The Hood

Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet #2

by Lavie Tidhar

The Hood is the second book in Lavie Tidhar's ambitious Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet – a viscerally entertaining, ominously subversive and poetically profane remixing of the myths and legends that shaped our nation.

God bless you, England, on this glorious Year of Our Lord, 1145.

Don't cross the Templars. Everybody knows that. But Will Scarlet, back from the crusades, hopped up on khat and cider, did. Stabbed thrice in the belly but somehow still alive, he's heading home to Nottingham.

And things are not right in Nottingham.

It's the wood, you see. Sherwood. Ice-age ancient, impenetrable, hiding a dark and secret heart. As the ancient sages say, If you go into the woods today, you may not come out tomorrow, and the person who comes out may not be you...

The Hood is Lavie Tidhar's narcotic remix of an ancient English myth, a tale knotted from legends lost to time, shredded and restitched for each passing century. A tale for today.

'A wild, inventive tapestry of myth and magic, with a wry sense of humor. Tidhar's writing is wonderfully vibrant' Silvia Moreno-Garcia, bestselling author of Mexican Gothic

Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Historical, Retellings, Fiction, Audiobook

516 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2021

About the author

Lavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.

Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century.

Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist.

Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.

He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).

Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie.

His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century.

Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).

Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012).

He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there.

He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers).

Tidhar lives with his wife in London.

Reviews

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tidhar’s Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet continues! And just like “By Force Alone” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it is a wild, hallucinatory ride that mashes together history, classical tales, folklore and Tidhar’s very own brand of weird. More like this, please!

Will “The Knife” Scarlett, Rebecca daughter of Isaac of York, King Henry’s sons Richard and John, Friar Tuck, Guy de Guiseborne; familiar names if you’ve read “Ivanhoe” and any version of the Robin Hood legend. But here, they are not at all the characters we are used to seeing in films and books. Tidhar links the figure of Robin Hood to the legends of the Green Man and Maid Marian as his consort, the May Queen, and around them, an age-old yet ageless story of power conquered and lost and regained unfolds. But this is not Disney's Robin Hood...

Just like in “By Force Alone”, Tidhar generously sprinkled hilarious pop culture references and cute anachronisms all over this book (the Nottingham gate guards are named Bert and Ernest, a bard whines about having to play “Greensleves”, etc…), and this is much more about gang wars and drugs (aka various mushrooms and fairy dust) than about wealth redistribution and heroic feats. It’s not for everyone but I absolutely love the way he makes this well-known folk story grimy and makes not-so-subtle commentary about the Holy Wars ultimately being about profit and gratiutous violence.

If you liked his version of King Arthur's story, you will love this as well! I can't wait to see what legends Tidhar tackles next! 4 and a half stars, rounded up.

[John McDermott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good! A grim dark fantasy retelling of the myths of Robin Hood. Using modern speech and with some excellent pop culture references ; Guy of Gisbourne in Apocalypse Now, anyone?
It's an entertaining read that also has an excellent sense of humour.
Recommended.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a second volume of a planned tetralogy based on myth and folklore of British isles, the first being a reinterpretation of Arthurian legend as a gangster noir, By Force Alone, which I reviewed here. This book fast forwards to the times of Crusades and Magna Carta, loosely reinterpreting Robin Hood story.

Once again, the story is alluding to gangster movies, but now with a bit of disgruntled soldiers returning from war (in this case the Crusades), which among other influences may allude to the first Rambo movie, as well as to Christianity stomping out local cults and traditions, a stand-off between feudal/Christian city and rural pagan/anarchic forest.

The story starts quite unexpectedly, with a elvish knight with behavior of a vampire, getting to Nottingham to find a new wife (and a snack). He gets a maid Marian, but when he takes her to his forest, she turns tables and he ends up as a compost for a magic oak, to be a court of the Hood. Then we shift to London, filled with angry and desperate, among them a former crusader Will Scarlett, who joins a heist to get to Templars’ vaults. Here is an example as gagster style works in the novel:
They’re in the Hole Bourn area, outside the church-and-office complex of the Knights Templar.
Tough motherfuckers. To be a Templar was to be made for life. They ran protection on the way to Outremer for the pilgrims, then branched out into handling finance. You didn’t fuck with the Templars, everybody knew that. Jonas knew that. Fucking Rufus knew that. So what the fuck?

As the book goes on, the points of view shift many times, so it seems more like a collection of linked stories than a novel, even if the stories are knit together quite tightly. The reader will meet a witch’s apprentice Rebecca, who is a Jew in this quite unlucky for the chosen nation time (in 1290 a royal decree issued by King Edward I expelled all Jews from the Kingdom of England), with heroes and villains of Robin Hood story - Little John, Friar Tuck, Much the Miller's Son, the Sheriff of Nottingham and others. Like in the Arthurian times, there will be drugs, sex and rock’n’roll minstrel ballads, pixies, old gods and new powers, turf wars and assassinations as well as the beginning of a beautiful friendship and other famous quotes.

I quite enjoyed the story, wait for the next instalment.

[Tom Bookbeard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Synopsis

Things are not right in Nottingham. The woods hold dark secrets of magic, outlaws and fey. No matter who is in place as the Sheriff the Hoods in the woods still cause headache for the crown. And while the fey world is ever-present, cracks into the real world emerge as

Lavie Tidhar’s retelling of the Robin Hood fairy tale is a cauldron of weird, wonderful and outright insane.

Review

“Nottingham. Shit. It’s been a week and I’m still only in Nottingham.”

This book was so much fun. Lavie Tidhar sets out a bonkers reworking of the Robin Hood myth in a story where everything clicked for me. All of the gang are here but not as you know them. Maid Marian is a tricksy fey creature, Friar Tuck is a slayer of unholy abominations, Alan-a-Dale is a fey-killing machine; even Robin himself (rarely called Robin) tends to be hinted at rather than take a starring role, which allows the Hoods a chance to shine.

