy end with an illustration of the path taken so far…

Perhaps it’s the effect of having read Mythago Wood and its sequels, but the troy, here, feels very much like one of Holdstock’s mythogenic landscapes — particularly with Holdstock using terms like “the oak-vortex”, and “the ley matrix”, as though the troy were just a more ordered version of the same whorls of weirdness. Inside the troy, what seems like a small forest proves to be immense; an old Roman villa with a slightly ghostly inhabitant can be entered at the same point from two different directions; there are sudden changes of weather, as well as of landscape, all just as in Ryhope Wood. There’s even a hint of the same ancient, pre-human world behind it all:

“This was ancient deep forest; not the mild open kind that could be travelled with little trouble, but the oldest oak forest, where men never went, where the vast trees grew and died and toppled and rotted untouched, as they had done since the beginning of the world.”

Beaver/Red Fox PB, 1989

For most of the book, The Troy Game feels at the younger limit of YA — its getting quickly to the journey without bothering with much set-up, the vagueness about the invaders from the east and the broadly archetypal characters (kings and queens as parents, wizard-like old men as village elders) — but things take a disturbing and more complex turn towards the end of the book. The invaders from the east, when encountered, aren’t simply barging in Viking-like and taking over, they’re seeking alliances with the aim of fomenting a civil war, but claim to be merely looking for a new home. (In the wonderfully double-edged words of one of them: “we come in peace but in strength”.) The Elders themselves are divided as to what to do, and their leader seems too weak to really accomplish anything. Mennor, then, makes a desperate move, and summons the Wild Hunt, despite knowing it will not simply attack these invaders, but throw the land itself into chaos:

“The Wild Hunt may be invoked, but not controlled; once the Hunt is up, its prey is everything in its path.”

And that’s what happens. Chaos, then ruin. After recovering from the Hunt’s passing, Brannock begins his journey back from Caerdroia, and it’s as though the air of fantasy has gone from the lands he passes through: he’s out of story and into history. The Seven Kingdoms ruled by his father prove to be seven villages; the invaders from the east — blond and tall — are now scattered among the people of the land, married to village women, with young families already, making a go as farmers, not warriors. Why, then, the terror of the Wild Hunt? It’s as though all the Hunt did was stir everything up in one big land-wide cauldron, then leave people so disorientated there was no room for thoughts of war or conquest, merely survival. The invaders are part of the land now, and the land itself has spent something of its mystical power.

Brannock realises his recovery from the chaos of the Wild Hunt didn’t just take weeks or months, but perhaps years. None of his relatives recognise him. After the younger-end-of-YA feel at the start of the novel, there’s a distinct note of something broken and lost — the magic has gone away, and the Dark Ages story-world of kings and queens and elders has been replaced by a more realistic land of farmers and villagers repairing roofs and tilling the land.

None of this is overly examined and, in a way, that makes it less immediately dark than it sounds, but also more mysterious. Still, there’s a haunting feeling to the ending, the sense that the world has irretrievably changed from the magical-mystical to the historical. As a story — particularly read as an adult — it feels a little unsatisfying, but nevertheless there’s a poetic air which is quite appropriate for such a short book.

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Avilion by Robert Holdstock

Published in 2009, Avilion is the last in Holdstock’s Mythago Wood series, coming out twenty five years after the book that started it all. Yet it’s the most direct sequel to Mythago Wood so far, with a return to the story of that novel’s protagonists Steven and Guiwenneth. Its focus, though, is on the couple’s children, Jack and Yssobel.

At the end of Mythago Wood, Steven settled in a valley near the heart of the forest, awaiting Guiwenneth’s return. Now we find him still there, living in the somewhat-repaired ruins of a Roman villa with Guiwenneth, their two children, and a few others who have wandered by and ended up staying. Steven, of course, is human, while Guiwenneth is a mythago. Their children, then, are half-human, half-mythago — half of the strange, magical wood, half not. Both children are intensely aware of this. Yss calls them her “red” and “green” sides; Jack comes to think of them as the human and the “Haunter”. The “green side”, as Yss calls it, is “the side that calls the strongest; and when it calls, you have no resistance to it.” Both feel an obsessive draw, just as a mythago does to the story-pattern of its originating myth. Yss feels it for the centre of the wood, for the region of Lavondyss, which she has named Avilion; Jack, on the other hand, is drawn to the edge, to the world of humans, to Oak Lodge where his father grew up. Both also catch glimpses of family mythagos: Jack sees his grandfather George Huxley, whose scientific mind means he cannot help being aware that he is a mythago; Yss glimpses what she calls the “resurrected man”, whom she and Gwin come increasingly to realise is Steven’s brother Christian. Yss is intrigued by this figure, but Gwin is horrified. Christian is “The man who stole me! The man who raped me! The man who sent his guard to kill me!” When a small portion of the travelling mega-army Legion passes by, Gwin tags along, knowing this is how she’ll find Christian and get her revenge for what was done to her. Yss then leaves to find her mother, knowing she’ll do so in Avilion. Jack, who has ventured out to Oak Lodge, turns back to the woods, intent on bringing back his sister.

