Like many of his fans, I was very shocked to learn over the weekend that fantasy author Robert Holdstock has died, aged just 61.
I think I must have been about 14 when I first read Mythago Wood, and after a diet of heroic fantasy which I'd springboarded into after reading The Lord of the Rings aged about 11, the form was already beginning to pall slightly for me. Then I came across this book, with its pastoral setting in the vast Ryhope Wood, its lyrical prose and its blending of modern-day human characters and mythical beings. It opened my eyes to the fact that fantasy didn't need swords or sorcery, and could in fact be good literature.
Mythago Wood transports us back to an age when Britain still had genuinely wild places. By setting the "contemporary" aspect of the book in the years after the second world war, Holdstock successfully splices the ancient and the modern: the modern characters, weary and wounded from a technological global conflict, find a hidden corner of something old and magical buried in the garden of the country they had been fighting to defend. I was surprised to learn, not so long ago, that Holdstock was so young – still in his early 30s when the book first appeared. Perhaps the 1940s setting of Mythago Wood had made me think the novel had come from an earlier time.
Holdstock was born in 1948 in Kent, and his childhood ramblings over Romney Marsh and the nearby woodlands evidently informed his later masterpiece and its sequels. He rightly won the World Fantasy Award for Mythago Wood in 1985, the year after UK publication; a quarter of a century on it remains a much-loved and critically acclaimed book – one of those rare beasts in the fantasy world: an enduring classic.
I returned to Mythago Wood just a couple of months ago, and the novel had lost none of its power. To read Holdstock's prose is to be drawn into the depths of the forest that is central to his concept, at times beautiful and otherworldly, but also dark and dangerous. Mythago Wood is a very British book, drawing on Celtic myth and English folklore, re-presenting the huge tapestry of these islands' stories as the titular woodland populated by "mythagos" – templates for all the figures of our myths and legend, or perhaps the distilled essences of them. Heroic kings and brave outlaws, forest spirits and beautiful noblewomen: we see King Arthur and Robin Hood and Boudicca in them (although Holdstock's characters amount to far more than the sum of their folklore parts).
Mythago Wood was one of those books that has stayed with me, emotionally and physically. Wherever I found myself living, my copy always found its way to the front of my bookshelf. Years later, when I started to write myself, I returned again and again to that feeling the book gave me when I first read it: that strange mix of the magical and the commonplace which, in Holdstock's book, sat together in real harmony.
On November 12, Holdstock posted an entry on his blog talking of his joy at attending the GamesCity festival in Nottingham – his energy and enthusiasm shines through. The next time the website was updated, it was to inform his followers that he had collapsed due to an E Coli infection on November 18 and died in the early hours of Sunday 29 November.
British fantasy literature has lost a bright, guiding light with the untimely passing of Robert Holdstock. The forest is a little darker because of it.
