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Duncton Wood

£9.9£99Clearance
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I know this is perhaps too long (700+ pages) for many kids to get through but the ones that do will have read a book that will stay with them forever.

It has all one could hope for in a action packed fantasy: great battles, a grand quest, lightning and a showdown at the end with two unlikely heroes who save the day. To make it worse it also doubles as Parental Incest, since her rapist is her own father Mandrake, who's so obsessed with his daughter that prior to the rape, he killed her first husband/mate in one-on-one combat and massacred her children/his grandchildren by said husband/mate. I am sorry to have to mention Watership Down again but in both these books the English countryside is depicted in such a beautiful way that it helps English readers like I realised what a lovely country we do live in.And there were parts of it that were beautiful: Cairn and Rebecca's story; the loving descriptions of Duncton Wood, which is near where the author lives; the first journey through the Chamber of Roots. My response to Duncton Wood seems to have almost as many layers as the novel has pages, which is a bold claim. The goal of finding the seventh book isn't mentioned till several chapters in, then it is forgotten while the moles go and do other things. Interestingly, the sheer power of the Old Speech when combined with walls of Dark Sound brings it close to being a black speech, despite being the language of the good guys.

At times Horwood goes into a whimsy of describing every tiny thing and there are a couple of occasions in the book that made me almost want to put it down in disgust - when Bracken is first exploring the Ancient System; when Boswell and Bracken journey to Siabod; when Bracken secretly attends the singing of the Song. Opinion on this book varies between those people who consider it a towering work of genius and those who find the adventures of human-like moles to be of sorely limited interest. At the time of their birth, the system is being overthrown and then led by two evil moles - Mandrake and Rune.For me, Horwood has got the combination of animals and fantasy and faith and countryside just right. Those who have a sense of what it is to experience the divine will certainly find something to recognize in Horwood's work, neither however does he ram this down everyone's throat, (I have purely agnostic friends who read such things as simply the experiences of moles in nature and elements of the story). Whenever this awful situation has subsided and if we ever get back to some semblance of normal and travel is once again allowed, I know exactly where I want to re-visit.

Mind you, I also have books two, three, and four on my bookshelves which makes me wonder if I am ever going to get around to reading them, or whether they are going to be tossed out at the next Church Fete – we will see. When they emerge above ground on a spiritual quest and enter our world they see roads as noisy rivers of death and Owls as lethal killers with terrifying screams and hypnotic eyes. Another favourite is the Brothers Karamazou, also translated as The Karamazov Brothers written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. All in all, a very uneven book, which was entertaining in parts, but couldn't hold my interest over the long haul.

But the source of the evil that spreads through Duncton lies not only in Mandrake but in the growing disinterest in the rites and traditions that surround the now deserted standing Stone that was once the heart of the system itself. If certain elements of the ending seem a little contrived and designed more to provide a false sense of completeness than anything else, well I can forgive the author those small mis-steps. With Rebecca a captive to her father after having mated with Cairn, a Pasture mole, she sinks into a long depression during and after her pregnancy when her pups are killed by Mandrake. Instead, Horwood falls back on explaining how you're supposed to feel about events and how we're supposed to think about characters.

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