Here Be Dragons (21 page)

had survived by
defending
itself against the destructive behavior […] of the human population that was settling around it. Over the millennia, the concentration of time and spirit in the wood had made it into something more than just trees […]. It had become an entity, not conscious, not watching, but somehow sentient and to an astonishing degree timeless. (
Hollowing
64)

The process suggests a virtuous circle, where successful defense leads to an increased concentration of time and spirit—Huxley uses the word
aura
(e.g.,
Mythago Wood
49)—which in turn results in greater sentience and thus better defenses. This brief description makes clear how central time is in connection with the polder. The process has taken millennia; the concentration of time and spirit has given rise to the sentience; and, somewhat contradictorily, the forest is astonishingly timeless. Over the course of the books, it becomes clear that the contradiction derives from the straightforward progression of time outside the forest polder and the temporal flux inside it.

The sentient woodland force, and the mythagos to which it gives rise, acts on the countryside around it. Its action on the surrounding world is one of the reasons why Mendlesohn considers
Mythago Wood
to be an intrusive fantasy. “[T]he wood's field reaches out into the world,” she points out, and the field “allows the wood's inhabitants/manifestations to burst through into modern life.”
⁷⁴
In fact, the forest reaches out—mainly through mythagos, but occasionally through other means—in all five novels. In
Mythago Wood
, a band of oak saplings stretches from the forest to the Oak Lodge, growing far faster than normal, culminating in the sudden appearance of an enormous oak in the study (
Mythago Wood
88, 141–42). Tallis in
Lavondyss
is insidiously introduced to the forest and taught how to open portals into its depths, so-called hollowings. In
The Hollowing
, Alex's spirit is partially sucked into the wood through one of Tallis's masks, and the boy is subsequently abducted physically by a mythago version of the Green Knight (
Hollowing
27–29, 296–99). Steven's brother, Christian, is brought into the forest by the schemes of the mythago Kylhuk in
Gate of Ivory
. In
Avilion
, the ancient Amurngoth, or fairies, steal human children and replace them with their own.
The books in the Mythago Wood cycle are, to use Marek Oziewicz's expression,
novels of visitations
, “the kind of visitations the protagonist does not expect, which he dreads and yet becomes increasingly fascinated with while being drawn into wanting them to recur.”
⁷⁵
This power of dread–fascination–attraction is most obvious in the mythago character Guiwenneth, whom Clute refers to as “the seducer seduced.”
⁷⁶
“[T]he notion of the intrusion as seducer,” Mendlesohn observes, “is made manifest as the wood in the form of Guiwenneth, who pulls first George Huxley and then his two sons within its embrace.”
⁷⁷

People are pulled into the forest, through its manifestations or inhabitants, because it needs something from their minds, and they are brought past the boundary defenses. The human subconscious is a source of creative energy used by the mythogenic process to “seed” the forest with mythago inhabitants. In
The Hollowing
, Alex's father, Richard, experiences how “a world [is] forming from his mind in the vampire wood around him” (
Hollowing
96). Tallis loses energy to the forest, which is “sucking out her soul, her spirit. It was sucking out her dreams. It was draining her” (
Lavondyss
247). Having been trapped in the forest for years, Huxley's colleague Wynne-Jones is left empty, a native inhabitant of the forest (
Lavondyss
203), and Steven suggests that he has become a part of the forest in
Avilion
(114). Unlike in the first four novels, it is suggested in
Avilion
that the mythogenic process is not purely passive; the main characters have some slight control. Steven and Guiwenneth's son, Jack, intentionally calls up a mythago of his grandfather (e.g., 161–62); Jack's sister, Yssobel, dreams up parts of Avilion (another name for Lavondyss, the Otherworld at the forest's heart) (e.g., 200–201); and Steven exerts some measure of control in his search for a suitable place to live in the forest (94).