The Hood is a narrative playground as it follows these characters through a series of vignettes, letters, fairy tales; even a play! It keeps every chapter fresh and engaging. By far my favourite was Alan-a-Dale, the Bone Harpist, who tears through his own fairy tale in a bid for vengeance.

Tidhar has some real fun with this story, which rubbed off on me from long before the first time a character told another to fuck off (you’ll note a lot of characters end a conversation in this way). I also put the book down with a “Seriously?!” when the gate guards Bert and Ernest were introduced. But this all works. When the book isn’t joyously pissing about, Tidhar’s prose dances its way through each narrative into fairy tale, grimdark, body horror, comedy – I could be here a while; you can play spot-the-genre yourself as you read it.

Although chaotic and a real narcotic trip at times, The Hood never oversteps the crazy boundary into becoming a garbled mess. It delivers its myth and magic with a splatter of sweary violence and comedy in all the right places in what is one of the most unique and masterful reads of 2021.

[Alex Sarll]

Robin Hood as retold, remixed, and generally bounced off the wall to see what pretty patterns it might make by Lavie Tidhar. Compared to this, his grubby 2020 retelling of Arthurian legend, By Force Alone, was positively direct and straightforward; this time out we're not even dealing with single individuals so much as roles that seek people to inhabit them, something that seems to be a recurring theme in recent projects based around British myth, from the Devices trilogy to Gillen & Mora's Once And Future. So the Golden Bough is high in the mix, but you can also see the eddies of an awful lot of other influences, from Keats and Dante to Apocalypse Now and the Muppets; there's even an Arkham to join Nottinghamshire's real Gotham. Themes ebb and flow; early on much is made of Nottingham as a grubby, fragile outpost of doubtful civilisation in the midst of Sherwood's vast 'Gloomph', the forest's fungal influence corroding character and stretching space and time. I was reminded of Vandermeer, obviously, but also of The Vorrh, especially once we hear more about Alan-a-Dale's harp. And for all that it's effective, I did start to wonder whether, between In The Earth and this, the fungus motif in fantasy-horror might be getting a little overused; time for a mycelium moratorium? Perhaps Tidhar had similar doubts, because after that the fungal motif drops out for some time, other toys pulled out of the grab bag to see what they might do instead.

Again unlike By Force Alone, where the leads might be heavily reworked (Jewish ninja Lancelot!) but were still approximately the characters you'd expect to head up an Arthurian story, Robin is mostly not the central figure here; point of view duties are traded irregularly between players including Will Scarlett, Alan-a-Dale, an episcopal fixer, and perhaps most frequently Rebecca, a Jewish woman apparently taken from Ivanhoe. That's one version of Robin Hood I don't know at all, but I'm guessing that Walter Scott's iteration of her was probably not the head of a drug-dealing girl gang. As for the Merry Men*, of course Tidhar takes his usual liberties: Much the miller's son is often a bit of a lump, but not like this, and while I know Gilbert Whitehand was always a sketchy figure, this version doesn't fit even what little was known. Still, his plan is entertainingly batshit enough that I'm not inclined to complain**.

As much as Tidhar is clearly larking around here, he understandably seems more sympathetic to the core themes of the Robin Hood legends than he did those of Arthur; the fight of the disenfranchised against injustice is always likely to strike a 21st century writer as a likelier way to heal a wounded land than the dream of an ideal monarch. At the same time, he has more sense than to believe it's ever quite that easy, or that revolutionaries are ever quite the romantic figures as which they're later painted. Not least because, unless you go full Inglourious Basterds (or indeed Gladiator), we already know that no utopian commonwealth was established in mediaeval Britain. Which said, even if we are here in more historical time than the shadowy post-Roman era of By Force Alone, Tidhar is still happy to play fast and loose with the record, not least by having the story kick off during the Anarchy rather than in Robin's usual period of Richard's reign. Partly this elasticity is allowed by having magic play a larger role than it tends to in Robin retellings; as an afterword points out, the early ballads do have much more of that, which the subsequent tidyings-up tend to omit. All the same, and for all that the presence of fading but still just about potent fae ties the book more closely to By Force Alone, I wasn't wholly convinced by the sections where it crosses over with outright fairytale. Though I loved the incidental detail – which I'm fairly sure a gentile writer couldn't have got away with – where a Jewish and a fairy character commiserate over how they're both forever being accused of stealing children.

The bit that still has me wondering, though, is what comes next. When I read By Force Alone, I saw no indication that it was anything but a standalone book. Now, it turns out to have been the opening of Tidhar's Anti-Matter Of Britain Quartet, with The Hood as the second part. So what are the next two? I figure Shakespeare/Elizabeth for one, but surely Tidhar has made enough of WWII and the Victorians already? Nelson, maybe? Certainly I'm intrigued to find out. Though at the same time, I wonder if given the fucking state of the place lately, our national myths have maybe already had enough of a kicking, at least as far as anyone liable to read Lavie Tidhar books is concerned. So part of me would be much happier to see some more from him in his gentler, healing mode, as seen in the lovely Central Station. Ah well, these are not times where we get what we want.

*For all that Tidhar loves his lists – the Hood is at one point described as "The Big Chief. The Pinecone Capo. The Man in Green. The Arrow Tosser. The Arch Archer. The Prince of Thieves. The Hooded Hoodlum. The Righteous Robber. The Cunt in the Hat" and a paragraph more – my spouse pointed out that he'd missed a trick here by never mixing that with the toadstool business to have the Hood's posse go by the synonym 'the Fun Guys'.
**SPOILER but if you're not already planning to read this book, this was possibly my favourite thing here, so I have to include it as a potential sell: this Gilbert Whitehand is a deranged occultist assembling as many holy relics as possible in order to assemble a Frankenstein Jesus.

