Drowned Country is the direct sequel to Silver in the Wood – indeed, it could almost be described as the other half of the story. It shares with it the dense, green atmosphere that feels almost more real than the real world, as well as the charm and humour of the characters. It is also absolutely impossible to discuss without spoiling Silver in the Wood terribly, because it starts where that story ends. Really, do not read this review if you haven’t read Silver in the Wood yet. Instead, go straight out to your online library or bookshop of choice and read Silver right away. You won’t regret it, and this review will still be here when you get back.

Done? Excellent.

I know, I know, it’s hard to have to leave that world and the Wood. Maybe you even read it twice so that you could stay there longer. But don’t worry, because the good news is that now you can return to it, and Silver and Tobias and Silver’s mother are just as much themselves as they ever were.

It is a little more than two years since the events of Silver in the Wood, and fourteen months since Tobias left Silver, after learning that Silver had lied to him about something crucial. Tobias has spent the intervening time working with Silver’s mother as a practical folklorist, which is a polite way of saying monster hunter. Silver has spent the intervening time sulking. And when I say sulking, I mean sulking MIGHTILY. Think Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle, only with more crabapples. (The spiders remain constant however).

Thorngroves shrouded Greenhollow Hall. Blackthorn and hawthorn, holly and briar, carpets of stinging nettles in case anyone missed the point. Adders moved in that dark tangle. Crawling, stinging things skittered along branches. Silver had a good line in alarming spiders going. Thin branches pressed up against the library windows, tapping and tapping as if asking permission to come in. No sunbeam had managed to penetrate in months.

On a Tuesday afternoon in April, a shudder of recognition went through the whole mess. Silver was lying on the dusty floor of the mediaeval great hall, staring at the vaulted ceiling, contemplating making it sprout. Everything sprouted if he wanted it to. There was a healthy crab apple demolishing its way through the ceiling and the floor of what had once been a whitewashed ground floor bedroom in the east wing. Crooked branches laden with white blossom and sour fruit together thrust from broken windowpanes. The tree had been in both blossom and fruit for months and it was not happy. Silver was not happy either. Sometimes he went and sat in there and felt sorry for himself.

Other places Silver felt sorry for himself: his study, which as all the servants had left months ago was a mess; his library, which was hardly better, his bedroom, where mistletoe hung from the bedposts like midwinter baubles, and of course the floor of the great hall, where the cold of the ancient stones seeped into his back and the moss was spreading lusciously along the cracks between them.

…until Silver’s mother shows up, and she is having none of this nonsense. And Silver, the ‘Lord of the Wood, nearer demigod than mortal man, master of time and seasons, beasts and birds, earth and sky’ is still more than a little bit afraid of his mother. It does not take long for her to shame him into helping her with her most recent case: a young woman has disappeared; vampires are thought to be involved, and while she and Tobias could certainly deal with the matter given time, time is something that they do not have. Silver’s presence is required, and he acquiesces. This has nothing whatsoever to do with any lingering feelings he has for Tobias, naturally.

We then launch into a story that takes place largely under the sea, in the country that was once the great forest, but is no longer. Once again, Tesh’s prose is gorgeously evocative:

A memory that was only half his whispered to him that the ocean had not been there so long. There had been a broad valley, and half a hundred little rivers, and an unbroken forest cradling half the world stretching all across that silted land. And then, when the world changed and the water rose, there had been islands still strung out like a chain. Silver could almost see them, each crowned with its last handful of trees.

The characters and the folklore are the heart of Tesh’s work, and I don’t want to say too much about the latter, because it is more fun if you get to watch it unfold as you read it. Suffice it to say that it is magical and disturbing all at once, just as it should be. Silver’s nature magic is beautiful and eerie and gruesome and he is human enough to still be disturbed by this, even while he is fey enough to use it. The resolution of the story was happy and wistful and slightly uncanny – and very satisfying. The Wood is still the Wood, for good or ill.

As for the former, Tesh writes simply fantastic characters. Where Silver in the Wood was told from the viewpoint of Tobias, in Drowned Country we are inside Silver’s head, and this is a highly entertaining place to be. Silver is charming, completely selfish, and really not a grown up at all. His inner monologue is very, very funny, and there is a lot of it. I am not sure I always like Silver – he really is profoundly self-centred, and I suspect that in real life he would drive me right around the bend – but as a character he is enormous fun.

And yet, underneath all the nonsense is a core of fear – fear of what he has become, fear of what immortality will mean for him, fear of what he might yet become, if he loses himself to the Wood.

Tobias is still Tobias: stoic, reliable, conscientious, and maintaining a certain mystery even though he is now entirely a mortal man. It makes absolute sense that he joined Mrs Silver in her monster hunting – he always felt responsible for the supernatural inhabitants of the Wood and their interactions with humans; this is an extension of that same duty.

And Mrs Silver herself is marvellous, of course. A practical folklorist by profession, she is sharp-tongued and brisk and rather ruthless when it comes to protecting her son (including, ideally, from himself). For all his loquacious charm, Silver does not deserve his mother, and they both know it.

A new delight in this story is Maud, the young woman whose disappearance sparks the adventure, and who quickly shows herself to be as tough-minded and brisk as Silver’s mother, if not more so. She has no time for Silver’s nonsense either:

“Didn’t you have an article in the last Folklore? No, the one before. On the Hallow Wood. Rather coy, I thought.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You plainly knew more than you were saying,” said Maud, eyeing him with distaste. “Why pretend to be a scholar if you’re going to keep secrets?”

Maud is great fun – full of scholarly enthusiasm, chillingly pragmatic in the matter of vampires, and absolutely bent on a scientific expedition into Fairyland in defiance of both convention and sense. She and Silver bicker like siblings and have rather more in common than Silver would like to think. (Silver is quite good at denial, so he does a good job of not thinking about it.)

Drowned Country has far more of the romance about it than Silver in the Wood, principally because the relationship between Silver and Tobias, while broken, is at least something they are both aware of. This is a second chance romance, and most of the work to be done here is Silver’s, since he is the one who messed it up the first time. Not that Silver is unsympathetic – yes, he is profoundly selfish, but it’s the selfishness of fear and desperation. He is very aware of his own weaknesses; he cannot die, but he has a very good imagination and knows that there are fates that are worse than death. And he loves Tobias, but is also terrified that without him he will lose himself – and this leads him to the lie that drives Tobias away from him in the first place.

Tobias has neither forgiven Silver nor left Silver unforgiven. He accepts Silver for what and who he is, and he understands Silver far better than Silver understands him. But accepting Silver is not the same as being willing to put up with being lied to. And Silver needs to get outside his own head for long enough to consider what Tobias wants, what he fears, and what he needs. There is not a lot of direct communication between the two, but there is a lot of listening to what is unsaid, which is perhaps even more important given their respective personalities. Silver talks a lot but says little that is meaningful; Tobias speaks hardly at all, and his feelings must be discerned from his actions.

But the understanding they reach in the end feels settled and loving, and if Tobias gives Silver the grounding he desperately needs, Silver prevents Tobias from sinking back into silence and emotional inertia. (Really, the Wood suited Tobias far better than it did Silver – there is a lot of the old oak tree still about Tobias.). On an emotional level, they balance each other, and perhaps even save each other. It’s a proper happy ever after, and I really love them together.

Drowned Country really is a beautiful book, the sort that makes you happy to live in a world where you can read it. It abounds in humour, adventure, tenderness, magic, and a sort of poetry. The story is peopled with characters I care about, and above all, it is haunted by a Wood that I both dream of and fear to be lost in.

I loved every minute of it.