The forest's need for people is why the boundary appears to both pull and push: while the forest does its best to keep outsiders in general away from the heartwood, some are pulled in and helped past the defenses. No character strays into this forest by mistake; all are led by a guide, brought against their will, or consciously force their way in. Steven and Keeton, for instance, very clearly fight their way through the forest defenses; and through their entry, the full extent of those defenses becomes plain:

First, there was disorientation. We found ourselves walking
back
the way we had come. At times it was almost possible to experience the
switch in perception. We felt dizzy; the underwood became preternaturally dark; the sound of the river changed from our left to our right. […] Somehow we passed that first defensive zone. The wood began to haunt us. Trees seemed to move. Branches fell upon us … in our mind's eyes only, but not before we had reacted with exhausting shock. The ground seemed to writhe at times, and split open. We smelled fumes, fire, a stench like decay. (
Mythago Wood
207)

Disorientation is the defense that is most persistently mentioned. Unwelcome visitors are turned away, led out, and never manage to pass the woodland's periphery. On his own and unwanted by the forest, Steven cannot breach this defense and is unable to enter more than two hundred yards into the woods (
Mythago Wood
92–93). Huxley's diary similarly mentions the difficulty of penetrating into the heartwood. Once humans are drawn in by the forest, however, disorientation also keeps them in, frustrating their attempts to leave. Richard, for instance, is unable to walk even the short distance from the Horse Shrine camp back to Oak Lodge (
Hollowing
71–72, 74–75). The disorientation can be overcome, however. By keeping to the river, Steven and Keeton manage to maintain their orientation, but they are instead haunted by illusions. On the ground, the forest does not defend itself in such a physically violent manner as when the two attempt to fly over it. Instead, its defenses are related to the first stages of mythogenesis (the creation of mythagos), which are characterized by half-glimpsed images in the corner of the eye, rather than by fully formed (and physical) mythagos.

Humans are kept in the forest, providing material for mythogenesis until they have been emptied of dreams and myths and have been made parts of myths themselves. Because the forest needs people to seed itself with mythagos and also must prevent possible external threats from arising, it maintains its pull, drawing or (physically) dragging back any who manage to escape. Christian leaves at the end of
Gate of Ivory
but cannot give up his search for Guiwenneth, a search that eventually leads to his death in
Mythago Wood
and again in
Avilion
. Steven, Keeton, and Tallis all stay, unable to find their way out. Even in
The Hollowing
, in which the protagonists appear to have a chance of returning, the reader never actually sees them do so, or even start on their way out. Keeton and Tallis's father manages to get out, but he remains spiritually shackled to the forest through Tallis's Moondream mask. Only in
Avilion
does the wood eventually allow Steven and his son to leave, but like his brother
before him, Steven keeps returning into the forest, unable to abandon his search for Guiwenneth.

Because of the manifestations of myths, the polder's structure is not only spatial; it is a structure of places connected to the myths: mythago landscapes, buildings, and seasons. W. A. Senior calls this landscape a representation of “the unlimited potential of the mind and creative impulse,”
⁷⁸
and Tallis is told that the world in the forest “is not nature, it consists of mind” (
Lavondyss
287). Likewise, the secret behind the polder's impossibly large interior is that it consists not of natural landscape but of the landscapes of myths. This landscape is made up of
mythotopes
,
⁷⁹
the habitats of myths, places suited to the myths they harbor. Mythotopes are created through mythogenesis along with their heroes (see
Lavondyss
160), and they are the reason why the woodlands open up endlessly as the characters travel inward.