(Netgalley ARC)

[David Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following his iconoclastic take on the King Arthur mythology in By Force Alone, Lavie Tidhar has now turned to Robin Hood. The Hood is very much a sequel, despite being set six hundred(ish) years later - some of the same characters appear or are mentioned, possible because both books dip into the fae-tinged lore of the green and pleasant land. (Even if characters here repeatedly characterise all the Elves and magic as made-up nonsense - nonsense can still have power).

The book's also a sequel in a thematic sense, exploring some of the same themes - for example, how unaccountable power lurks behind the tapestry of history - and in a similar, picaresque style, across a horde of characters and merrily leapfrogging years or decades when needed.

We are in the second half of the 12th century and England is plunged in civil war. Or at least, nobles and princes are at war: a definite theme of The Hood is the lives going on around that, mostly ignoring the battles, escapes, marches and rivalries that are occasionally referred to as the struggle moves backwards and forwards. Instead, the book focusses on Nottingham and Sherwood (of course) though beginning in London where one Will Scarlett gets himself into a bit of bother.

That isn't, though, our entry point to the happy band of outlaws making free in the forest. Throughout this book there is a Hood in Sherwood, just as there are numerous "hoods" who form part of his crew. Tidhar plays happily with concepts and language to compare the outlaws to a gang of mobsters (fair, since that's really how they appear in the sources). Hood is even named Robin, or Rob, at times. But he's hardly a central figure in this story. Necessary, yes, like a king on a chessboard, but also weak. Marian is more important, as are the various figures who wheel around her - Birdie, the strange figure sheltering from the world in a monastery; Rebecca, the daughter of Jewish merchant Isaac of York, who herself becomes something of a gang boss in Nottingham, and even Mrs More-Goose, the cook at Nottingham Castle who has a hidden identity. There's also Sir Richard at the Lee, a knight and agent of the Archbishop of York, and of course Guy of Gisbourne, the last two acting as vehicles for Tidhar's characteristic noiriness. They play the shady fixer, the tough guy(!) who goes where others won't to serve a kind of justice. Or injustice.

It's a mark of how well Tidhar does this sort of thing that a concept like that - referring forward eight hundred years to a different world and a different medium - works so well in this book. It isn't, of course, the only one - the book is filled with allusions to music, books, media of all sorts, as well as historical parallels and comparisons that I kept thinking ought not to work but just do. There are, for example, numerous characters here who've been through horrors in the Crusades, things they can't explain to the civilians they meet but that others just understand. (You had to be there). That haunts the book, bringing to mind so many wars over the past century and more. So many returned and haunted men. So many appalling sights and events.

At the other end of the scale in emotional terms are some really obvious references that had me grinning - a bar called Dick's ('Everybody comes to Dick's', yes I know), allusions to TV and films and, of course, sideswipes at more traditional depictions of Robin Hood (including, yes, That Song). The joke on those is that the Nottingham of The Hood isn't, in contrast to Robin of Sherwood and the like, the Nottingham of, er, The Hood at all. It's the Nottingham of whatever gang boss can hold onto it - be that a Sheriff (but Nottingham has a way with its Sherriffs), the daughter of a Jewish merchant, an enchantress, an alchemist in the vein of Dr Frankenstein or, well, you get the idea.

Like By Force Alone, the real action here is criminal: control of rackets, production and smuggling of substances, throat-slitting, the works. That coexists with a slippery stratum of forest magic, portrayed at the same time as made-up and as ancient and powerful. That world is populated by some of the same entities and forces as appeared in the previous book but it's not a neat, Neo-Classical pantheon but a confused gaggle of deities and powers scavenged from the mythologies of North-Western Europe and, of course beyond, this being an age of faith and the faith being that of Jesus. But it's also an age of commerce with a lively trade in relics, something that is at the same taken seriously by its participants and treated as a bit of a joke.

Maybe that's a key to the book as a whole - so much here is both presented as fake, artificial, mutable and as rooted, significant, serious. Sometimes it's at the same time, sometimes the treatment swings between the two depending which characters we're following and what they're doing. The way the book works kind of illustrates how historical figures and events we're used to seeing of thinking of in a certain way can also be shifty, contingent and make-do.

Historical figures and events including of course some key and cherished bits of (admittedly mostly made-up) British history. Which is of course Tidhar's point. It is a point he makes in a highly entertaining, and compellingly readable, way, one that leaves me eagerly looking forward to the next part of this rackety story of Britain.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book courtesy of NetGalley.

This was... completely bonkers.

Some context: I studied medieval history at bit at uni, and I also did a subject about medievalism in modern society; I did an essay on Robin Hood. I am by no means an expert, of course, but I have some awareness of the whole mythology. Which is why I was so excited to read this. I had loved what Tidhar did with the Arthurian stuff in By Force Alone, and I was wide-eyed at what he would do here. The Robin Hood stuff is so wide-ranging - in history and in modern incarnation (Disney's version is still the best) - that there's just so much to play with.

Fascinatingly, Tidhar begins with Maid Marian, and goes somewhere I didn't expect at all. And then goes to Will Scarlett, and likewise. And then to Rebecca - riffing off Ivanhoe - and... well, there's a very long section of the story that's exploring things other than a man with a bow and arrow and Lincoln green. In fact, I would argue that "Robin Hood" is probably the least important main character in the entire narrative. Which is a very interesting choice and one I'm still chewing over. Many of the characters recognisable from old and new stories make an appearance - Guy of Gisborne, the sheriff of Nottingham, Sherwood Forest, Little John and Tuck and Much the miller's son - although perhaps not as you would expect them (that aspect I'm completely happy with).

