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| The
Enchanted Forest and the Wild Wood |
"Enter these
enchanted woods, you who dare"
Tanya Brown
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"[The wood is] primary
woodland. Untouched, essentially unmanaged, for eight thousand or so
years... something more than just trees and bracken, dog-fern and
bramble. It had become an entity, not conscious, not watching, but
somehow sentient and to an astonishing degree timeless."
"The Wood is, like all woods in this country... part of the
great Forest that once covered this land. At the merest nudge, it...
becomes the great Forest again. [Anyone] will tell you how... he has
been lost in the smallest spinney. He can hear traffic on the road,
but the road is not there, while there are sounds behind him of a
great beast crawling through the undergrowth. This is the great
Forest... it is voiceless, yet it has a will at least as strong as
yours."
The first excerpt is from The Hollowing (1993), a sequel - of
sorts - to Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984). The
second is from Diana Wynne Jones’ Hexwood (also 1993),
perhaps the deepest and most mature of her juvenile novels. Hexwood
has been dismissed as "Mythago Wood for children".
However, while the two novels deal with the sentience of the forest,
and its role in the genesis of myth, they do it from two different
angles.
Mythago Wood is a journey into the subconscious, the well of
dreams that underlies and contains all human myth, as much as it is
the journal of Steven Huxley’s journey into Ryhope Wood. The wood
is populated by ‘mythagos’ - embodiments of mythic
archetypes which are born from the minds of those who come within
range of the forest’s influence. Sometimes the mythagos are
harmless; more often, they are not. Huxley’s father is shot at by
a Robin Hood figure, and keeps the arrow in his study to remind him of
the wood’s power. And time in the wood doesn’t run at the
same rate as in the outside world. George Huxley’s journal
contains accounts of month-long journeys, from which he has returned
to find that only a few days have passed.
As Steven learns more of his father’s adventures in the
wildwood, the wood reaches out for him: oak saplings spring up between
the edge of the wood and his house, and by the opening of the second
book in the sequence, Lavondyss (1988), the house is entirely
within the wood, with an oak tree growing through the desk at which
both Huxleys wrote.
Mythago Wood is primarily a fantasy, although it has
scientific elements. Huxley and his friend (Edward Wynne-Jones: call
it synchronicity!) experiment with electrical devices to hasten the
formation of mythagos from their minds. In the later books there are
indications that more sophisticated instruments are being used both to
encourage, and to repel, the mythagos. Holdstock’s ‘myth
images’ and myth genesis are firmly rooted in psychology and
anthropology. Hexwood, on the other hand, states its
science-fictional setting with the very first sentence: "The
letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue
ballpoint".
In Hexwood, entering Banners Wood means leaving the mundane
world. Strange things happen to Ann, and Mordion, and Hume, within the
boundaries of the wood. Ann’s ‘voices’ tell her when
she’s been in the wood, and for how long: this generally doesn’t
equate with her perception of passing time, and often she seems to
forget whole episodes. Hume, who is introduced as a young child, doesn’t
age reliably: it’s as though, when Ann enters the wood, she steps
into another time.
Eventually Ann realises that she has been the subject of a device
called the Bannus, which has been playing through scenes - alternate
possibilities - to achieve its required outcome. Hence the time
distortion, the sense of deja vu, and the trend that Mordion
identifies: "The Bannus tended to send Ann along at important
moments." Ann is present when Mordion first awakes: for most of
his magical experiments: and for Hume’s first sight of the
Arthurian Castle, where fame and fortune can be found, and an ailing
king must be healed.
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The Bannus manipulates ‘theta-space’
fields to run its cast - composed of the aristocracy of Homeworld, the
present, corrupt Reigners, and the inhabitants of Hexwood Farm Estate
- through a variety of scenes which draw heavily on myth and magic.
Where Holdstock delves deep into the subconscious to depict
prehistoric ritual and magic, Jones uses Arthurian myth, leavened with
folklore and fairy-tale symbolism. Holdstock’s The Hollowing
draws on the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight (and Gawain turns
out to be the villain: Nature, in the aspect of the Green Knight, is
the hero). Jones transmogrifies the Fisher King, with his unhealable
wound, into a nervous and hypochondriac Reigner Two, who has made a
nasty bruise an excuse not to marry the malevolent Reigner Three -
Morgan La Trey.
The Bannus is, to some extent, a teaching machine. It also transforms
its cast into their true selves. In an echo of Mythago Wood, trees
spring up along Wood Street as the Bannus transforms Reigner One,
stealthily and without any fuss, into a dragon. But is the Bannus to
blame? It isn’t the only thing manipulating time and myth in Hexwood.
