Mythago Wood is a highly-praised, award-winning fantastical novel, and it’s built on an interesting idea. Behind a man’s house, there is a small wood – I guess you could call it a magical wood – where archetypes and myths from mankind’s collective subconscious become real, and get physical form. For example, the myth of Robin Hood would give rise to an actual Robin Hood figure in the wood.

Holdstock then explores what happens when the myths in a man’s subconscious come to life, and start interacting with him. And what if he himself enters the wood, and becomes part of a myth?

An interesting idea, but hard to present as believable. Once you start thinking about it, you realise how untenable this is. What would this Robin Hood live on? How can he be Robin Hood without nobles to steal from, and peasants to give the spoils to? Does his entire world materialise? And how come his world doesn’t collide and conflict with the worlds of other myths who also exist in the wood? And so on.

The people in the book all accept this idea of myth-made-real far too easily. If I told you that my mind generated a real Robin Hood in the wood behind my house, how much time, and how much evidence, would you require before you believed me? More than one day and one person’s word, I think!

In other ways as well, the characters’ behaviour is often not entirely believable. Major changes in some characters’ behaviour are never quite explained – they “just happen” – and major decisions likewise “just happen” with little preparation or build-up. The characters seem to lack a real inner life, and simply feel flat and 2-dimensional.

The writing itself is also flat. Through much of the book, the language is stiff and cliched. People actually say things like “Oh my god, no!” (as I thought they only did in bad movies) and the book abounds in phrases such as “Then darkness began to close about me. My lips moved but I could utter no sound…”.

Holdstock shifts into a different gear for retelling some of the myths that live in the wood. He tells these in a simple, matter-of-fact manner, in the kind of voice that an old-time story-teller might use. And as a result, these myths are a lot more gripping than the rest of the book. Too bad he didn’t stick to this simplicity throughout the book.

All in all, the book was a bit of a disappointment to me. An interesting idea, as I said, and some intriguing developments of that idea, but neither the characters, nor the wood, nor the story never really come alive.