Avilion, is, at least according to Amazon, the 7th book in the Mythago Wood series. This one returns us to the tale of the Huxley family, and looks to provide some sort of closure for the stories of Steven and Christian, if not for the series as a whole.
Rob Holdstock’s writing is a glorious as ever, but this book suffered from being read at the same time as I was also reading Charles Butler’s excellent Four British Fantasists. In that Charlie was making very interesting arguments about fantasy, history, time travel, predestination and the like. This brings home very clearly the fact that if most of your characters are mythagos with pre-destined life stories there isn’t actually much tension to the narrative, or indeed any necessity for the author to provide a plot that pushes the characters in the right direction in a believable way.
Interesting concept about predestination destroying tension. I recently read a book (Blue Bells of Scotland) in which the characters do change history from an alternate realtiy back to what really happened. I realized as I read that the alternate reality was necessary, or there’d have been little incentive for the main character to go back in time to fix what wasn’t broken. Very interesting story.