An interesting premise and a powerfully written novel drawing on the author's theme of other realities used elsewhere in his 'Mythago Wood' series. Here, the treatment is dark and concerns a haunting of a strange kind. Michael is adopted by parents who seem rather self-absorbed and cannot relate to him as he grows, possibly due to traumatic events occurring around him in the first days after they take him home from the clinic which has made a somewhat dubious arrangement. Inexplicably, dirt is thrown at him whenever he is left alone, and this climaxes in the first section of the book in near disaster. After relocating to a friends' house, things settle for a few years but eventually the adults realise Michael can 'fetch' things, and they eventually understand that these things are taken from the distant past.

The gift turns out to be a kind of curse. Despite the fact that tragedy attends it - that the fetching is a violent wrenching and often includes body parts of humans and animals - the parents start to look on their adopted son as a goldmine. Meanwhile, they transfer their parental affection to their own natural born daughter. Michael is a lonely boy, bullied at school, whose only 'friend' is an alter ego, Chalk Boy, whom he believes to be essential to his ability to fetch valuable items from the past. Chalk Boy is a fetch of another kind - a Trickster character in effect, from the old meaning of trick. He often torments Michael by switching things at the last moment so that what he brings back are rotting animals etc.

As years pass, the boy develops an obsession with the Grail which he believes he can find and recover - perhaps to win back his father's affection which is soon lost when his gift becomes less certain as he approaches puberty, and his father turns to drink.

There is some good character development though I found the father's transformation from an unpleasant drunken sott who landed the family in debt to a dubious and violent group of characters, into an abruptly reawakened repentent man who wants to rebuild his fractured relationship with Michael, less than convincing. The psychic French character Francoise is also rather a plot device. But Michael and his little sister Carol are well realised. The only aspect that becomes a bit repetitious after a while are the graphic descriptions of the aftermath of violent dismemberment which attend Michael's forays into the past. Also, the explanation for what lies behind his psychic abilities and experience is a little 'pat' for me. Hence I'm rating this as 4 stars rather than 5. ( )

So far, I’ve only read one book by Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood, an utterly captivating tale of mythic power and ancient legends, closely bound to the English landscape. The Fetch turned up in a second-hand bookshop some months after I’d finished Mythago Wood and, although I was keen to explore more of Holdstock’s imaginative world, it didn’t take me long to realise that The Fetch is a very different kettle of fish. I’ve never actually read any Dennis Wheatley, but I suspect this has a similar flavour to his books; I’m reminded, too, of those horror films in which wholesome families are gradually reduced to primeval terror. Yet this isn’t an outright horror novel: if it were, I wouldn’t have read it. In some ways it’s a classic Holdstock story, a tale of the past weaving itself into the present and breaking through in unexpected ways, a tale of treasures and quests and miracles – but one underlaid with the slow, inescapable thrum of something nasty in the woodshed...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/05/28/the-fetch-robert-holdstock/ ( )

Adopted boy gains
gift of fetching gifts; travels
through time and space too.

The Fetch (the US title, Unknown Regions, is taken from a subtitle of Holdstock's Lavondyss) revisits one of Holdstock's favourite tropes, the wood as gateway to other times, places and parallel worlds (as in the Mythago Wood series) but on this occasion the tale is set within the undergrowth which has grown up in a disused chalk quarry on the English south coast. The action revolves around the boy Michael, adopted by a middle-class professional couple, who brings with him a maelstrom of psychic activity, changing their lives forever.

Holdstock's starting point is the three meanings of 'fetch' (the act of retrieving, a spirit doppelganger and a dialect word meaning 'fetish') and interweaves these into a narrative that also draws in archaeology, folklore, ritual, ESP, scientific ethics and a dysfunctional family. As with many Holdstock stories there is a sense of escalating claustrophobia and menace, unleavened by any humour but told with a profound love of words, sense of place and concern over human meddling in Nature's domain.

I must confess a feeling of connection with Holdstock. Born three weeks after him, I shared his interests in British mythology, history and storytelling until his untimely death in 2009, but came across him only once at an Arthurian conference in Cardiff in the 1990s when he must have been working on his Merlin cycle. I was impressed by the Mythago titles I had read but faintly irritated by his deliberate misspellings of many Welsh-rooted names; no such problem arises with The Fetch, however. More convincing is Holdstock's highlighting of the family's claustrophobic life by the occasional foray into the outside world (Scotland, Hadrian's Wall, London) and of course into the world of the past (I especially liked the reference to early 20th-century descriptions of antediluvian sea creatures in the fossil record).

Holdstock has a soft spot for the theme of the Quest, particularly that of the Holy Grail, and that reappears here in an unusual but, in the context of this story, very relevant way, along with a striking treatment of the Fisher King. All in all, this was for me a very well crafted and haunting tale; my only reservation is the conclusion which is simultaneously rather pat and also rather open concerning the boy Michael and his family. Indeed, his sister Carol and parents Richard and Susan, who all bear very ordinary names while being subjected to not very everyday experiences, are at times well drawn but at other times I feel the motivations for their actions are hard to fathom exactly. The other enigma is the psychic archaeologist Francoise, whose ultimate function as a dea ex machina rather loses this reader's empathy with her.

One other point: the cover illustration of my paperback edition is full of details that closely echo the details of the text--all except for the doppelganger spirit itself: true, there are elements of a fetish with a gold mask, the fish face of a foetus, the amorphous aspect of a shape-shifting entity, the height manifested by its appearance to the psychic, but where the blood-red colour comes from I have no idea. ( )

A strange, disturbing book, not directly related to Holdstock's Mythago Wood series, but definitely drawing on some of the same ideas. ( )