The different sections, especially in perhaps the first third, are almost like stand-alone ballads; and maybe that's intentional, reflecting the structure of those early, medieval 'Gestes'. But it is somewhat disconcerting if you come to this expecting a straightforward "Robin Hood story" - because it definitely isn't. I have no problem with this idea; disjointed narratives can be brilliant. Many of the early ideas do eventually have their pay-off later in the narrative, and often in quite clever ways; but it often didn't feel like enough of a pay-off given the set up. I think perhaps there's not enough of a crescendo - I finished the book feeling a little flat, a little lost - surprised: "is that it?"

(For those having read By Force Alone: that too was somewhat chaotic, but to me it always seemed like a coherent chaos. In contrast, I think The Hood doesn't always succeed in coherence, narrative or character wise.)

Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the book. It's a rollicking ride from the Anarchy of Stephen and Matilda's civil war of the 1140s through to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th Crusades; Tidhar incorporates a surprising and unexpected amount of English history that's usually not connected to the Robin Hood stories at all, commenting along the way. There's an excellent range of characters, all stubbornly themselves and threatening to break away and live their own damned lives, thanks all the same. It's not always easy to read - Tidhar clearly has a love of language and he likes playing with repetition and surprising slang - but it's also not a slog.

I have no regrets about having read The Hood, and I will read whatever books Tidhar puts out in the Matter of Britain series (I think I heard it described as a quadrology, but I can't for the life of me figure out what else will be included).

[Sifa Poulton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received an eARC from the publishers through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. It has not affected my opinions.

This book is bizarre. It's a Robin Hood retelling that doesn't resemble any of the Robin Hood stories I know - it's literally just the names that I recognise in this weird mash up of 12th century England (from the Anarchy through Henry II) with hallucinogenic mushrooms and dangerous forests.

The promised bizarre tone was what interested me in the book, and it would have been great - if I'd been able to follow the plot better. But I simply could not work out what was happening or why.

The first part of the problem was it felt like little vignettes of different unrelated characters for so long that I lost track of who was in the book, what they wanted, and what on earth they were doing. Their events rarely impact on the lives of others, so if I wasn't interested in a certain of the many POVs, there was little to engage me in reading it, just tapping my foot until they stopped talking and someone I liked better came along. That's never promising for attention or following along. The first two characters introduced then vanished for ages, so I was left wondering why I'd spent 50 pages with them.

The tone also randomly changed with some characters. Nearly everything was told in third person (a mix of present and past tense), but one person was writing letters (that had the weirdest formatting, I think to try and show some bits were crossed out? But it just looked like a formatting error highlighting it in black with white letters that was rather tricky to read at times.) It was such a sudden change that every time it came up it threw me out of the story.

The other part of the problem was that wasn't a goal or destination apparent in the story. Some characters had individual goals, some just seemed to be there, but there was nothing uniting them or hinting at what come. Without that glimmer of what it might all be leading to (which doesn't have to be real, as a good twist subverts and redirects), the forward momentum usually slackens for me and the tension is undercut. This happened here.

It was rather disappointing, as the premise sounded so much fun in this book, but the execution just made it a slog for me to read as I was too confused.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

If you go into the woods today, you may not come out tomorrow, and the person who comes out may not be you, as the ancient sages said.

This is one of many many Robin Hood adaptions that I've read and the one that I liked the least. Why? The story itself read like a drug induced nightmare that made just about as much sense. There is not one likeable character, which is a good thing because each characters story is so splintered it's very hard to follow any kind of storyline at all. Modern day Pop culture references yank me right out of the book. It's too bad because the author did have some good ideas such as fusing Robin with fairy.

The witch snorts. ‘Real magic? You don’t want to see that, my little novice. No one needs magic. What you need is clean water, medicine that works, a way to keep food fresh for longer, decent roads. Contraception. Magic is no use to anyone. Look what happened when that Jewish boy of yours got himself crucified and then came back from the dead. Now we’re fighting wars half the world away. The dead should stay dead or they’ll outnumber the living. And then where would we be?’

Casablanca Movie reference.

‘This could really be some place. Needs a clean, though. Put some cushions down, a handful of tables. And a band, at least an organ player. Someone to play, as time goes by.’

Rebecca shakes her head. The man’s often exasperating. ‘Keep up the monthly payments, straight split on the product, and you run point with de Grantmesnil,’ she says. ‘Keep it clean, keep it respectable, and keep the tax man out, and I think we’ll do just fine.’

The knight smiles. ‘Rebecca,’ he says, ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’

Morgause orders a hit on Jack (Beanstalk Jack)

Now the cook, there’s a funny old bird. Mrs More-Goose, she calls herself now.

Bert and Ernie

Guards, Bert and Ernest, are getting on in years; they snore peacefully

L.O.T.R.

it’s not like they’re on some quest to drop a magic ring down a volcano like some fucking Nibelungen

Breaking the 4th wall

‘At least he talks now,’ he says. ‘On the way back from London, he didn’t say a fucking word.’

‘Well,’ Alan says, considering it, ‘he wasn’t important for the story then.’

[Artur Nowrot]

I'd call this a gritty take on Robin Hood except you'd probably be imagining an endlessly dull Hollywood reboot instead of this book, which I would say is much closer to something like "Britannia".

Yes, there is violence and power; but Tidhar also infuses the story with a healthy dose of psychedelia and strangeness. There is Faerie and mushrooms. Loads of mushrooms.

