Wildwood (novel)

In Wildwood, everyone is either of The Wood, or is an Outsider, or, in the special case of the protagonists, a "half breed", that is, an Outsider who is able to enter The Wood. A sort of "aura or shine" makes it possible to visually identify which of these things a person is. The first human Prue meets in The Wood is an old man driving a mail truck, Richard, the South Wood Postmaster General. She sees in him something she "couldn't put her finger on that seemed to exude from him, something that made him seem like no one she'd ever met before. It was a kind of aura or shine, like the way a familiar landscape is transformed in the light of a full moon." The natives of The Wood are consistently able to recognize Prue and Curtis as Outsiders, who ought not to be able to enter through the Periphery Bind surrounding The Wood, while only the people of the pastoral and meditative North Wood can see with an unexplained sense that Prue and Curtis have a dual nature, born outside The Wood yet unhindered by the magical barrier that keeps the Outsiders out.[1]

The St. Johns Bridge. In the universe of Wildwood, this is the Ghost Bridge, existing only when a rune magic spell is cast and not apparent in everyday life. Without the St. Johns Bridge, the impassable Wilderness is all the more isolated.

The premise of Wildwood is that Forest Park in Portland is "its own secret country, populated by a diverse and strange people".[11] The real Forest Park is about 8 miles (13 km) long and 1 mile (1.6 km) wide, containing 5,100 acres (2,100 ha) of natural woods, mostly second growth forest with some old growth, all within the city limits.[12] This place fired Meloy's imagination, and the fantasy version of Forest Park is Wildwood's "most distinctive element".[8] Wildwood transforms Forest Park into "the darkest possible woods."[13]

Outsiders, the people of Portland, call it the Impassable Wilderness, and they know it only as a forbidden, taboo area, never visited and rarely spoken of. Children are taught to stay away and even learn, eventually, to stop asking why it is forbidden. Unknown to the Outsiders, it is filled with magical talking animals and people, some living in the pastoral, almost medieval conditions of North Wood, while the country of South Wood is industrialized with technology typical of the 19th and early 20th Century. North Wood and South Wood are separated by Wildwood, an untamed no man's land filled with bandits and ostensibly wild coyotes. Travelers, and the Postmaster's truck, make the risky journey from the northern and southern countries by the Long Road through Wildwood. Tucked between Wildwood and South Wood is the Avian Principality, a nation of birds.

Nearly every location in the imaginary setting is carried over from Portland's actual geography.[9] The story begins in the protagonists' neighborhood, St. Johns, before moving across the Willamette River and into the impassable Wilderness, that is, The Wood. Pittock Mansion, located just south of Forest Park, appears under its real name, but serves as the seat of government of South Wood, while the Oregon Zoo is represented as the South Wood Prison. The Audubon Society of Portland is in the approximate location of the Avian Principality.[9] Ellis said there are a number of large trees in Forest Park, but no specific tree served as the model for the North Wood Council Tree.[9]

The St. Johns Bridge, is missing and unknown to the people of Wildwood's Portland. The only access Prue and Curtis have to pursue the crows into the impassable Wilderness is a risky dash over the train tracks of the Railroad Bridge, which is based on the Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge 5.1.[1]^{: 33–40, 331–340, 346–349, plate 4}[9] The St. Johns Bridge does appear briefly, as the Ghost Bridge, conjured by a rune magic spell. In a question and answer session with Meloy and Ellis, a young reader suggested the Ghost Bridge could be interpreted as an apparition of a bridge that once existed in the past, implying that Wildwood takes place in our world's future.[9] Meloy replied that this is not the case, and that he has "another story in mind" as to the origin of the Ghost Bridge, and that Wildwood is meant to be more or less contemporary with our time.[9]

A stereotypical view of Portland's youth culture is expressed through Prue, Curtis and Prue's parents.[3][14][15] Literary critic Anna Minard describes the kids as "bespectacled, bike-riding, vinyl-browsing, Kurosawa-referencing children."[14] Descriptions of real elements of Portland are combined to create what critic Claire Dederer calls a "richly satisfying weave of reality and fantasy."[16]

Wildwood echoes several classic fantasy and children's tales, notably J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.[5][15][17] The kidnapping of a child by crows comes from Irish folktales of the Sluagh, and from Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There where a girl rescues her brother kidnapped by goblins.[3][5] The literary tone of Decemberists songs is apparent in the writing style, with a weakness for the charms of archaic language and sesquipedalianism.[3][4][5]

