Duncton Wood

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"Duncton Wood" is a very difficult book to describe, not because it's not about anything but because it's basically about everything. Adventure, love, hate, destiny, terror, the mechanics of how evil arises both within a society and within an individual, romance, play, disaster, the clash of species, hope, faith, mystery, abyss-deep horror, nature and character. And it's all from the perspective of moles. Not utensil-using, clothes-wearing, machine-building moles, but real, furry, tunnel-burrowing moles. There are a few unorthodox speculations - they know how to use herbs for medicinal purposes, they have stacks of bark chips whose scratches across the surface are the moles's own written history, etc. - but they are not 'little humans in mole form'. Centering around two moles in particular from their infancies onward, Bracken and Rebecca (yes, one of the main themes of this novel is a romance between two moles, and no, it's not remotely a children's book), it nonetheless has an extremely wide and diverse cast - studious, faith-rich, quietly brave scribe-mole Boswell, the devious and unspeakably evil Rune, the small, tender, and enderaingly-nervous Comfrey, the nurturing Rose, and the living darkness that is Mandrake, to name a few. The only novel that equals "Duncton Wood" in array of all-time great characters is "The Gnole". Written with tremendous skill and heart, with surprises and not some but many of the most memorable scenes in the history of the written word, "Duncton Wood" is indispensable for fans of the novel format of storytelling. Total excellence.

There is something unexplainable about Duncton Wood. It is quite simply and purely more "human" than any book I've read that relies on homo sapien characters.These moles can make you cry and laugh and love and hate and so many subtle things in between. You will not be the same after reading this book. It won't make you a "mole lover" or anything silly like that, but it will make you look at life with a certain sense of beauty and mystery that may not have been there before. I rediscovered this book in a used book store 10 years after reading it the first time. I found my eyes watering while i was standing there in the store, just from the flood of memories that came from reading this book about moles.