Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn
Robert Holdstock
Voyager hbk, 287 pgs, £16.99; published in the USA as Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (now available as a Voyager paperback)
Reviewed by Steve Jeffery (1998)

A prequel to Mythago Wood, earliest in the ‘Mythago’ sequence. Holdstock’s frequent returns (like his protagonists) to the mythago-haunted realm of Ryhope Wood have taken on an almost McLuhanesque aspect of the endless spiral paths of his own dislocated wildwood. Everything is familiar, but also not to be trusted. Narratives are, like the mythagos of the wildwood, shifting, uncertain, untrustworthy and hidden in disguise. For the uninitiated, mythagos, myth-imagos, are figures from deep collective memory, proto-legends around which stories, legends and folklore accrete over time: Arthur, Robin Hood, Herne, Cerrunnos, the Wild Hunt. Some are far older, their stories having been split and transformed into separate and interlinked stories over time. It is a rich playground and, stripped of the veneer of civilised retellings, a dangerous one.

Mythago Wood was the story of Steven Huxley, called into the wildwood of Ryhope in search of the mythago-form of a young woman, a Celtic princess warrior called Guiwenneth, who had previously haunted both his father and elder brother, Christian. It’s Christian, now trapped in the mythago realm as the feared and brutal Outsider, uth guerig, who Steven pursues into the wood after his abduction of Guiwenneth and attempt on Steven’s life, while their father hunts them both in turn, in the shape of the man-beast primal mythago form, the Urscumug. Gate of Ivory is Christian’s story, from his tragic childhood (he looks on, helpless, as his terrified mother hangs herself on the great oak at the border of the wood) to before his brutalisation as uth guerig. In a sense, father and sons are doomed to repeat the same cycle of love and loss. Christian’s turn comes when Guiwenneth returns to him in adulthood, after his return from the war which has left his brother convalescing in France. As a boy, Guiwenneth had ridden him down in the fields outside the family house, ‘counting coup’ on him with a feathered stick, and another warrior mythago had entered the house, marking him as his slathan (whose literal translation, ‘disguise’, has several meanings in the text).

Christian’s fated pursuit of Guiwenneth, leads to his part in an epic quest that is derived from part of the Mabinogion, although encrusted, barnacle-like, with fragments of other tales and mythologies. Many of these provide episodes of wry humour that were largely missing from the dark and intensely driven Mythago Wood, but nearly all of them also carry a darker and bloody edge, like the tale of the flayed knight-errant, Escrivaune. In fact, Gate of Ivory, like the other Mythago books, embeds a number of other stories, some teasingly unfinished (‘But that is a story for another time and another people’) that hint that Holdstock is far from finished with his explorations of the mythago realm. Conceivably, Holdstock could spin off further mythago stories for quite some time, picking up such unfinished tales, and those of secondary characters, although the distorted space-time of Ryhope Wood is already starting to show some very strange effects as characters start to encounter earlier or later incarnations of themselves along different timelines.

Christian’s part in the central quest of Gate of Ivory is ambiguous. He is both participant and catalyst, having been marked in boyhood as Kylhuk’s slathan. Kylhuk’s quest, which has been handed down as the price for the hand of the princess Olwen, takes on aspects of a number of epic tales, from the Tain to the labours of Hercules, and in which he has amassed an army, the Legion, whose sheer concentration of mythago forms can distort the fabric of the wood itself. Christian becomes part of a band of champions within the quest, the Forlorn Hope, which includes Guiwenneth, the sorceress Issabeau, a Neolithic shaman, the jarag, a Celtic warrior with no name, and the Interpreter of Tongues, Gwyr. Each of those, like Christian, has a specific part to play and, as expected, a story of their own. The conclusion comes at the entrance of the underworld, entered by one of the twin gates of Ivory and Horn, through which come either dreams of lies and false promises, or of truth. Christian’s story, which has taken on its own mythago aspect, becomes that of Orpheus. His final choice is surprising, and serves to link to two ends of the spiral path which seals his own fate, and that of his mother and younger brother, Steven.

Gate of Ivory ends in a short Coda, whose final line is a promise of return. Whether this is the return that drives Mythago Wood itself, and closes one loop of a story that has taken ten years in the telling, remains to be seen. I doubt, though, whether Holdstock is fully finished with Ryhope Wood, or it with him.