The Wood itself is working on the people within its sphere - sometimes
co-operating with the Bannus, sometimes not. For example, the Wood
effectively imprisons the Bannus, along with assorted luminaries from
Homeworld, until Mordion resolves the conflict between machine and
nature.
The Bannus is resentful of the fact that, over the centuries of its
imprisonment, its theta-space has merged with that of the Wood: the
fact that the wood is called Banners Wood is an early indication of
this. The Bannus can’t control or communicate with the wood at
all: it can only learn by trial and error what is allowed. In this,
Banners Wood is like Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood: it can’t be
manipulated. But it is a less malevolent wood. Mordion, in his role as
magician, has learnt to work with the Wood: in return, the Wood gives
him ‘special treatment’, because he can help it achieve its
own desires. When the Bannus gives Morgan La Trey the formula for a
poison to destroy Mordion (and does it really want him dead?) the Wood
transforms him into a dragon instead of letting him die. It’s
only in this form, after all, that he can defeat Reigner One.
It is Mordion, in the end, who works out what Banners Wood wants: its
own permanent theta-space, "so that it can be the great Forest
all the time, without having to rely on humans". Ryhope Wood
functions by raising ‘demons of the mind’ against what it
perceives as human invasion: Banners Wood is a gentler place, which
needs humans to attain its full potential. Once it has persuaded
Mordion to give it what it wants, there are mythagos all around: Robin
Hood, twig-people, a dragon and a unicorn, all glimpsed through the
trees as legends are supposed to be.
Banners Wood and Ryhope Wood are two different places. While Hexwood
probably has a higher body count than any other of Jones’ novels,
there isn’t the sheer nastiness and violence of primeval myth
that is so dominant in Holdstock’s proto-mythologising.
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Ryhope Wood is called ‘the
wildwood’: it’s a place of violent death, of Ice Age winters
and slow starvation. This is the wood of nightmares, where wolves prey
on small children and every path curves back on itself. By contrast,
Banners Wood is the fairytale enchanted forest: there are wolves, and
a terrible winter, but they are not unconquerable. Besides, the Bannus
- like the magical cauldron of Celtic myth - provides whatever is
asked of it. Mordion is struck by the beauty and peace of the wood:
for him, it is a healing experience rather than the agonising
catharsis of Huxley’s journey into the wildwood. Most
importantly, perhaps, the way out of Banners Wood is relatively simple
to find. Hume and Mordion go hungry in the terrible winter - but only
until Mordion realises that he can buy food in the shops on Wood
Street. Ryhope Wood holds onto those who come within its bounds:
Tallis has to undergo a terrifying series of transformations before
she can regain the edge of the wood, and the human world, and other
characters never come out at all.
The Bannus gives people a chance to explore their own natures, and
learn to accept responsibility for their own actions and the less
pleasant aspects of their personalities. In this, Hexwood works well
as a rite-of-passage novel: although all of the main characters are
past adolescence, they still have much to learn about themselves. In
Ann’s case, at least, this is achieved by a temporary return to
childhood. (Paradoxically, it is as an adolescent that her feelings
for Mordion change from a girlish crush to love.) Only then is she
able to assume her role in the adult world.
Ryhope Wood forces those who enter to examine their primal natures -
and if they don’t succeed, they will be lost for ever. In
contrast to the romance and happy ending of Hexwood, all three of
Holdstock’s ‘Mythago’ novels fail to achieve
resolution. (Mythago Wood and The Hollowing end with a
man waiting, in the wildwood, for a woman to return. Lavondyss
ends with a time loop: it’s all going to happen again, just as
unhappily ...) There are recurrent themes of losing a child, and of
the conflict between father and son - both more ‘adult’
psychological crises than the rites of passage in Hexwood.
The two novels both depict the forest as a sentient thing, a device
for translating subconscious hopes and fears into real symbols. (In
Hexwood, it’s actually the Bannus that does most of this,
through a conscious manipulation of character and plot not unlike the
writer’s.) Both Hexwood and the ‘Mythago’
sequence examine essential phases of human life, by embodying
archetypes to lead and challenge the protagonists. In a sense, Hexwood
is "Mythago Wood for children": the
conflicts and changes it examines are those which every child must
confront before achieving maturity. Equally, Mythago Wood is
Hexwood for adults: a darker and nastier place, with less
youthful optimism, but still the Enchanted Forest.
edited and unless otherwise indicated,
written by Meredith
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