Albion Magazine Online Autumn 09: The Mythago Wood Cycle/The Once and Future King

Books

Classics of Englishness, Part 2

Review of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood Cycle

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

(T S Eliot, Little Gidding, 1942)

In 1981 the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an American genre magazine --already venerable then and still going strong today— published a 16,000-word story called 'Mythago Wood' by an English writer, Robert Holdstock.

At the time Holdstock was a jobbing SF and fantasy writer of a kind more common then than now, producing quantities of genre writing under a range of pen names (Ken Blake, Robert Black, Richard Kirk, Chris Carlsen, Robert Faulcon, Steven Eisler) some of which were publishers' 'house names.' But 'Robert Holdstock' was his real name, and 'Mythago Wood' was something different. It made his name and won the first in a series of increasingly prestigious awards that his work has received in Britain, the USA, and France. It was also a breakthrough into an astonishingly rich, dark, strange and honest kind of imagining and feeling about English landscape.

The original 1981 story is about a wood. Obviously. Ryhope Wood is a small, fenced-in area of ancient wildwood in Herefordshire. Except that's not all it is. People who go into the wood get lost. They walk for days, weeks, months, trying to penetrate to a centre that can never be found, as the wood puzzles their path and leads them astray. Time passes differently there. The further in you go, the more you find, the more enriched and the more lost you become, and the harder it is to come out. Characters in the stories become obsessed with the wood. They try to explore it, map it, fly over and take aerial photographs of it, theorise and write treatises about it, in their effort to understand it. Such attempts always fail. The wood resists, absorbing and changing them. Most of these explorers become, in the eyes of the world, more or less mad: they are drawn deeper and deeper into a world populated by ancient, mythogenic figures of the landscape. There is no escape.

And so in a sense it was for Holdstock. The 1981 story, like the wood of the title, turned out to be far bigger on the inside than it looked from outside. It grew into a great tree of a novel, also called Mythago Wood, which was published in 1984. This tree became a wood, the so-called Mythago Wood Cycle, or the Ryhope Wood series, as three more great trees surged up --Lavondyss (1988), The Hollowing (1993), and Gate of Ivory (1998)— accompanied by a back-story made up of novellas and short stories which were collected in The Bone Forest (1991). After 1998 it seemed that Holdstock had kicked the mythago habit and turned to other things, but a new addition to the series, Avilion, is coming out in 2009 (not yet published at the time of writing).

The novels are all the same book, really, or at least all parts of one big book, in the way that trees make a wood. Taken together, they form a spiralling, recursive knotwork of prequels and sequels that re-enter Ryhope Wood by different paths, as if maybe this time --this time— Holdstock will find his, and our, way into the centre of it, or the origin of it. He will finally understand what it's all about, and put it to rest.

It's not that Ryhope Wood lacks story. On the contrary, it is filled with it. Characters who get lost in the wood are enmeshed in Story like birds in mist-nets or moths in cobwebs: the endlessly-repeating tales of English/British myth and legend, and the family struggles of fathers against sons, brothers against brothers. (Yes, there are women here - mothers, daughters and lovers are central characters - but I do suspect that the cycle is a male thing, in the way that Jungian psychology is male psychology.)

In Ryhope Wood, and sometimes emerging from it into 'our' world, are figures, some apparently human, some apparently animal, some strange both-and-neither figures, that include characters from old story (Robin Hood, Herne the Hunter, the Green Knight, Arthur, Mordred, Guinevere) alongside figures from an even older, wilder palaeo-mythography. These figures are not simple reappearances of the familiar, but odd, wry-shaped, disturbing doubles, precursors, avatars and archetypes. And they are not ghosts or traces or memories. They are real, strong, and physical, sometimes loving, but often decidedly not.

Yet what you come away with as a reader, and remember long after reading one of these books, isn't the story or the characters, particularly. There are two things: the extended puzzle, the endless effort to understand what this wood is, what it is doing and how; and the intense physical actuality of the wood. You breathe, touch and taste it, in passages of intense and synaesthesic landscape writing. Here's an example from Lavondyss:

"But the old Daurog came closer. … It stepped slowly towards Tallis, crouched with much rustling and snapping of sinews and reached a long, tapering twig-finger to touch her hand. Its nail was a rose thorn; she allowed it to scratch her skin, making a faint red mark.... The Daurog … spoke words; they were high-pitched and meaningless: bird chatter; the creak of a branch; more chatter; the rustle of leaves in wind."

