The book is elegantly written, and does not bog down with weighty psychological preponderance, but you will find yourself needing to pause in your reading ever so often so the blocks in your brain have a chance to shuffle. Gwyneth's incarnations have varied personalities, some dangerous and others alluring, and differing relations with the members of the Huxley family and Harry Keeton. It uses, and reuses, and synthesizes, the myths that support all the ideas you and I have about the world.

The mechanism of mythagos being created from the subconscious ties in with Carl Jung’s understanding of the psyche. Suddenly, it turned into a quest and struggle for survival that was not quite as fascinating as the learning process was, though there were definitely some fun parts. There's a unique blend of psychology and mythology that brings this story to life, and it's all set in the creepiest wood I've ever read about. It is revealed in The Hollowing and The Bone Forest that George was a tall lean man, a psychologist who studied with Carl Jung. Holdstok je majstor evociranja neodređene ali intenzivne tuge nad nečim izgubljenim, bilo da su u pitanju detinjstvo, doba kad je porodica bila na okupu ili voljena žena.Ryhope Wood may look like a three-mile-square fenced-in wood in rural Herefordshire on the outside, but inside, it is a primeval, intricate labyrinth of trees, impossibly huge, unforgettable … and stronger than time itself. Vēl viens robs fantāzijas literatūras lauciņā aizpildīts un pilnīgi dubultprieks, ka tā nebija vilšanās. While fascinating in healthy doses, the indulgence in historicity creates a lack of character development. The special 30th Anniversary edition of Mythago Wood was published as part of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series in 2014, featuring an introduction by Neil Gaiman which you can read here.

I loved the premise of the story -- the wood that forbade entry to modern humans and was bigger in time and space inside than could be explained by it's physical dimensions. In particular, there are some ancient myths (the idea of human migration after the ice age) that made for thoughtful good images. Mythago Wood is set in Herefordshire, England, in and around a stand of ancient woodland, known as Ryhope Wood. Mostly very favourable, occasionally hostile, though the hostility turned out to be more disappointment that I hadn’t written a direct sequel.

Mythago Wood is a deeply philosophical novel that will have you scratching your head and spending long amounts of time digesting the subtext. You could argue that mythagos are created out of the minds of men, but that also makes it more difficult to sympathize with them. For my part I find it continually fascinating to think that Steven has become a myth character himself! It and the subsequent 'mythago' novels (including Lavondyss , which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1988) cemented his reputation as the definitive portrayer of the wild wood.

The area around Ryhope Wood being sparsely populated, there are few mythagos in the woodland, but because of his interest in the wood and his deliberate experiments in the 1930s, George Huxley created more mythagos than would normally be present in the wood at any one time, causing a greater than usual diversity within the wood. Jung defined his concept of the archetype as a formula that is the result of "countless experiences of our ancestors". Instead Steven finds a neurotic brother obsessed with Ryhope Woods, a three mile square section of pristine old world forest that has never been properly explored since the last Ice Age.The forest is referred to by John Clute as an " abyssal chthonic resonator" because it creates and is home to myth-images, or mythagos, who are creatures (including animals, monsters and humans) generated from the ancient memories and myths within the subconscious of nearby human minds. The story itself is super interesting and dark although I do think S and H friendship was significantly underdeveloped. But it still bothered me that, if you strip away all the fantastic, novel ideas of this story, it ends up just being the same old story of a man driven to do extreme things all in the name of love. I never fully understood Harry Keeton's situation, which was wrapped up much too quickly, but I'm thinking that this will be addressed in a sequel.

We can tell which one is the good guy because he on one occasion suggests she might have a choice, but there is no choice in the book because The Girl has no personality and no role that doesn't include being there for men to fight over who gets to fuck. His love for the nature goddess seems coerced by her magical animal magnetism and not a real relationship, so it was hard to care about them being together. In addition we soon discover, through the journeys of the brothers, that the forest distorts both time and space, becoming larger as you go inside and taking you further back into mankind's prehistory. The mystery of Ryhope Wood, Britain's last fragment of primeval forest, consumed George Huxley's entire, and long, life. According to one modern Tolkien scholar, Mythago Wood and Lavondyss have an internally consistent framework of principles, and deal with the traditions of the British Isles with originality and deftness by incorporating its unwritten culture.Larger inside than out, like Dr Who’s Tardis, and populated by…primal yet multifaceted elements of myth, it’s a feral, spooky, and thoroughly exhilarating arena of Story.