It might be because my ur-forest-of-Europe looks much more like Hexwood, and I should have read his works earlier in life.
I was in college: I had a slightly under-the-table position teaching Latin at a summer school, so every day I was walking home past the same little used book store on Mass. Ave. and seeing the U.S. editions of Mythago Wood and Lavondyss with their Thomas Canty covers in the sci-fi and fantasy, looking at once like crystally Celtic twee-fey and like something that might be messier and wilder, with more earth and blood; I would open one at random and get a passage about a flight of birds from within the ribs of a creature made of holly-jags, but then I would read the back-cover text and it all sounded too Jungian for words. I was finally curious enough to go home with Mythago Wood and I did love it, even if I have my doubts about the historicity of Holdstock's Bronze Age. I like the strangeness of the books: the way Mythago Wood feels almost like a pre-Tolkien throwback with its explanatory mad science and old hauntings moving under the surface, then breaking through; I have never encountered anywhere else quite the atmosphere he evokes for Ryhope Wood and he repeats the trick with Lavondyss, adding masks and shamanism. Everything is dirty enough to feel like archaeology. You don't recognize anything entirely. And he really does write a good autumn, which counts for something with me.
Hexwood is a good point of comparison, though.
I was expecting to like Mythago Wood et al, but the complete lack of awareness of the characters about the mythic history of their own area kept being tooth-rattlingly jarring.
I don't think it jarred for me: Mythago Wood because one of the points is how disconnected its characters have become from the ghosts-in-the-land they are carrying around in their heads, Lavondyss for similar reasons of excavating the myth underneath the ribbons and the mumming ritual. The Hollowing lost me completely once it attempted to introduce Greek heroes into the British mythscape, though.
no subject
I was in college: I had a slightly under-the-table position teaching Latin at a summer school, so every day I was walking home past the same little used book store on Mass. Ave. and seeing the U.S. editions of Mythago Wood and Lavondyss with their Thomas Canty covers in the sci-fi and fantasy, looking at once like crystally Celtic twee-fey and like something that might be messier and wilder, with more earth and blood; I would open one at random and get a passage about a flight of birds from within the ribs of a creature made of holly-jags, but then I would read the back-cover text and it all sounded too Jungian for words. I was finally curious enough to go home with Mythago Wood and I did love it, even if I have my doubts about the historicity of Holdstock's Bronze Age. I like the strangeness of the books: the way Mythago Wood feels almost like a pre-Tolkien throwback with its explanatory mad science and old hauntings moving under the surface, then breaking through; I have never encountered anywhere else quite the atmosphere he evokes for Ryhope Wood and he repeats the trick with Lavondyss, adding masks and shamanism. Everything is dirty enough to feel like archaeology. You don't recognize anything entirely. And he really does write a good autumn, which counts for something with me.
Hexwood is a good point of comparison, though.
I was expecting to like Mythago Wood et al, but the complete lack of awareness of the characters about the mythic history of their own area kept being tooth-rattlingly jarring.
I don't think it jarred for me: Mythago Wood because one of the points is how disconnected its characters have become from the ghosts-in-the-land they are carrying around in their heads, Lavondyss for similar reasons of excavating the myth underneath the ribbons and the mumming ritual. The Hollowing lost me completely once it attempted to introduce Greek heroes into the British mythscape, though.