The structure feels much looser than the first book in the "Anti-Matter of Britain" quartet. The Arthurian myth that provided the basis of "By Force Alone" had many versions, true, but it also has the elements thay everyone knows: the sword in the stone, the marriage, the death – providing a sequence-arranging thread. The legend of Robin Hood is much more disparate, fragmentary, so the novel feels more like a connection of (very entertaining) episodes. Tidhar utilises several concepts to provide some cohesion to his idea of who (what) Robin Hood is; I had a vague inkling of what they were while reading, but they're also helpfully elucidated in the afterword, so no point in elaborating on that.

Overall, I really enjoyed the gonzo sensibility of this series so far and I'm looking forward to the next installments. Having done the biggest two heroes, who knows what's gonna come next...?

ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now this is what I’m looking for in a book. Knowledgeable in both ancient lore and modern pop culture (though not too modern, mind you), Tidhar treads both carefully and with heavy boot through the common dreamland of the British Isles, taking on the ethereal, oneiric tale of a by now well-known and even better disnified group of characters, taking us back to and through the roots (heh) of the myth through a series of riffs on a number of sources for the basic story. I can’t wait to read the next instalment of the Anti-Matter cycle.

[Jonathan Oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute joy of a book. A mixture of history, comedy, fantasy and pop culture references. Pleasingly profane and funny as hell. As a man of Nottingham this book pleases me greatly.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin Hood on surreality, smack and shrooms - fabulously weird... More, more!

[mads ! · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25

very odd, an acquired taste but i enjoyed the whimsical storytelling. i did skim the last 100 pages as i became impatient …

[Readelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Confusing, possibly blasphemous but great fun

[Cor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, absolutely loved reading it.

One thing that did bother me was the author’s depiction of Christians as compared to Muslims and Jews. Granted, it is a fantasy book, but the way the way in which all Christians are depicted as horrible people, whereas Muslims and Jews are seen as flawless was completely inaccurate and very uncomfortable to say the least. Sure, Christians did horrible things in the Middle Ages, but everyone did! Human beings are just horrible sometimes, which is what gives the book flair. But incorrectly exalting some religious groups over others is just wrong and completely unnecessary. These moments definitely broke the immersion and at some point I was considering dropping the book because of it, which would have been a shame.

Like I said, I loved the book and look forward to the author’s new work, but I hope they steer away from the incorrect generalizations of religious groups.

[Ross Macpherson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is essentially a sequel to the superb By Force Alone, both crude, blunt, brutal retellings of English folk myth, steeped through with cynicism and you can safely bet every character is a bastard, each more bastardly than the last. It’s a vibrant book and a fun read, packed with references to high literature and low film that are fun to spot, but perhaps not quite as funny as the author imagines. Still pretty funny though. I enjoyed it greatly, but to be honest it is simply way too similar to By Force Alone, and as a result my reaction to it is sort of a “So what have you got that’s new?” shrug. The core idea (reframing England’s myths as a more accurate portrait of the hideous insanity of our current system of government and life) is fine, but this adds nothing to the earlier novel. Hopefully the projected 2 more books in this series can develop the idea, instead of stagnating like a failed rebellion. I guess maybe there’s a man for his time and place, and perhaps that man is Tidhar. (I loved all the Big Lebowski references in this, albeit it is a shame that none of the Merry Men ever claimed the forest leaves really tied the room together.)

[Peter Hollo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another tour de force from Lavie, moving a few centuries on from the Arthuriana of By Force Alone to retell the Robin Hood mythology, and various other related stories and fairy tales, with a similar tone to the previous novel. It's grim, it's violent, but it's also very funny.
Central to the story is Rebecca, the Jewish woman who features in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and who here is apprenticed to a witch and eventually runs the *ahem* drug trade in Nottingham.
The stories here wind back on each other (and at times also the narratives from By Force Alone, which I imagine is setting up more callbacks in the following two novels in this Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet) and reality bends as the forest, full of mushrooms and dark places, hallucinates or nurtures the soft places... For much of the story, "Robin Hood" himself is hardly there. The powers of faerie and fairytales and fungus cause certain characters to last much longer than they ought, and slowly various Sherrifs are vanquished and subsumed, and history limps on around them. Various characters return from various crusades, damaged in various ways, and neither England nor Christendom come off well (although this seems less of a Brexit novel than By Force Alone was).

Later in the novel - after the zombie Jesus is awoken, after Rebecca retires to the continent - we're introduced to Guy of Gisborne, another returned crusader, who's tasked with killing the Hood once and for all. Meanwhile, Robin of Loxley returns himself from the crusades, finds his meagre lands lost, and makes his way to Nottingham. But Robin is too late for his own story. Finally there's a master archer with an appetite to fight the monarchy, steal from the rich and give to the poor, but the forest ingests him and spits him back into the world as its own thing, and Guy of Gisborne is on his way...
Lavie does lean a little hard on the post-modern intertextuality at times. The anachronistic speech of his characters is enjoyable, and of course it's all about stories, but I'm not sure if it was necessary to insert a none-too-self-aware narrator into the tale at Robin's denoument, only to find himself intercepted by a returned Rebecca, and convinced to cut the story off at the neat ending with poor Much, the Miller's son's funeral. In the book's final pages we see Rebecca tying up her own loose ends, and then the march of progress brings gunpower and iron in to destroy faerie's hold on the forest. And yet, Maid Marian, the wiley woman who tricked the elfin son of Morgause at the book's start, is here also an avatar of Spring itself and will return, while Morgause and her sisters are also at a new beginning.

I don't know what Lavie has in store for the third & fourth entries into his Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet, but I'll be here for it.

