Book reviews: Mythago Wood (Holdstock, WFA 85 best novel), Death at the Opera (Mitchell, 1934)

[cimorene]

Death at the Opera (1934), mystery - Gladys Mitchell

Death at the Opera (UK, 1934) is one of Gladys Mitchell's more famous Mrs Bradley mysteries. I read it because of a rec that I can't find now.

Synopsis:

An English boarding school stages a production of The Mikado. When one of the teachers, given a starring role in the production, is found dead on the opening night Mrs Bradley is called in to investigate.

This is a classic golden age detective novel of the period with an amateur sleuth (the eponymous Mrs Bradley is an elderly psychoanalyst). The overall construction and style can be compared to other known golden age amateur sleuths, though character-wise Mrs Bradley stands out as less mild-mannered than Christie's Marple or Wentworth's Miss Silver. (There's a lot of rather self-conscious comparisons to crocodiles and references to glee and smugness which don't really land for me and just seem like Mitchell thinks smirking and humor are a lot more sinister than they are. YMMV.) Overall it's an engaging enough read for the most part - not as refined, sophisticated, intelligent and beautifully-written as Sayers (but nobody is), without that primal spark of genius that animates some of Christie's best plots, but superficially of a comparable quality of prose (both style and level of goodness, I mean) to some of Christie, just not like... the high points. Nice touches of humor here and there. There's a great deal of omniscient POV and little detours through the whole ensemble cast, as found in a lot of second-tier golden age detective fiction, but a little more irritating in this case. The biggest weakness was just... the solution. It felt like she didn't make her mind up until partway through the book and perhaps chose it by spinning a wheel. 4.5/5 for the writing - enjoyable enough but not brilliant -, but if you think the ending can ruin the whole book, then the ending ruined this one. The author's foibles are already showing themselves and becoming an irritant, but as one of them isn't a tremendous flotilla of horrible ideas about sexism and gender, and her notions of class are so far less intrusive than Christie's, on balance I am optimistic for the series.

Mythago Wood (1984), fantasy - Robert Holdstock

Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (UK, 1984) won the 1985 World Fantasy Award for best novel (though in general the World Fantasy Award is not a great judge of quality).

Synopsis:

The mystery of Ryhope Wood, Britain's last fragment of primeval forest, consumed George Huxley's entire, and long, life. Now, after his death, his sons have taken up his work. But what they discover is beyond what they could have expected. For the Wood is a realm where myths gain flesh and blood, tapping primal fears and desires subdued through the millennia. A realm where love and beauty haunt your dreams -- and may drive you insane.

It was an engaging read, well-written, but its fatal flaw is female characters (though it tried and it did do better than some...), and ultimately in spite of good intentions its theme and intention sort of collapses. The titular forest is a magical entity apparently, and an area that bends the laws of time and space. It repulses travelers and prevents them from reaching the center, and has a sort of relativity so that far more time passes inside than outside, while as you travel towards the center you travel back in time, through forest types and climates that occupied its location in the past. It also apparently imprints on the fears and archetypal characters (like King Arthur, Robin Hood, and the Wild Hunt) in the minds of the cultures who live around it and stores these characters, who populate it with some sort of partial self-awareness even though they are magical constructs.

The constructs interact with each other and with people who enter the forest, and unfortunately one of them is a manic pixie dream warrior princess maiden raised by the forest, plus a lot of nonsense about the "ideal Celtic beauty". As you can imagine, multiple real men become obsessed with her. This leads to a Quest, and the quest leads to some really great stuff with side characters and the forest itself... if not for the manic pixie dream magical construct at the center of it all, who kind of is just part of a powerful multidimensional timespace entity in the form of a forest and is also sort of immortal and has questionable agency. Even if you spackle the somewhat vague and mysterious origin of the character as a sort of new life form or artificial intelligence created by the mystical forces of this forest interacting with human culture, and thus as a legitimate character who ought to have her own inner life, motivations, history, and agency... she kind of doesn't, or at least to the narrator she doesn't.