So. Why am I writing about these books as part of a series of essays by divers hands about classics of Englishness?

There is a strand of English writing (and English music, art, film, and above all feeling) that is completely familiar and yet has always had to fight for its position in the marketplaces of the intellect, because it is never—never— taken seriously. Its roots are in the early twentiethcentury, and its heyday was around 1967-1977.

I have a book at home which distils this English feeling better than anything else I've come across, a Reader's Digest book published in 1973 and abundantly illustrated, called Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. It's all there. You can enquire within upon everything from William Blake to witch posts, from corn dollies to horned gods, all carefully linked to a particular county, vale or village. The first reproduction in it is a detail from Paul Nash's Landscape of the Summer Solstice, setting us firmly in a familiar world of neo-romantic pastoral vision and localised English folk and landscape history.

I've chosen the Reader's Digest deliberately, because it is, in the intellectual sphere, so not acceptable. This feeling and set of ideas is not academic folklore, not careful, reverent stuff. This is the people's folk. Folk for kids. Folk-rock—not the refined interpretation of English folk music. The soundtrack to this state of mind is rooted in Elgar and Vaughan Williams, but its greatest flowering was early Caravan, Mellow Candle, Forest, Comus, Jan Dukes de Grey, the Mike Oldfield of Hergest Ridge. The only full-on literary expression of this English feeling (though not its folk trappings) that I can think of is T S Eliot's Four Quartets.

One of the core ideas of this imaginative world, one which repeats again and again, is this: that through an intense sensory and imaginative relationship with some very particular place in England --a valley, a wood, a hill, a river, a circle of standing stones-- you can encounter some kind of mythical, mystical presence. This presence is extremely localised but it is also immensely connected and immensely old. It is almost always expressed as a kind of story, whether it be myth, legendary history or fairy tale, which you either observe being played out, or more often get drawn into and re-live yourself. Such encounters are most likely to be experienced by people who are displaced, excluded and on the threshold of something, often adulthood, and normally feature in texts that occupy an equivalent position in the literary world: in 'children's,' 'fantasy,' 'popular,' 'genre' or 'non-literary' fiction.

Most people could make a list of this kind of thing. My own personal canon includes, off the top of my head: Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill (1906); Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams (1907); Lucy M Boston's Green Knowe books (1954- 1976); Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), and The Owl Service (1967); and Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence (1963-1977). Similar ideas play out in 1970s children's TV: The Children of the Stones, Doctor Who and the Daemons. They saturate popular books of the sixties and seventies, like Janet and Colin Bord's Mysterious Britain (1972) and John Michell's The View Over Atlantis (1969), books which look backwards to ground-breaking works by Alfred Watkins (who 'discovered' ley lines), T C Lethbridge (who found sun-god and moon-goddess figures in the Cambridgeshire hills) and O G S Crawford (who described a whole goddess archaeology spread across England).

Holdstock has explicitly placed himself in the 1970s folky-pastoral tradition. Here's his account of writing the story 'Scarrowfell' for a Hallowe'en reading:

"I was in the middle of my 'mythago' period at this time, and was listening to a great deal of European folk music, especially British. I'd found a 'Morris' album called Morris On, featuring such stalwarts of folksong as John Kirkpatrick, Richard Thompson and Ashley Hutchings, which was huge fun to listen to …. The words were resonant and haunting. And they inspired a story. On the Hallowe'en night I read the piece and between sections played the Morris music for effect, a sort of 'radio' performance. It went down quite well."

But it would be misleading to describe the Mythago Wood books as simply part of this sunlit, neo-romantic 1970s world. Holdstock's cycle is a late-comer to this tradition and he makes it into something different, original, obsessive and peculiar. These are books which examine themselves and wonder endlessly about their own roots. To read them is to explore theories of the mind (Ryhope Wood is a working model and a making-real of the archetype-rich Jungian unconsciousness) and theories of anthropological mythography (Holdstock draws on the works of Joseph Campbell in particular). They are also books conscious of their own heritage as "a central contribution to late-20^th-century fantasy writing … almost embarrassingly dense with fantasy tropes" (John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy). They can be read as a kind of encyclopaedic collection of fantasy story ideas.

