2009 Reading #109: Mythago Wood
Dec. 19th, 2009 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snurriBooks 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
Books 91-100.
101. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman.
102. Brown Harvest by Jay Russell.
103. Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos, Charles Johnson, editor and Se Yang, associate editor.
104. Summer of '49 by David Halberstam.
105. The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter.
106. Black Betty by Walter Mosley.
107. She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea by Joan Druett.
108. Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater.
109. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (Reread). It's dangerous to revisit books that loom large in one's mind--there is always the danger that a second look will reveal flaws that one had not suspected. For the most part, that isn't true of this book. Just yesterday this post reminded me of something I'm not sure I ever knew--Holdstock was a science fiction writer before he became interested in the concepts that suffuse Mythago Wood and its descendants. It makes perfect sense. This is a fantasy novel with an SFnal approach: in Part 1 a concept is introduced, in Part 2 it is made manifest, and in Part 3 the protagonist and the reader are carried inside it. That it's not science, exactly, but Jungian theory melded with a sort of deeply speculative anthropology--really, the "leaf-mold of the mind" that Tolkien spoke of--is what makes this book feel at once so rigorous and so richly fantastic; Ryhope Wood and the phenomena that surround it begin to seem not just wondrous but somehow enchantingly, horribly plausible.
If there's a caveat, it's that this story is very much out of the boy's-adventure-tale tradition, and while the outsider/conqueror/colonist dynamic is subverted at least in part, the gender dynamic is problematic in a way that's never really explored. Guiwenneth is a construct of Steven's or Christopher's or both, a literal dream girl, and yet the implications of this with regards to her own identity and their relationships are almost entirely ignored. Still, as Justine has recently discussed, it is possible to love something and accept that it's flawed. After all, a perfect novel may well be an impossibility; maybe it shouldn't even be the goal.
It's a bit unsettling for me to think back to when I first encountered this book--somewhere around the mid-'90s--and realize that I remember very little of it, not even why precisely I liked it so much. I was absolutely a less critical and less cognizant reader back then, and yet Mythago Wood hit me at a time when I was slipping out of the grasp of trilogy fantasy, looking for something more substantive and interesting; if I hadn't found this and books like it I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't have moved out of the genre entirely, at least for a time. I wish I had had the opportunity to thank Mr. Holdstock for his books while he was still alive.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
Books 91-100.
101. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman.
102. Brown Harvest by Jay Russell.
103. Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos, Charles Johnson, editor and Se Yang, associate editor.
104. Summer of '49 by David Halberstam.
105. The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter.
106. Black Betty by Walter Mosley.
107. She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea by Joan Druett.
108. Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater.
109. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (Reread). It's dangerous to revisit books that loom large in one's mind--there is always the danger that a second look will reveal flaws that one had not suspected. For the most part, that isn't true of this book. Just yesterday this post reminded me of something I'm not sure I ever knew--Holdstock was a science fiction writer before he became interested in the concepts that suffuse Mythago Wood and its descendants. It makes perfect sense. This is a fantasy novel with an SFnal approach: in Part 1 a concept is introduced, in Part 2 it is made manifest, and in Part 3 the protagonist and the reader are carried inside it. That it's not science, exactly, but Jungian theory melded with a sort of deeply speculative anthropology--really, the "leaf-mold of the mind" that Tolkien spoke of--is what makes this book feel at once so rigorous and so richly fantastic; Ryhope Wood and the phenomena that surround it begin to seem not just wondrous but somehow enchantingly, horribly plausible.
If there's a caveat, it's that this story is very much out of the boy's-adventure-tale tradition, and while the outsider/conqueror/colonist dynamic is subverted at least in part, the gender dynamic is problematic in a way that's never really explored. Guiwenneth is a construct of Steven's or Christopher's or both, a literal dream girl, and yet the implications of this with regards to her own identity and their relationships are almost entirely ignored. Still, as Justine has recently discussed, it is possible to love something and accept that it's flawed. After all, a perfect novel may well be an impossibility; maybe it shouldn't even be the goal.
It's a bit unsettling for me to think back to when I first encountered this book--somewhere around the mid-'90s--and realize that I remember very little of it, not even why precisely I liked it so much. I was absolutely a less critical and less cognizant reader back then, and yet Mythago Wood hit me at a time when I was slipping out of the grasp of trilogy fantasy, looking for something more substantive and interesting; if I hadn't found this and books like it I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't have moved out of the genre entirely, at least for a time. I wish I had had the opportunity to thank Mr. Holdstock for his books while he was still alive.