The only other female characters are a vague memory of the narrator's mother crying all the time, and a woman who helps him with his research who appears once, with a very strange sort of narrative lens - preoccupied with how obviously boring and dried-up old maid she is and then equally preoccupied when it discovers she is cohabiting with a man in that "boring people have sex?" way. In spite of her inconsequentiality to the text and what seems like a great deal of trouble on the author's part to make it obvious how unappealing she is sexually and romantically to the narrator, the space given to contemplating it leaves the impression of a prurient interest that the narrator can't recognize in himself, while the overall picture is actually of the most relatable and likeable character in the book. She has a history, a childhood, a parent she's lost and an attitude about him, a relationship with the world around her and a determination to get on with life, and a kind impulse towards a guy she's never heard of who appears and wants her help in case her dead father's academic papers have something relating to a collaboration with his dead father that happened when they were both children.

In contrast to this, the manic pixie love interest has a legend told about her birth and parentage but it takes at least three different forms which all involve deities; she has a corpse who died recently, so she's apparently a clone; she is hinted to have had love affairs with other guys in the past but it's implied that she doesn't remember them; she is a near-superhuman warrior huntress and is accustomed to hunting, butchering, and cooking with blood covering the whole kitchen, which is I guess supposed to be neolithic keto; she has a strong smell because forest people don't bathe; and she has a romance with the only human guy in reach who isn't threatening to her (maybe she's like a lure that the forest entity uses to lure in more people so it can digest their subconscious minds for stories?). The protagonist becomes the 3rd (?) guy from his immediate family to voluntarily just decide to move into the forest, which seems to just swallow them up, transforming them profoundly and using them in its business of spinning stories (?), but leaving their consciousnesses and senses of self. There's a hint towards the end that the final result of the very profound transformation of the narrator's father nonetheless maintains the same emotional connection and attitude the narrator finally understands he had all along, but if this suggests that the other transformations are similarly true to the person's real self, then it fails to make that work for his brother. (This is what I meant about collapsing.) It's too bad though, because the OTHER parts of this book had a really fun take on the dark magical forest idea. That's probably why it has 4.8/5 on Goodreads, and why it won the award, anyway - well, writing and readability, which as I said were very good, and then just... a lot of people have a tendency to fall for a story and be willing to mentally amputate the end or just forget about it if it trails off in confusion. I can't really do that though. 2/5. The fact that this is a series causes a reaction of fascinated horror.

Comments

[vass]

Wasn't mythagowood a fanartist who did a notorious pencil and paper fanart piece? I can't remember what, and that's bugging me, but it was either pregnant, elf Blair (Sandburg, from The Sentinel) or maybe something goatse-like but with fandom characters. From what I remember, part of what made the art quite so notorious was that it was very technically skilled.

[stranger]

Hmmm. I remember reading Mythago Wood, back in the college times when there were fewer shiny fantasy books, and more time and patience for odd-sounding premises. It didn't really land for me, probably for the unexplained ending, and somewhat for the interiority, the sense that it was about a central male character's mental map as expressed in the Wood's manifestations. I hadn't at that time become allergic to the lit genre's portrait-of-the-author-masquerading-as-life-philosophy tendencies, but I suspect this seemed like that kind of thing.

[torachan]

Mythagowoods is an infamous SPN fanartist who loved (loves?) to draw Sam and Dean with prolapsed anuses, among other things. I did not realize the name was taken from a novel, so it definitely caught me up as I was scrolling just now lol. Not sure if he's been active in other fandoms or not.

[cimorene]

Lol yikes.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I guess it is kind of that, but the subvariety that's about literature, more or less - in this case cultural history, and attempting, like, folklore. Had I read this in college, I probably would not have pegged the fact that a good half the page space revolves in some (mostly masturbatory) way around this manic pixie dream ideal woman construct who lacks agency and interiority while other women are almost glaringly absent from the story. It's not so much offensive as painfully second hand embarrassing to read.

[vass]

Thank you! I'm misremembering: both artists I was thinking of did photomanips, not pencil drawings.

Pregnant Elf Blair was by Natalie L.
And I just found Mythagowoods' Twitter account, although he seems to have last been active in November 2020.