[Kate Hyde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. And I mean that in both senses: this book is like a clear, frosty night in Alaska, a sky liberally studded with glittering gems of wit and erudition. Every page (and, often, many sentences) sparkles with the wit of diligent research turned scathing satire. And what is even nicer is that the author is not the least bit pretentious; rather, the mood is that of sharing a joke with friends, confident that we all share enough cultural background to get the punchline. But it's not necessary to have much more than the rudimentary everyman knowledge of the Crusades and Robin Hood story to enjoy it all. I'll be honest, I have never read Ivanhoe. Two-thirds of the way through The Hood, I thought I'd better have a quick Wiki. And it certainly added another dimension to the character of Rebecca. But she had cemented herself from the very start as an intelligent, headstrong, interesting young woman, and it was just perfect of Tidhar to have her as the main protagonist.

Many and hilarious as the jokes are, however, they do not belittle the subject matter; at its heart, The Hood is quite serious. The author takes the romances of fifteenth century England and gives them new life, to show the emergence of modern England, the casting aside of the pagan gods of the Angles, the Vikings, the ancient Britons, with the growth of capitalism and Christianity, best personified perhaps in the Knights Templar. With riffs on Will Scarlett, Marian the queen of the new spring, and her sister Fae, Much, Alan-a-dale, Red Cap, Tuck and, of course, Robin himself, and the hoods in the woods mirrored by the greedy lords and king, this is very much a social commentary. And, as the author himself comments in the endnotes, even today householders own just 5% of the land in England, with the Crown, the church and descendants of the barons, so little has, in essence, changed for us poor serfs.

The often profane language used is perfectly suited to the subject matter and the building of the characters. The Hood reads like the love-child of the Bard and Tom Holt, with Robert Holdstock as godparent. And, for a story about stories (and legends that become folk tales that become fairy tales - that become movies?) this is some story: it has sex, it has violence, it has betrayal and love and lashings of comedy, like the best Hollywood blockbuster or the cream of Shakespearean drama, it has everything.

I am very grateful to Netgalley for the ARC of this book, but I will nevertheless be buying a copy, as The Hood will definitely repay repeated readings through the years.

[Keith Currie · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you go down in the woods today…

Red, red Robin, the Hood in the wood, loathed by the bad, loved by the good. Marion, Maid Marion, queen of the wood, an implacable force of primal nature. Scarred Will Scarlett, big Little John Little, Holy Land veterans, PTSD, Much the Miller’s scarecrow, dwale, ale, Allan-a-Dale, Allanah Dale, balladeer and assassin, the not so Merry Men.

Sherwood, green Sherwood, filled with bonfires, merry men, green men, fungus and rot. Nottingham, shitty Nottingham, a miasma of Gloomph, fungus and rot. Sherwood and Nottingham, the borders of Faery Land, and Fairies and tales: Rumpelstiltskin, Beanstalks and kleptomaniac Jacks, Mirrors and dwarfs, a grandmother more frightened of a homicidal Red Riding Hood than she is of the wolf.

Literary allusion by the bucketload: Ivanhoe, Heart of Darkness, the Teddybears’ Picnic, Apocalypse Now, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Don’t Look Now, The Lord of the Rings, Wayland the Smith. And stuff.

Rebecca, Becca, Bex, Nottingham’s Jewess, girl gang boss, drug baroness. Guisburn, Guy of Guisburn, another crusader vet, paid assassin, Double Oh VII.

The Corn King and the Spring Queen, the cycle of the seasons, round and round and round again, and again, round. Crusaders and kings, Templars, Dan Brown, Relics and indulgences, random popes, the fall of Byzantium, Mongols and gunpowder, yes, and a Frankenstein Jesus.

A seething cauldron of manifold slop, a style in search of a story, a fungal infection, a great heap of stinking ordure – let’s not be coy, the author isn’t, let’s call it shit.

But that’s not fair: rather, an unbridled imagination, an intellect unleashed, a roaring, roiling tempest that, finally, burns itself out.

Whatever. I forgot. Father Tuck, Brother Tuck, Exorcist Tuck, Prior Tuck, never Friar Tuck, but, as the author says – Who gives a …….

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

After tackling Arthurian legend in By Force Alone Tidhar turns his reworking of the many and varied Matter of Britain onto that of Robin Hood. The book’s title is a little inappropriate, though, as that gentleman is not its principal focus. To be sure we have Maid Marian, Will Scarlett, Sheriff(s) of Nottingham, Much, Alan-a-Dale and, later, Little John and a Friar Tuck, but we also have the Lady Rowena, Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca, plus Guy of Gisbourne (all taken from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe - as Tidhar acknowledges in his afterword - but altered here) to contend with. Not to mention a riff on Frankenstein wherein a simulacrum of Jesus is animated from (authenticated) relics collected by a man called Gilbert Whitehand. And the other Hood, Little Red Riding. This is not quite the familiar tale, then. Emphasising this, the forest is the domain of the fae and Nottingham is festooned with images of The Green Man.

We start off in the time of anarchy where Stephen and Maude (not the historical Matilda, note) are vying for the crown of England and Will Scarlett takes part in a robbery of the London headquarters of the Knights Templar. This London is your typical fantasy city modelled on an imagined Dark Age, with ale-houses, cutpurses and rogues of various kinds and a casual attitude to life. How realistic this depiction is of day-to-day existence in such a place is another matter. However, “Men have murdered women with impunity since the beginning of time,” is sadly still an apposite observation.

From thereon, Knights Templar not being ones to cross, Will has to look out for his life. After his companions in the raid start to die off in inventive ways he decides to light out for Nottingham, barely surviving a multiple stabbing because his intended assassin has a soft spot for him. In this tale women are as hard-edged and ruthless as the men. Sometimes more so. But sweet and demure they are not.

We also have two characters who may be transgender - or at least cross-dressing. Alan a Dale, who plays a harp made from the bones of his sister and is seeking vengeance on the man who killed her, sometimes manifests as Alanah Dale and there is a priest called Birdie who is in touch with the fae and discovered to have breasts and female genitalia.