In most ways the Mythago Wood cycle is nothing like The Lord of the Rings, but in one big way it is. Both Holdstock and Tolkien locate a post-war England (Mythago Wood begins with a demobbed soldier returning home in 1945) that has no national myths, no largeness, no wild woods. It is all drab and dull and cramped and austere. In this England, both Tolkien and Holdstock take a small space -a wood, a shire ("in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit")- and they make its littleness big, massive, capacious, filling the space they've opened up with a huge imagined other place: an endless forest, a bottomless well of quasi-invented, quasi-borrowed folklore, myth, history, and landscape. It is a place that grows and grows without end, not outwards but inwards and backwards, the mind discovering the endless riches of itself. --Peter Higgins

Many people who have read The Sword in the Stone as children are unaware that it is only the first part of a quartet— including The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind— that is one of the greatest fantasy novels of the twentieth century. Whereas other novels of this genre and period are often mainly escapist, reflecting the wars and political torments of the time only indirectly, The Once and Future King is an explicit response to contemporary problems. In fact, it is a sustained defence of English liberal humanism (represented by Merlyn) against the Thrasymachean argument; Arthur explains that "What I meant by civilisation, when I invented it, was simply that people ought not to take advantage of weakness." At the same time (and necessarily) it is a searching meditation on the human condition and the question of original sin. This makes the novel sound quite serious, but it is also massively entertaining, full of incisive character studies, poetic touches and comic anachronism, and informed by a deep knowledge of mediaeval history that the author wears lightly. Throughout the quartet, White turns the Matter of Britain into something quintessentially English: self-satirising yet sensitive, with a profound tragic undertow that evokes the original on which it is based, Malory's Morte D'Arthur. White's Arthur is a kind-hearted Norman, baffled and saddened by the tribal warfare which destroys the peace of his reign. His fatal mistake, White suggests in this deeply pacifist work, was the attempt to harness force for good through the Round Table.

Beauty and humour dominate the first book, an idyllic novel about childhood that follows the development of the young Arthur (the Wart, as he is called by his foster brother Kay), under the affectionate, eccentric tutelage of the wizard Merlyn. The Sword in the Stone is primarily a Bildungsroman about the getting of knowledge. American critic Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow that great literature is the product of childhood trauma, and this novel, like the rest of the quartet, certainly bears this out. The Wart is orphaned, as White felt himself to be following his parents' divorce, and Merlyn, though irascible and elderly (but getting younger all the time, because he is living backwards), is a father figure to him. White's portrayal of a child's natural joy in learning, under the guidance of a loving adult, is a reaction against the type of public school education that he had himself endured and which had left him with serious psychological problems that he never managed to overcome: White fell back on study as a cure for depression throughout his adult life (Merlyn famously advises the Wart, "The best thing for being said....is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails"). The wizard innovatively combines story-telling with field trips of a most unusual sort, turning the Wart into various creatures including a falcon, an ant, a wild goose, and a badger— this is Celtic shape-shifting as political object lesson—and introducing him to Robin Hood. The boy does not know it yet, but Merlyn is preparing him for kingship, vigorously attempting to educate him away from the Norman love of arms, which the wizard disdainfully describes as "games-mania." Dictatorial dystopia makes an appearance in the Wart's visit to the proto-Orwellian ant colony, where the only adjectives are 'Done' or 'Not-Done' (a lobotomising impoverishment of language), the ants are controlled by broadcast propaganda demonising the Othernesters, and a sign proclaims EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY. Though perhaps too obvious in its parallels with Nazi Germany, such political satire is startling in a children's novel of 1938. The ants are contrasted with the loving, internationalist wild geese, to whom national boundaries are imaginary lines and who cannot conceive of members of the same species murdering each other.

It is impossible to capture the charm and wit of The Sword in the Stone. The Wart's visit to Merlyn's idiosyncratic cottage has deservedly been repeatedly anthologised, and the gormless King Pellinore, constantly in pursuit of his beloved Questing Beast, is one of the most delightful comic creations in English literature. White's love of joyous anachronism is given full rein here: the Wart's adoptive father, Sir Ector, and his friend Sir Grummore Grummursum are harrumphing precursors of nineteenth-century fox-hunting squires, Friar Tuck is a Sam Weller-ish Cockney ("Dash my vig if I didn't think we was done for!") and so on. There is also unbounded linguistic playfulness, of which the best example is probably the obsequious, Genevieve-singing hedgehog— unearthed by the Wart during his badger phase—who speaks a peculiar mixture of Geordie, deepest Sussex and (possibly) Norfolk. In The Sword in the Stone the villains, seen through the children's eyes, are merely grotesque buffoons, but White develops a more sober-minded portrait of evil in the rest of the quartet.