Geoff Taylor cover

Holdstock, I think, also has his “red” and “green” sides. Mythago Wood was narrated by the “red” side, viewing Ryhope Wood’s strangeness from the perspective of Steven, who was having to learn how it all worked. Its plot was a quest plot, driven by love and revenge, and the narrative felt straightforward, following a relatively conventional story logic. Some of the later books, though, like The Hollowing or the novella The Bone Forest, seem more written by the “green” side, full of a constant stream of weird events, coming almost too fast to process them or find a stable narrative, so that it’s the onrush of strangeness and savagery that impresses, rather than narrative coherence. I think that, in Avilion, he’s found a more easily readable balance between these two sides. There’s still the strangeness, the wood-myth-logic of this unstable world, where the land can shift and a forest rise up from a lake, or an army emerge from the ground, but the narrative feels a bit more follow-able. There’s something a little calmer, less intensely “bosky” (to use the term for the wood-madness humans can suffer in The Hollowing) about the story, making it more digestible.

There’s still the same striking moments of invention. Here, for instance, we have a race of non-humans called the Amurngoth, a form of Iaelven (elf), though of a distinctly Holdstockian, woody type: these are “tall, lank-haired, cat-eyed creatures” who speak with a “whistling and clicking”, clad in leaves and furs. These are one of the many pillaging/collecting types in the Mythago books — something that has been present, to various degrees, from the start, from George Huxley’s collecting of arrowheads and other knickknacks recovered from the wood, to The Hollowing’s Jason, plundering the many mythic realms of all their treasures. The Amurngoth venture from the wood to abduct human children, leaving in their place “changes”, shaped pieces of wood that come to life in the manner of mythagos. The Amurngoth, however, believe that they created humans in the first place — whose name, in their tongue, means “violent children”, though the Amurngoth aren’t exactly peaceful themselves — but as another character points out, “There is no such thing as truth here. Whatever this monster believes is true, is its own truth, insofar as it’s true to itself.” The Amurngoth have their own myths. The practice of stealing human children, though, is part of their belief that “loss is necessary for understanding”, and loss is one of the themes, I think, of the Mythago Wood books.

2012 French edition, art by Guillaume Sorel

Another theme, even in those that don’t feature the Huxleys, is family. In Mythago Wood we were presented with a quietly dysfunctional family: the obsessive, distant father George sacrificing all for his study of the wood, the isolated and eventually suicidal mother Jennifer. The tensions in this set-up played out in exaggerated form thanks to the mythogenic wood’s bringing out into reality the deepest parts of the unconscious, and so there we had the frightening Urscumug as an image of the darkest aspect of the domineering father, and Christian’s transformation from brother to grizzled, rapacious Outsider. In Avilion, the next Huxley generation is far more functional and loving of one another, but it is still dealing with the effects of the past. Gwin, certainly, is most affected, with her need for vengeance on Christian. Jack and Yss’s obsessions can be read as being down to their part-mythago nature, but also because they’re the children of traumatised parents, and a result of that invisible handing down of unresolved conflicts from one generation to the next. Certainly, Yss’s justifications for her need to enter the heart of the wood are vague, and speak to an incompleteness she oughtn’t to feel, with her loving, supportive upbringing:

“I want to go to the centre of the earth because I think I will find there who I am… Because I will find my way home there. I will find someone I care for.”

She and Jack are both (literally) haunted by family ghosts.

2015 French edition, art by Alain Brion

Avilion is the last of the Mythago Wood books. Sadly, Robert Holdstock died some months after its release. He’d already been working on other series, but to me it seems likely he might have returned to Ryhope Wood again, even if it was ten or twenty years down the line. But Avilion, as we have it, is a fine conclusion, feeling as though it resolves the story of George, Christian and Steven Huxley — and, though to a lesser extent, Guiwenneth — from that first book. (It’s only Jennifer, the mother, present mostly throughout the series by her absence, that never had her story properly told.) The unspoken, mostly suppressed, tensions in that initial family, made physically explicit by the mythogenic powers of Ryhope Wood, have played out, finding some resolution — as far as such things can resolve — in the next generation, a generation who are half of the human world, half of the wood.

I don’t think every book in the series is an essential read — it could even be reduced to Mythago Wood, Lavondyss, Avilion — but I can’t help feeling that, for Holdstock, every book was nevertheless an essential write, as he explored, and played with, this very strange, fruitful, and constantly-live idea of the forest that brings the archetypes of the collective and personal unconscious into a living reality. It’s been some years since I started reviewing the series on this blog (intending to read them through in one go — but they were just too intense for that), but now I’m tempted to return to that first book, and read it again, seeing how it feels now I know the whole saga…

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