“Now that’s a book,” McGavick said, “that Night Wood thing. The way that little girl ... You think she’s going to find her way out. That’s the way these things are supposed to go.”
“She has to figure out what she’s lost before she can escape,” Charles said.
“But she never does, does she? Who among us is lucky enough to do that? The book is true to life that way. That’s what I like about it.” [p. 54]
Lissa, daughter of Charles and Erin, dies: her parents flee to England, where Erin has inherited a country estate. Hollow Hall is the former home of obscure nineteenth century fantasist Caedmon Hollow, whose only work was In the Night Wood. That book has fascinated Charles since childhood: it was also involved in his meeting Erin. Now, grieving and ridden with angry guilt, he determines to write a biography of Caedmon Hollow.
Erin, meanwhile, descends into a spiral of drink and prescription drugs, and begins to draw compulsively -- sometimes portraits of her dead daughter, sometimes darker things. She blames Charles for Erin's death [spoiler, highlight](because it is his fault) and also for the affair which he was pursuing before the accident.
Researching Caedmon Hollow and the roots of his novel, Charles meets a local historian, Silva North. (Coincidentally, her initials are the same as the woman with whom Charles had his ill-fated affair.) With her insight, experience and knowledge, Charles is able to untangle the story of how Caedmon Hollow came to write a book about a Horned King and a little girl ...
The prose is beautiful, and there are some fascinating ideas here: but I disliked Charles intensely. He turns away from Erin, discounting her grief, telling others 'she blames me for the accident'. There is a lot of gaslighting, and an ongoing refusal to take responsibility for his own actions. There is, indeed, something mythic in the wood, and an ancient secret waiting to be discovered, and an unearthly bargain: but there is also a sad and frustrating tale of a shattered marriage and a sense of futility in the face of fate.
Charles worries at one point that he's just a figure in a story: that he was somehow fated to discover Caedmon Hollow's novel, that everything that came after that was part of an ancient cycle. But Erin, I felt, actually was helpless: things happened to her, she had little agency. And unlike Charles, I can't imagine her thinking "the idea of submitting to a larger narrative was not without its comforts" [p. 162]. For Charles it's an excuse for bad behaviour: for Erin, just the chilly assurance that there was nothing she could have done.
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