Reading “The Forest of Forever” by Thomas Burnett Swann

The Forest of Forever by Thomas Burnett Swann. Ace Books, 1971. Minotaur 2.

*Ace Books cover (1971); art by George Barr; courtesy of ISFDB.*

Thomas Burnett Swann’s fourth novel, The Forest of Forever, returns to the Country of the Beasts on Crete, and to its denizens the Minotaur Eunostos and the Dryad Zoe and the Centaur Moschus and many more, including the Telchin Bion and various Thriae, Panisci, and Bears of Artemis, all of which first appeared in Swann’s first novel, Day of the Minotaur. While Day of the Minotaur ended with the Beasts and the half-Beast children Thea and Icarus leaving Crete for the mythic Isles of the Blest, The Forest of Forever offers a prequel telling the origin story of Thea and Icarus, how their father Aeacus met their mother, the Dryad Kora, and how she tragically died. Swann also rewrites some of the story, retconning several elements in Day of the Minotaur, to make Eunostos a central—and more heroic as well as tragic—figure in the children’s origin story. Of the six Swann novels I’ve now read, The Forest of Forever is probably the least impressive and the least interesting, but it is still a worthwhile read. It is also Swann’s first outright tragedy, a form he previously feinted at in The Weirwoods, with the death of Vegoia, before striking with a more hopeful conclusion.

Like Swann’s first three novels, The Forest of Forever is split into two parts, “Part I: Eunostos” and “Part II: Aeacus,” that suggest their origin in something like two different short stories or novelettes. But unlike Day of the Minotaur, The Forest of Forever is an original novel not previously serialized. And much like Moondust, it nonetheless very much has the feel of a fix-up novel. More so than Moondust, the two parts of The Forest of Forever hardly cohere and make for a rather strange reading experience that very much suggests two different stories, with two different purposes, were mashed together. However, I do think there is a thematic throughline to the novel, even if it is somewhat less apparent in the first half. The novel ultimately extends Swann’s concerns with the history of ancient human civilizations, with the waning of his prehumans, and with the concurrent theme of “forest vs. city” that is common to most of his work. There is still a good deal of play with ideas about gender and sex(uality), too, but these ideas are a bit messier and unclear than in other Swann novels and The Forest of Forever lacks the hinted (and later explicit) queerness that threads through much of his work (though perhaps for interesting reasons, as I’ll explore below).

The novel is told in the first-person by the Dryad Zoe, a relatively minor character in Day of the Minotaur, a close friend and occasional sexual partner of Eunostos, whose presence serves to disabuse Thea of her notions about propriety and sex(uality), and which emphasizes the much looser and queerer sexual norms among the Beasts. Zoe, in The Forest of Forever, is a sexually adventurous Dryad even at 360 years old; her sexual adventures among Beasts and even humans—including a Cretan and an Achaean—have provided her a wealth of knowledge about the wider world, which becomes an important plot point as well as a device that enhances her narration, since she is able to speak intelligently about the histories and politics of Crete, the Beasts, Egyptians, Babylonians, and the “Yellow Men” (more on that below). Still, Zoe isn’t exactly a compelling narrator. Shifting perspectives to share it with another character, like the portly Paniscus Partridge, a good friend to Eunostos, might have worked better (Swann does this particularly well, switching perspectives between a Dryad and a Faun, in his late novel Lady of the Bees), or, most interesting would have been telling the story from Kora’s and Eunostos’s perspectives, switching back and forth, and emphasizing the internal development and tragic depths of their persons (Eunostos is the narrator of Day of the Minotaur and has writerly aspirations). Then again, perhaps those perspectives would have lacked the (self-)awareness Zoe brings and which does offer some unique insights.

The first part introduces Eunostos as a younger Minotaur of 15 and a recent orphan. He is kind and precocious and enamored of the 18-year-old Dryad Kora. He spends his days building a house inside a burned out oak—which plays an important role in Day of the Minotaur—and writing very bad poetry to woo Kora, e.g.: “A Minotaur with gainly hoof / Pursued a Dryad girl / She spied him from her barky roof / And spruced a wayward curl.” Partly, I think, Swann is mocking his own tendency, earlier in his career, to write cheesy, whimsical poems when he fancied himself a poet (he published two collections in the 1950s: Driftwood and Wombats and Moondust), but poetry threads throughout Swann’s oeuvre, with most of his novels including at least one original poem, and many of his characters being poets themselves (he also wrote a book-length study of the gay WWI poet Charles Sorley). But Kora feels that choosing Eunostos would be settling; she has prophetic dreams of another future and longs for something beyond the Country of the Beasts, something or someone out in the world of Men.

