| I read and enjoyed "Mythago Wood" some years ago. It first came
out in '84, and I believe it won the World Fantasy Award. I
haven't seen the sequel yet though. I thought the concept itself
had mythic overtones: the secret woods where
wonders can happen. I remember how vast the woods seemed when I
was a kid. They seemed to go on forever, even if there was a
highway on the other side. They were full of little trails made
by who-knew-what. You could explore and explore and never learn
it all, even if it was just a patch of forest missed by the
suburban developers. Holdstock made this childhood impression
concrete, and wrote of an infinite, primordial forest right off
of your backyard.
I wonder, though, if his idea of archetypes isn't too dominated
by Northern European history. Lots of cultures did not arise
from forests but rather from grasslands, or coasts, or deserts.
Their myths don't have the undertones of mystery and menace that
Celtic and Germanic ones do, perhaps because you can see threats
coming. The monsters can't hide behind the trees. Everything
is out in the open. The mythic image of the secret place would
have less resonance for such cultures because there are just less
of them in the environment. For them, mystery is not in the
secret woods, but is in the sky or the sea. The archetypes of
"Mythago Woods" are those of Northrons, of forest people, and
might not apply to all humanity.
/jlr
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| I just read "Mythago Wood," and while I found it original and
enjoyable, there were a number of things that didn't quite satisfy me.
(The ethnocentricity mentioned in .1 wasn't one of them; after all,
this _was_ a woodland, suggesting that its only occupants would be
archtypes who belonged to that region and the cultures that sprang from
that region. In fact, a few of the more recent mythagos seemed to me to
be rather out of place there... The Cavalier was a prime example, and,
indeed, seemed to be treated as something of an afterthought.)
One of the things I liked most about the book was that everything was
so uncertain, potentially dangerous, and terrifying; this departed
radically from a lot of the "visit another world" fantasies, in which
the visitors often seem immune to the worst of the local hazards. But,
since the book was _really_ about (!) visiting one's own psyche, I
suppose it says a lot more about the central figure's view of his
relationships with his father, brother, friends - and self - than it
does about "true" archtypes. [I thought it was a nice touch to have
Steven and Keeton react to, and interact with, the various mythagos in
slightly different ways, depending (one would guess) on the degree to
which each mythago "belonged" to each man.]
I thought it fell apart a bit at the end, though I liked the coda about
the giant, who hints at the weaving of the finale into another series
of stories. But it all felt as if everybody's energy had been
exhausted, so instead of ending in high drama it just faded away.
Or was that the point? <she asked, as the myths-turned-ghosts are
scattered by a sudden breeze...>
-b
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