Wildwood is more soft fantasy than hard fantasy, in that historical and technological consistency and plausibility are not a high priority, giving the book a whimsical, or stream of consciousness, tone.[18] The factions of The Wood use a variety of anachronistic technologies, including cutlasses, blunderbusses, and flintlocks, concurrent with howitzers and semi-automatic pistols, and vehicles like animal-drawn wagons and carts alongside bicycles, trucks and trains. No attempt was made to maintain a consistent level of technological advancement or to rationalize why a particular piece of equipment was used; rather, Meloy said, they could "pick coolest version of whatever piece of technology" they wanted, and Ellis said they "just picked whatever we liked."[9] When she first meets the South Wood postman Richard, he threatens her with a shotgun, which in the same paragraph is referred to as a double-barrelled rifle, then on the next page it is called a shotgun again.[1]^: 62–63 Though the text pointedly mentions Prue's single-speed bicycle,[1]^: 3 the illustrations twice show her bike having derailleur gears, which are only present on multi-speed bikes.[1]^{: 23, 431}

Illustrations

Carson Ellis's illustrations, ever present on Decemberists album covers, are consistent with the folklore roots of the band's songs, love of nature, and romanticized historical periods, having a dark and playfully macabre tone reminiscent of Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl.[3][5][19]

Carson Ellis's favorite Wildwood drawing, a badger pulling a rickshaw, was included in the story solely so she could draw it.

Ellis said that her favorite drawing among Wildwood's 85 illustrations is of a badger pulling a rickshaw, a relatively minor illustration compared with the full page color plates depicting pivotal scenes in the book. Meloy said that the scene it illustrated, of a friendly animal who appears at an opportune moment to offer Prue a ride after she escaped from captivity in the Pittock Mansion, was not vital to the plot, and an editor wanted to cut it from the book. But Meloy had written it specifically because he thought Ellis would enjoy drawing the badger and rickshaw, so he fought to keep it in.[9] Booklist's Daniel Kraus highlighted the image as representative of the book, commenting, "If you like stories in which spunky kids emerge from secret tunnels only to be greeted by smartly outfitted badgers operating rickshaws, this is your book."[20] Ellis commented, "That's one of the moments when the story seems really stream-of-consciousness. Prue pops up out of a manhole, and a badger comes by with a rickshaw and gives her a ride free of charge, and it's like, why not? It's such a great image."[1]^: 173[18]

Meloy and Ellis first conceived the idea for the book before Meloy formed the indie folk-rock band The Decemberists in 2000. When they first moved to Portland, Meloy and Ellis were living in a warehouse where they "had this idea of working on a novel together ... because we enjoyed making up stories and playing off one another's creative impulses."[5] Meloy was influenced by books that he read growing up, including Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain. Meloy cites Piers Anthony's Xanth novels as a "direct influence", noting the "world within the real world and the implausibility of the whole enterprise".[7][9] Ellis was influenced by The Chronicles of Narnia series as a child; the illustrations in the seven books of the Narnia series were a direct inspiration on her work.[9] Unlike her previous work, where the text is completed before the illustrations are created, for Wildwood, Ellis collaborated with Meloy throughout the writing process.[3]

Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy at a book signing in Portland.

After writing the first 80 pages, Meloy put the book on hold for several years while he worked on his music and Ellis focused on her book illustrations. When work finally resumed on the novel, the title changed from How Ruthie Ended the War to Wildwood, the character of Ruthie became Prue, and the object of her quest changed from her lost father to her kidnapped brother.[5] The early version of the story was, according to Meloy, "wildly inappropriate for children."[3][9] Once they resumed work on the novel, Ellis said it took about two years to complete.[9] Meloy feared his entry into fiction writing would be seen as "dabbling"; he wanted to avoid creating a "vanity project" like Madonna's picture books.[19]

Five publishers sought the rights to the Wildwood series before being won by the HarperCollins imprint Balzer + Bray, with a first print run of 250,000 copies.[19]

Meloy and Ellis live on the edge of Forest Park and frequently hike its trails, where they found inspiration for geography of the series.[9][19] Meloy and Ellis developed the idea for the impassable Wilderness from their experience in Forest Park, drawing maps of the fictional forest and using it to create the plot and characters.[3][9] Illustrated endpapers in the book feature a large map of the forest with accompanying detail maps.[1]

A special edition of the book (ISBN 9780062130280) was also printed: it is hand-bound, signed and numbered, with a slipcase and a three-color 15-by-12-inch (38 cm × 30 cm) fold-out map, among other additions.[25]

Wildwood was on The New York Times Best Seller Children's Chapter Books list for two weeks, ranking 7th the first week and 9th the second.[26] The book won, in a tie with Colin Meloy's sister Maile Meloy's The Apothecary, the 2012 Middle Reader E.B. White Read Aloud Award.[27][28]

