Robert Holdstock's pivotal modern fantasy work, 'Mythago Wood', winner of multiple awards, not least the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985, is one of those timeless stories that never really away, but somehow I've managed to let it slip by me until now. Tor have just put out a new edition of it, in the 'Tor Essentials' line, and I'm very happy to have finally read it.

It's a strange book, because it does a lot with what's really very little; it's very traditional while being a subversive commentary on tradition; and it feels like nothing I've read before, as if it began a lot more than a series of books by tapping into something that was always there but nobody else had noticed. It takes its time until it can't do that any longer and then carries us along in a flood. It's a haunting read, especially when we realise that most of the characters aren't real and the real ones are broken. It's an exemplary book club choice, because I have a feeling that any reader will bring something new to it and deepen it even further.

For instance, I connected it to it initially as a researcher and an outsider, not to mention a middle-aged British man who grew up close to the wild spaces that used to be everywhere. That's because the focus is on Steven Huxley, a British soldier who fought in World War II but didn't come home after it ended, instead remaining in France for romantic reasons. Eventually he does return, to his childhood home of Oak Lodge, which sits right on the edge of Ryhope Wood. He returns to see his elder brother, Christian, now that their distant father has died, a long journey but one that doesn't really end when he reaches Oak Lodge because it's truly a beginning.

And that's because of Ryhope Wood, an ancient woodland that has remained undisturbed throughout history, all the way back to the Ice Age. George Huxley, Stephen and Christian's father, had an obsession with the wood that could fairly be described as unhealthy, so much so that it led to broken relationships with his wife and children and the death of the former. George believed that Ryhope meant something that he was driven to understand, that a different set of natural laws applied to it that he had to figure out. And, in so doing, he tapped into what it meant and set the events of this book in motion, even after his death. It's a great example of the dangers of dabbling in something beyond your understanding.

Given that the book is almost forty years old now and a gamechanger in its genre, it's hard to avoid all spoilers, especially as the key discoveries are outlined on the back cover blurb of this edition and in the introductory essay by Michael Swanwick. What's more, everything revolves around archetypes and that goes for the story as much as the characters in it. That means that it's doubly difficult to avoid spoilers, given that, in large part, this is The Story that's been told for millennia, merely in a new form.

Let's just say that Mythago Wood is a lot more than the three square miles it takes up on a map. It's an entry point to something much larger and much deeper. I couldn't tell you if it's a portal into a parallel universe or a distortion of the time/space continuum or what, because the science behind it isn't what matters. This isn't science fiction, it's fantasy and it's drawn from the abiding mythology of a country, a distilling of tens of thousands of years of unrecorded history into race memories and archetypes. These characters, the mythagos in the wood, who are conjured out of the subconscious of people who spend a lot of time close enough to it to matter, have lived many times and in many forms, not as reincarnations per se but as the pivotal characters who define a nation: King Arthur, Herne the Hunter or Robin Hood.

And, of course, The Woman, Guiwenneth of the Green, a distillation into one form of every woman who has ever made her mark since the Bronze Age. That makes her an idealisation and a fantasy figure, an object of automatic attraction to any male who meets her. Every Huxley we meet falls head over heels in love with her. George obsessed over her. Christian married her. Stephen finds himself no different in that lineage and the impetus for much of this story, for what it's worth, triggers when Christian, whose Guiwenneth is dead, returns from the wood to discover a new Guiwenneth, promptly steals her away to the wood and Stephen is driven to follow, to rescue her and to defeat his brother.

It's worth mentioning that this often feels rather awkward. The primary characters in this just post-war England are all white men and they all obsess over the same woman, even if she is an archetype. Much of the action revolves around a fight between two brothers over possessing her, as if she were only an object. In fact, as dangerous and as capable as she is, it's hard to define her without using a possessive: the Guiwenneth we encounter is Stephen's Guiwenneth, even if Christian believes she's his Guiwenneth and a version of the character was George's Guiwenneth before either of them. That's acutely unfair to Guiwenneth, who ought to belong to herself.

However, everything here revolves around cycles of mythologised history that have kept repeating not just for centuries but for millennia and it's no spoiler to point out that Stephen and Christian end up as part of that themselves. And this is England. It would be inappropriate to tell this story from any angle other than a male Anglo Saxon one. In fact, while we spend our time in Ryhope Wood, one character is connected to an equivalent in Brittany. He's Harry Keeton, the pilot who attempts to fly Stephen over the wood to photograph it, realising as he does so that it's just like the wood he was shot down in when flying with the RAF during the war. I believe a later book in the series is set there.

The point is that the story is fundamentally translatable and there ought to be Mythago Woods all over the globe, each of whose mythagos would be shaped by the race memories of the native cultures in the areas. The characters conjured up in a Mythago Wood in rural Japan or Kenya or Brazil, or even Norway, would be utterly different from those conjured up in this one in England. It's important that the pivotal characters here are students of archaelogy and anthropology or who served their country in a time of great need. I'd love to read versions of this set in Mexico, India or Nigeria, and written by Silvia Garcia-Moreno, Indra Das or Nnedi Okorafor. ~~ Hal C F Astell