Looking at the characters' journeys in the novels reveals how the mythotopic structure evolves from novel to novel—the polder is not identical in all five stories. The basic structure is the labyrinth, found in its simplest form in
Mythago Wood
. In his review of
Gate of Ivory
, Clute describes that novel as “an arduous tale which leads its protagonists, arduously, through many labyrinthine meanders, into the arduous heart of fantasy.”
⁸⁰
On one level or another, all the novels can be discussed in terms of labyrinthine structures, although I will focus on the relation between mythotopical structures and character journeys. The path Steven follows through the forest in
Mythago Wood
twists and turns but never really leaves him with any choices.
⁸¹
It is a path that conforms to what Umberto Eco calls a linear labyrinth
⁸²
and Penelope Reed Doob describes as a unicursal labyrinth, where “a single unbranched […] circuitous route leads inevitably, if at great length, to the center.”
⁸³
The river along which Steven and Keeton travel suggests such a circuitous path, curving and curling through the woodlands (
Mythago Wood
244, 280); and the only fork that is implied occurs where they leave Christian's trail, guided by a mythago. The inevitability of the unicursal path is echoed in the inevitability of Steven's quest; the further he pursues his brother, and the deeper into the forest he travels, the more he becomes the Kinsman of myth, doomed to eventually kill the equally mythic Outsider that Christian has become, regardless of his own intentions.

In
Lavondyss
, the polder is a forest of forking paths. Tallis's route is not the inevitable, unicursal labyrinth of Steven's journey. Her years of wandering, lost among the protean mythotopes and through unpredictable
hollowings, suggest that the forest path is one of innumerable forks and dead ends. It is, in Doob's terminology, a multicursal rather than a unicursal labyrinth,
⁸⁴
the kind that Eco refers to as a maze. “In a maze,” he states, “one can make mistakes. […] Some alternatives end at a point where one is obliged to return backwards, whereas others generate new branches, and only one among them leads to the way out.”
⁸⁵
A mythotopic maze is more difficult to negotiate than a spatial maze, because it allows for more than spatial choices. The protean nature of the mythotopes means that backtracking does not return the traveler to an original location, and the forest defenses disorient the travelers. Only slowly are Tallis and her mythago companion drawn inward along the one route that leads not out of the forest but to its center.

The multitude of paths that the forest offers in
The Hollowing
, on land and through hollowings, within and between the numerous layers of woodland Otherworlds, takes the forest beyond the multicursal maze of
Lavondyss
. It resembles the type of labyrinth that Eco calls a net: “The main feature of a net is that every point can be connected with every other point.”
⁸⁶
In the forest in
The Hollowing
, it is implied that every mythotope can be reached from any other mythotope by some route or another. The routes are not necessarily short or obvious, however, and the possibility of losing one's way is ever present. Eco also claims that “the abstract model of a net has neither a center nor an outside,”
⁸⁷
and whereas Ryhope Wood does have an outside, it is an outside that is impossibly small compared to the inner vastness. Furthermore, unlike the other three books,
The Hollowing
contains no quest for a Lavondyss at the center of the wood. The heart of the wood and the goal for the quest in this novel is Alex's hiding-place, located somewhere in the forest net, and any one of several routes leads there. As if the net of paths through the forest were not disorienting enough, this structure is further complicated by the enigmatic and ubiquitous “rootweb” through which Alex can send his consciousness and see things all over the forest, a web underlying the net.

In the cycle's fourth book, the complex structure of
The Hollowing
remains, but the journey is one of a small polder within the forest, a polder that creates its own path. When Legion, Kylhuk's host of mythago heroes, marches through the forest in
Gate of Ivory
, it does not move consecutively through the mythotopes, nor does it move through the net of hollowings and planes. Instead, it breaks the structural components apart, piecing fractions of time and space together from numerous
mythotopes into a new spatiotemporal structure. “Legion moved forward outside what you or I might think of as ordinary space and ordinary time,” Christian explains, musing on the effect this might have on mythagos who would see “when Legion flowed for a few seconds through their space and time” (
Gate of Ivory
139). Legion becomes a mythotope in its own right, with its own structure in relation to the rest of the woodlands, just as the latter have a structure dissimilar to that of the outside world. With a reality of its own, maintained and defended by Kylhuk's warriors and magic users (see, e.g.,
Gate of Ivory
133), Legion is in fact a polder within the larger polder of Ryhope Wood. This small polder moves through its surrounding sylvan polder like a bubble, but a bubble that makes its own paths through the structure that contains it.