2021/152: Lavondyss -- Robert Holdstock

'Each of you was born with memory of the same ancient event, and the abundance of later myths and legends that had developed from it...Lavondyss for you – for all of us – is what we are able to remember of ancient times ...’ [p. 398]

Having reread Mythago Wood, I found myself craving the Ice Age and the multiple circling-backs of Tallis' story in Lavondyss. Tallis is the sister of Harry Keaton, Stephen Huxley's companion in the earlier novel. Guided by a letter written by her grandfather in the margins of a book of myth and legend, she develops a rich and strange personal mythology, donning hand-made masks to channel different voices, and discovering the secret names of the fields and streams around the village where she lives. She encounters, and impresses, an aged Ralph Vaughan Williams: she misses her brother, and wants to find him again: she catches a glimpse of a dying warrior, and falls in love with him. And she tells stories that she doesn't understand ...

Lavondyss revisits and reshapes the themes of Mythago Wood: here, the siblings are bound by love instead of envy; the female protagonist is more powerful than anyone else; there is more sense of the 'present' (the 20th century) informing events, and of 20th-century thoughts being available in the deep past at the heart of the forest. And Lavondyss, that deep cold heart, is an atavistic memory of the never-ending winter of the last glacial maximum, a place of horror and honour, a place where the cruel origins of stories about princes and castles can be revealed.

Here's my review from my last reread, back in 2010. I have a clear memory of Rob telling me that it wasn't a time loop, which I found immensely comforting: but apparently I did not have that memory then, and Rob died in 2009 ... Have I created a comforting memory, or did I simply forget that conversaion back then, and remember it again more recently? .. .I also note that this time around I recalled slightly different aspects of the novel, but it was distorted out of shape: I'd thought the majority of the story took place within the wood, but Tallis doesn't enter the wood until nearly two-thirds of the way through.