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A review by slimikin
From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytales by Sara Maitland
1.0
A book that explores how forests, the Wood, shape our lives and our stories? That delves into different types of woodlands and ties those places to faery tales that reflect them? What a remarkable, clever premise. I can only hope that someday someone does it justice, because From the Forest most assuredly did not.
I wanted very, very much to enjoy this book...and I couldn't even finish it. And it wasn't the long paragraphs of dry botany lessons. Or the intricate, detailed descriptions of twigs and buds and leaves and branches. Or the exclusive, and excluding, expression of British culture. Or the flat recital of historical events. Or the unnecessary and wholly unconvincing justification of the book's thesis. Or the sneering digs at Tolkien, Andersen, and even Wilde.
No. Though that is more than enough to have to wiggle around and slog through and clamber over, none of that was what finally made me sigh and shut the book. That is entirely due to the fact that From the Forest has no purpose. What could've been a clear, elegant expression of land and peoples and the stories that connect them is instead a cluttered jumble of repetitive, self-indulgent essays and faery tales that...somehow?...tie into them.
Maitland meanders from travelogue descriptions of the forests into memoirs of her own experiences, lapses into emphatic critiques of Things She Doesn't Like, somehow drags some history and/or botany into justifying her opinions, states (and restates and states again) that forests must mean important things for faery tales, and tosses out a story. All without ever saying anything important or insightful or thought-provoking or, come to think of it, about forests and people and faery tales.
She talks around those things quite adeptly and certainly seems to think they're important, but she never actually connects to them. Instead, she opines that beech trees are wicked step-mothers and birches are princesses and insists that Forest Law birthed tales of the heroic tailor, servant girl, and soldier, but these are very clearly her own interpretations. They do not open themselves to my own, or any other reader's, experience, and they do not, really, show what the forest might have meant to those long ago tale-spinners.
In fact, where the book does its best work is precisely in those elements which invite us to participate in experiencing the forest and the stories as those tale-spinners might have. Adam Lee's photographs are lovely and evocative, even absent all the colors Maitland mentions in her descriptions. And Maitland's faery tale retellings are frank and earnest and funny and poignant. It's unfortunate that the remainder of the book lacks the same humility and clarity of purpose.
I wanted very, very much to enjoy this book...and I couldn't even finish it. And it wasn't the long paragraphs of dry botany lessons. Or the intricate, detailed descriptions of twigs and buds and leaves and branches. Or the exclusive, and excluding, expression of British culture. Or the flat recital of historical events. Or the unnecessary and wholly unconvincing justification of the book's thesis. Or the sneering digs at Tolkien, Andersen, and even Wilde.
No. Though that is more than enough to have to wiggle around and slog through and clamber over, none of that was what finally made me sigh and shut the book. That is entirely due to the fact that From the Forest has no purpose. What could've been a clear, elegant expression of land and peoples and the stories that connect them is instead a cluttered jumble of repetitive, self-indulgent essays and faery tales that...somehow?...tie into them.
Maitland meanders from travelogue descriptions of the forests into memoirs of her own experiences, lapses into emphatic critiques of Things She Doesn't Like, somehow drags some history and/or botany into justifying her opinions, states (and restates and states again) that forests must mean important things for faery tales, and tosses out a story. All without ever saying anything important or insightful or thought-provoking or, come to think of it, about forests and people and faery tales.
She talks around those things quite adeptly and certainly seems to think they're important, but she never actually connects to them. Instead, she opines that beech trees are wicked step-mothers and birches are princesses and insists that Forest Law birthed tales of the heroic tailor, servant girl, and soldier, but these are very clearly her own interpretations. They do not open themselves to my own, or any other reader's, experience, and they do not, really, show what the forest might have meant to those long ago tale-spinners.
In fact, where the book does its best work is precisely in those elements which invite us to participate in experiencing the forest and the stories as those tale-spinners might have. Adam Lee's photographs are lovely and evocative, even absent all the colors Maitland mentions in her descriptions. And Maitland's faery tale retellings are frank and earnest and funny and poignant. It's unfortunate that the remainder of the book lacks the same humility and clarity of purpose.