Mythago Wood

Mythago Wood, a beguiling adult fantasy novel, concerns the power of myth, the eternal stories passed down from generation to generation, hidden in the deep recesses of the human mind.

Two brothers, Christian and Steven, grow up in a house on the edge of Ryhope Wood. Their father is obsessed by the wood and its secrets, the so-called Mythagos that populate it and the secret pathways to the very heart of the forest. After World War 2, Steven, wounded in France and reluctant to return home, returns after the death of their father to find his brother prematurely aged and similarly obsessed. It turns out that he had fallen in love with the Mythago of a girl, Guiwenneth, a Celtic warrior woman of legend, but it had ended tragically. The obsession makes him believe that the Wood can conjure up the girl again....

So begins the struggle between the two brothers for the love, or possession, of Guiwenneth, and the secrets of Ryhope are slowly revealed. When Christian kidnaps the version of Guiwenneth that has fallen in love with Steven, a pursuit into the depths of the forest begins. Steven is accompanied by the burned pilot, Keeton, and Holdstock takes us deep into the heart of the forest, through epic, mythic landscapes of the mind, vast landscapes that cannot possibly fit into the small English wood called Ryhope. Yet Ryhope is a place where the ancestral myths come alive again, the Neolithic Shamen, the tribes that roamed Britain in prehistory, Romans, Saxons, Medieval Knights....they all appear. All the stories of heroism and tragedy, of gods and giants, of doomed love and redemption, they all play out in the forest, drawn from the minds of the human beings travelling through it.

It's a grown up novel of love, loss and obsession. A magical, beautifully written book deeply rooted in British myth echoing back down the years from the end of the last Ice Age.

The denouement plays out with the inevitability of legend but leaves threads dangling for Holdstock to pick up in later novels. A beautiful novel.