Lavondyss

After having re-read Mythago Wood as part of a critical study, I decided to carry on and re-read Lavondyss. Many people have commented that this narrative drags, but in my humble opinion, as with how cinema, prior to rhythmic editing trends, perhaps may seem slow or wafting, Lavondyss is no more unhurried than any other book of the 19th or 20th century. Whereas, Mythago Wood was a deliberate intrusion into the mythical realms of Ryhope, Lavondyss is a more gentle discovery of it through oracle and divination. The character of Tallis really carries the burden of life and death through her imagination, her journey is in the grandest sense of time, epic. Lavondyss is a book of familial sorrow, entropy, of suffering and superstition. You are not going to find a rip-roaring adventure full of spellbinding and combat, this book is more reflective but it is also, as Holdstock mentions in his afterward, a fictional version of a treatise he might have liked to write on the theme of stories and myths. For me, there are some moments that I will never forget, some moments where Robert's writing held me unflinchingly, and others where I just let time unfold in a world where time has no linear meaning.