The Queen of Air and Darkness, the second in the series, is the darkest and least successful of the novels. White's demons got the better of him here: animal lovers are advised to avoid the unicorn and cat scenes altogether. The novel is also unpleasantly Scotophobic, a by-product of its attempt to blame the later destruction of Camelot on Arthur's Orkney relatives (though White does, later on, partially compensate for this in his sympathetic portraits of Gareth and Gawaine), rather than traditionally, on Guenever. This was a necessary manoeuvre on White's part in order to overcome his deep-seated fear of women and give himself a chance to sympathetically draw Guenever, but identifying another woman, Morgause, as the cause of Arthur's eventual downfall simply replaces one misogyny with another. The idea of the Round Table is born in this novel, and Merlyn explains to Arthur the inherited Gael-Saxon-Norman tensions that will dog his reign and eventually flame into civil war, provoked by Morgause and Arthur's son, the Gaelic nationalist demagogue Mordred. There is some light relief, in the form of an encounter between King Pellinore, the Saracen knight Sir Palomides (speaking Babu English, which seems insensitive on White's part), and the Questing Beast, but the novel is, on the whole, somewhat imbalanced.

The Ill-Made Knight, which introduces the Breton Sir Lancelot, has greater light and shade. It is a more compelling novel in its autobiographical depiction of the sensitive knight, tormented by his awareness of his own evil nature: Arthur, with his simple goodness and happiness, is what White longed to have been, but Lancelot is the man he in fact was. However, there is also an element of wish-fulfilment in the infinitely touching romance between Lancelot and Guenever, tolerated by Arthur because his love for both of them prevents him from doing otherwise. White's gift for psychological study is displayed to the full here, and the Arthur-Lancelot-Guenever triangle becomes the emotional centre of the last two books. The ending of the novel, in which Lancelot is permitted by God to heal a wounded knight, is tremendously affecting. It conveys White's own desperation for delivery from himself: "The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle."

In the final part of the quartet, The Candle in the Wind, the eponymous candle is Arthur's idea of civilisation, bravely flickering as his kingdom is beset by Mordred's armies. The third chapter of the book contains an idyllic sketch of "the fabled Merry England of the Middle Ages," a snapshot of the Pax Arturus that swirls with eccentric detail, humour and colour like a mediaeval manuscript page. This is the most philosophical part of the series, as Arthur wrestles, to the best of his ability, with fundamental moral and political questions in his distress at the sufferings of his realm. He struggles between Merlyn's idealistic belief in human goodness and the present hideous reality, weighing up Christianity, the communism of John Ball, and internationalism: "The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing --literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines....Countries would have to become counties --but counties which would keep their own culture and local laws." The Candle in the Wind has that distinctive wan, exhausted, yet cautiously idealistic pacifist post-war atmosphere that also permeates Michael Tippet's oratorio A Child of Our Time: the closing scene, in which Arthur figuratively passes the candle to the young Thomas Malory, is very powerful.

Though White chooses Mordred's Gaelic nationalism as the vehicle for his comparison with twentieth century European history, this is not by any means a specific attack; he quite clearly intends it merely as a type of nationalism in general, of which, looking at the devastation of World War II, he takes a totally bleak view. Throughout the quartet, White identifies xenophobia and Force Majeur, the rule of might, as the twin threats to Arthur's civilisation. The novel is a response to the traumas of the 'terrible century,' heightened by White's awareness of the dark side of his own nature. By refracting modern politics through the prism of mediaeval England, he achieves a dual purpose, producing both an incisive political allegory and a determined riposte to the strand of thinking that views the Middle Ages as Dark.

On a personal level, the novel is quite clearly a redemptive catharsis. White wrote in his diary, "It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them." If this was his tragedy, his triumph was that he was able to sublimate his pain into an intensely moving novel containing a whole world of loveable and loving people, in which he succeeded in living, at least for a little, through his characters. --Isabel Taylor