Rowena is far from the character found in Ivanhoe. She is a hard-nosed dealer in dwale, the drug of choice in Nottingham, and subject to as much double-dealing and betrayal as drug baronesses ought to be accustomed to.

Many of the men have returned from the Crusades and subject to the usual ex-servicemen grouses, “Nobody gives a shit about returning soldiers.” There is a constant background drip of information on events in the Holy Land and the fortunes of the various Kings of the times.

The characters tend to speak in a down to earth demotic style as of our times, which is anachronistic as far as the setting goes but this is fantasy; in that respect perhaps anything goes. There was a nice aside on the origins of dietary custom evolving from the Church’s ban on meat on Fridays. The common people soon worked out that fish was not meat and so indulged themselves, “everybody likes a loophole.” One of the Sheriffs has a side line in procuring piscicultural delicacies.

Tidhar can certainly illuminate character and spin a story but we also have here an abundance of allusion. I confess I admired the reflection of a prisoner on discovering himself to be incarcerated, “Then I awoke and found me here on the cold cell’s hide,” (a Spoonerism will always get me, one based on a Tiptree quote from Keats still more so) but the book is over-stuffed with this sort of thing. At times it seems as if no reference cannot be elaborated on. A meeting with a Jack and his friend Jill calls up a description of that male name’s connotations - some steal from giants, others go down hills, or bring frost, or light up like a lantern. Some even go around murdering people. But the page or so riffing on the Rumpelstiltskin story was surely unnecessary.

[Robert Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Award winning fantasy author turned Arthurian legend on its head in his bawdy, reverentially irreverent By Force Alone. It turned out that this was but the first in a series which Tidhar is calling the “Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet”. The Matter of Britain is a body of medieval literature containing famous tales and myths that are deep in the British psyche. So it comes as no surprise that the second book in the series, The Hood, takes on another dearly loved but mainly fictional British hero Robin Hood.
The structure of The Hood is much like that of By Force Alone. The book is made up of a number of short tales, mainly focussed on particular characters. But there is also a vague overarching plot that weaves in and out, sometimes more clearly than at others. Because the overall narrative is really one of mythmaking where the character of Robin Hood is played by any number of people over the years. One of the new characters that Tidhar introduces is a Jewish woman called Rebecca who starts off as a witches assistant, gets into the local drug trade and has her own adventures. But as is made clear in an encounter with the current Hood:
The Hood shrugs. “You are not important,” he tells her mercilessly. This is my story, not yours. The stories they sing are of Robin Hood, not of some Jewess in Nottingham or of some dying hedge witch who carried out abortions… I steal from the rich. I give to the poor. Hated by the bad, loved by the good. I am the Hood.”
Many of the stories do deal with characters with whom readers will think they are familiar – Alan a Dale, Friar Tuck, Little John and Will Scarlet – but Tidhar puts new twists on these familiar archetypes. A few are veterans from the crusades, one is on a journey of revenge. But if anything, these characters are even more familiar than those of the Arthurian tales, given the number of retellings of the Robin Hood legends through the twentieth century.
There are strong links to the first book in this series. The faerie world, which played a large part in Arthur’s story is still in play although the continued rise of Christianity is pushing it further into the background. But the thirst of faeries for power and their capacity to meddle in the real world is consistent. And there is a section which delves into some very well known faerie tales. All of which revolves around the mystical wood and Marian the Green Lady:
The wood is where humanity’s dreams and nightmares come from, and where they fled to shelter.
But as always there is the sense of fun that Tidhar has in playing in these worlds. His riffing not only on the stories themselves but on their connections to more modern tales. There is a long subplot that uses holy relics but builds them into a Frankenstein narrative. The comedic guards at the gates of Tidhar’s Nottingham are called Bert and Ernest. The list goes on. And then there is just the joyously profane narrative itself:
The point is, there is no one in charge. It’s an anarchy – from the Greek, a state without a ruler. So money talks and bullshit walks, as Pliny the Elder said.
Tidhar’s Anti-Matter of Britain series will not be for everyone. They require readers to forget what they might know about these stories and look at them through fresh eyes. With The Hood he continues to both pay homage to those traditions and completely reinvent them for a modern audience. And continues to demonstrate why he is one of the most exciting and interesting fantasy authors working in the genre.

[Greg (adds 2 TBR list daily) Hersom · Rating 2 out of 5]

My apologizes Mr. Tidhar, I loved By Force Alone, Anti-Matter of Britain Book 1, but I can't finish The Hood. I didn't realize I was getting into a dark satire when I started this series, which I guess that's what The Hood is. (If that's what the By Force Alone was, it flew right over my head.)
By Force Alone was recognizable as a King Arthur tale, but I really don't see how The Hood can be called a Robin Hood story. It's a dark take on a conglomerate of fairy tales. Who considers Robin Hood a fairy tale? Robin Hood is and always has been a legend. To throw Robin Hood in with children's fairy tales is disrespectful, or at least to me it is.
Usually I'd have given-up on this book a hundred pages in or so, but I was intrigued by Christianity clashing with the old "pagen" beliefs. (It was reminiscent of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword.) I'm also a fan of grimdark fantasy and this book definitely stared out with that vibe.
Because of those elements I tried to hang in there, but the more it moved away from the Robin Hood story and took a deep dive into fairy tales the more confused I became. Not being all that versed in nursery ryhmes or fairy tales, I didn't get a lot of references and therefore much of the humor was lost on me too.
I also realized that I really didn't care about single character. Then at Chapter 48, Part 13, The Hood is written as play and that was the bullet that ended my struggle.
Mr. Tidhar, I really wished you stuck to the gangster story style you had with By Force Alone. For what my opinion is worth, that would have been the perfect way to re-tell Robin Hood.