Overall, the book received positive reactions. Critics praised the quality of the illustrations, noting the old-fashioned style of the hardcover edition with maps on the end papers and a select set of color plates.[4][8][14][29] The A.V. Club's Tasha Robinson found the book, in spite of its flaws, "a perfect balance of middle-school-age-appropriate simplicity and more challenging writing that makes the book adult-accessible."[8] Meloy's rich descriptive language, of action, and especially the natural setting, were among the book's strengths, while a lack of character development and over-reliance on familiar fantasy tropes were cited as weaknesses.[8] Similarly, The New Yorker found that the use of familiar motifs could sometimes be "formulaic" but it was nonetheless a well told tale that was "never condescending", and that Meloy's original contribution to conventions of the genre was his allegorical exploration of contemporary political and military struggle, including diplomacy, revolution, and ethnic cleansing.[29]

The most frequent criticism was that the pace dragged in some places,[4][30] which some critics speculated was necessary setup for subsequent novels in the series.[16][31] Some critics said they were "rankled" at the "arch" and "Portland-y" mention such local lifestyle tropes as cork flooring and recycling bins.[4] Prue's riding to the final battle on her bicycle caused The New York Times's Claire Dederer to quip, "bicycle heroism: it doesn't get any more Portland than that."[16] The regionalisms came on strong enough to bring to some critics' minds the Portlandia TV series that pokes fun at the oddities of Portland culture.[4][16] Salon's David Daley has called on pundits to "stop comparing everything to Portlandia", saying reference to the satirical comedy show "has become a lazy shorthand for oddball, quirky cool."[32]

The first negative review of Wildwood appeared following the release of the novel in the UK.[31] The Stirling Observer's Gregor White said that the story begins well, and agreed with other critics that the setting is an impressive work, but in sum judged that the book "somehow ends up as one big shoulder shrug of indifference."[31] While other critics had reservations about the novel switching back and forth between the story threads of Prue and Curtis after they become separated early in the story, White said this "flitting back and forth" is an insurmountable "structural problem" that is "intensely wearing".[31]

Rachel Brown of The Atlantic thought that "it makes perfect sense that Colin Meloy, the loquacious and imaginative lead singer of the quirky Portland-based rock band The Decemberists, would write a children's book."[3] In contrast, critic Anna Minard from Seattle's The Stranger and Patrick Ness, in The Guardian, feared that Wildwood could be one more of a stream of "baldly mediocre books written by celebrities", citing children's books by Joy Behar, Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Fallon, Gloria Estefan, and Madonna.[14][30] Minard and Ness also worried that the book would pander to adult Decemberists fans,[30] while only "dressed trendily in kid-friendly wrapping," but Minard was pleasantly astonished that the book did none of these things, and was not a "vanity project", landing well in range of its middle reader target and avoiding the affected pitfalls of a pop musician as writer.[14] Ness, noting the repetition of the adjective "suddenly" in one paragraph, hoped for tighter writing in future novels, but overall found the book successful and not the work of a "dilettante wanting to dabble."[30] Coincidentally, Colin Meloy's sister, novelist Maile Meloy, also released a juvenile fiction book in 2011, saying, "I feel like everyone I know is writing one."[19]

Stephen Heyman of The New York Times warned that Wildwood might be too violent for some readers, having many of the horrors so frequently found in Decemberists songs, including battles when people and animals die by musket and cannon fire, sword blows, and falling, and references to torture, and the threat of the blood sacrifice of a baby at the book's climax.[19]

In 2011 Meloy said intended to write at least two more books for the Wildwood Chronicles while his band, The Decemberists, was on hiatus.[5][19] He planned the second Wildwood novel to have Prue return to The Wood, "her life very much in danger". The plot was to involve "scheming industrialists trying to worm their way into Wood" from the Outside, and show a much "weirder Portland", with the supernatural not confined to The Wood. Meloy said he would no longer constrain the denizens of The Wood to the native species of Forest Park.[9] The second book in the series, Under Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles, Book Two, was released on September 25, 2012.[33][34][35] The third and final book in the series, Wildwood Imperium, was released on February 3, 2015.

In 2011, Oregon-based animation studio Laika optioned Wildwood for a stop motion animated feature film[19][36] and produced the trailer for the book.[23] In 2021, Laika announced their next film will be Wildwood with Travis Knight set to direct and Chris Butler writing the screenplay. On August 25, 2022, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant were all announced as part of the ensemble voice cast of the film.[37][38] In 2023, director Travis Knight revealed in an interview with Empire that the film was due out in 2025.[39]

• Official website