[Borja · Rating 4 out of 5]

📚Un retelling de la leyenda de Robin Hood en una versión gamberra, irreverente y subversiva. 'The Hood' es la segunda parte de una serie de nuevos puntos de vista de algunos de los mitos y leyendas más conocidos de las islas británicas. Hace casi dos años Tidhar publicó 'By Force Alone', una magnífica aproximación al Rey Arturo que mereció cada minuto de lectura.

😵Drogas. Las mismas drogas que eran elemento principal en la vida de Arturo en la primera historia, ahora también lo son de esta revisión de Robin Hood. Si os animáis a leerlo podéis esperar algo completamente distinto a lo que han contado las mil y una historias que nos han llegado. Por no hablar de las de Disney.

👑Aunque Robin Hood sea el personaje central de la historia, no es el único protagonista. En la lectura aparecen otros personajes del mito como son Lady Marian, el Fraile Tuck o Will Scarlett, junto a otros secundarios que dan lugar a un elenco disparatado de personajes. Ellos son los verdaderos protagonistas de una serie de historias que dan lugar a este volumen.

😱Y es que esta novela es todo un asombro constante. Cualquier conocimiento de Robin Hood que tengáis previamente se va a ver dado la vuelta en una disparatada historia, por momentos caótica, donde cualquier cosa es posible. Cualquier cosa.

🏰A pesar de ello, la novela no deja el lado histórico. El contexto es clave en los acontecimientos. El libro es una ficción histórica a la vez que ucrónica con elementos fantásticos que hacen de 'The Hood' algo único y seguramente no del gusto de todos.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF 40%

I really wanted to love this book. The Robin Hood retelling is a great concept, there is some good humour in it, and for the most part, the prose is well-written. There just isn't a story. Or if there is, it's so long and drawn out that it's impossible to reach. The narrative is severely fragmented between way too many POV's and it feels more like a short story collection than a novel. For example, there are several chapters about Will Scarlet living in London before he moves to Nottingham that really hinder the story from progressing. It could have been so much shorter, or just absent entirely. I got the impression it would be relevant later, but nearly halfway through the book it still wasn't. Another issue was the random switch to different personal pronouns which felt really jarring. One character tells his chapters from the point of view of letter writing, but the others are third person.

That being said the book was occasionally quite funny, especially at the beginning with Maid Marian's dialogue. If stories that function more as a vignette collection are your thing, The Hood could be a very enjoyable read. Just unfortunately not for me.

[Annarella · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me think of Beatles' "A Day in the Life". It's lisergic, you never know where the plot is going and what will happen but I knew I didn't want to stop reading.
I'm not an expert of the Robin Hood lore, I know it's more complex and nuanced than what we usually think and that there's a mix of fairy tales and history.
Tidhar delivers a book that plays on the fairy side using it to give some of the most exciting part in the books. But he also talks about historical facts and the mix works.
Don't expect a standard fantasy book or a historical fiction: it's something more and it will bring you to some new places and to meet well known characters made new.
If "By Force Alone" was gritty and action packed, The Hood is more complex and a bit harder to follow.
I loved what I read but he's one of my favorite authors and this is an enthralling and fascinating story.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

[Ada]

***vrijdag 29 juli 2022***
Today I learned that By Force Alone was the first book in a quartet. Which kinda blows but okay.

Then I saw this monstrosity of a cover. How did they go from this awesome cover: , or even this one: , to this: ?!

*sigh*

[Zach Weinberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m surprised to say that I quite liked this in the end! I found reading it to be incredibly frustrating, with episodes of wild imagination and excitement cut down by scattershot focus, strange pacing, and odd framing. At about the halfway point (in one of the funnier and stranger action sequences I’ve ever read) and at the ending, the book coheres into a mad and brilliant thing.

I remember liking By Force Alone quite a bit more, and I think that’s for two reasons: the myths of King Arthur have more of a defined arc for Tidhar to adapt, as it turns out I don’t know a lot about other medieval British myths and history. If you’re in that same boat I would recommend reading the Historical Afterword first for some context on Robin Hood, May celebrations, the Crusades, and the Child Ballads. Stopping to read more (especially the Child Ballad “Leesome Brand”) gave a sense of familiarity, dramatic irony, and tragedy that feels necessary to this reweirding of foundational national myths.

[Tim Hicks · Rating 3 out of 5]

After slogging through this 439-pager, I come away with "Why?"

If the answer refers to the philosophy "write a book you'll enjoy reading," then fine. I'm sure the author enjoyed it. But isn't the reader supposed to enjoy it too?

OK, I laughed at the guards Ernest & Bert, and I spotted the lines from "The Girl from Ipanema" and so on. Maybe 20 of those.

There were some creative interpretations, such as the characters somewhat disconnected from time.
There's no doubt that everyday life at the time was more like Tidhar's grimdark view of it than the jolly Hollywood pap we've seen before [with the notable exception of anything including Daffy Duck!]

But after a while it all got a bit samey. Moan, ugh, drugs, shit, drink, casual death, fairies, manipulators, Crusades, repeat.

And a title character we don't even meet until hundreds of pages in.

So .. some enjoyable sections, but I ended thinking "well, that was a slog."

[Macha · Rating 4 out of 5]

second in the Anti-Matter of Britain Quartet series, and if anything a bit better than the first (though still not for everyone). Medieval England in this time is still a shithole, filthy, violent, and corrupt (the Holy Church is contributing gaily to that these days); they haven't quite yet managed to stamp out magic, but you know they will. this one is based more on folklore and ballads than on the Matiere itself, not to mention adding in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and whatever else comes to hand on the way to Sherwood Forest. it's the perfect soil for a Tidhar-style review of the state of the English nation. spoiler: he doesn't found it edifying, or even very different now. but the report he leaves when he draws all of this together is still brilliant, all the same.