The driving conflict of part one is the sudden arrival after a storm of the Thriae, the bee-people who are partial antagonists in Day of the Minotaur. One of their queens, Saffron, wants Eunostos to impregnate her since her drones are impotent and lack the Minotaur’s manliness. She hopes to breed a new hybrid Thriae. To get at Eunostos, Saffron captures Kora and Zoe; to free them, Eunostos relents to her demand to impregnate her—after all, what’s a little harmless bee-fucking?—only to discover that Thriae queens devour their mates, leading to a confrontation that results in Saffron dead, Kora and Zoe freed, and a pact of peace made between the remaining Thriae and the other Beasts. For saving her, Kora relentingly agrees to marry Eunostos:

“And you’ll marry me then and come to live in my stump?” [Eunostos asked.]

“Yes, Eunostos.[” Kora answered. “]You saved my life.”

I looked into her eyes but I did not see Eunostos. I saw her dream. I saw death. (75)

Part two begins with the preparations for a party to celebrate Kora and Eunostos’s upcoming nuptials, but the party is interrupted and the wedding delayed when news reaches the Beasts that a human man has entered the forest, breaking the ancient covenant between the Beasts and the Cretans. Swann then takes us back to introduce Aeacus, the father of Thea and Icarus in Day of the Minotaur, a prince of Crete, brother to king Minos. Swann’s Aeacus, only briefly glimpsed in the previous novel, is described as man who he feels things deeply and embodies the defining characteristic of the Cretans—a people who“live in the moment, poised like a blue lotus on the stilled waters of time, perfectly content, untroubled by memory or anticipation; a joyous people” (77)—except that he seems uncontented with life, unmoved by the beautiful women around him, as though drawn to something distant… and one day he hears a tree calling to him from far off. Sent by Minos to stop some Achaean raiders, and victorious but wounded, he wanders into the Country of the Beasts in search of that tree-voice. And finds Kora. She ends her engagement to Eunostos and devotes herself to the human she called out to in her dreams, who made them real. In typical Swann fashion, Eunostos wants to hate Aeacus, but his love for Kora is so strong, and the human prince so damnably likable, that Eunostos eventually becomes fast friends with Aeacus, his love for Kora transforms into something more friendly, and he teaches his new human friends the ways of the Beasts.

But The Forest of Forever is a tragedy; it can only end in death, as we know from Day of the Minotaur. The years pass and Kora bears Aeacus children, who grow into toddlers. Though Aeacus swore a pact with the leader of the Beasts, the Centaur Chiron, that he would never return to Knossos—lest humans come to believe that the covenant separating city and forest, Man and Beast, is breakable, thereby endangering the Beasts who would no doubt be driven from the forest by resource-greedy humans—he has been disenamored of the forest and of Kora. No longer is she the dream, but a real Dryad woman, a relationship anchoring him in a foreign land, and the reason that their children have green hair and pointy ears. Moreover, Aeacus’s concern is for Crete: his children are the rightful heirs to the throne of Knossos, since Minos is childless, and he feels a duty to Crete’s future.

At the same time, Aeacus comes to resent Eunostos’s friendship with Kora and to despise the fatherly relationship Eunostos has with the younger child, Icarus. After an incident involving Thea, a wayward Bear of Artemis, and some marijuana (yes, a drugged-up, gender-swapped Winnie-the-Pooh gets a kid high to shut her up while the bear-girl steals shit), Aeacus bans Eunostos from seeing his children and Kora. Aeacus makes his feelings toward the Beasts clear by hunting and killing a bear, which Eunostos explained to him are not hunted by the Beasts: “They’re too much like us” (99). Eventually, things come to a head and Aeacus kidnaps his children and returns to “civilization.” Zoe and Eunostos venture out from the Country of the Beasts to Knossos—where Eunostos is greeted by the Cretans with awe: “He did not need a forest to give him dignity. He brought the forest with him and walked in the courage of his purpose” (141)—to petition Minos to send the children back to their mother, even if for only half of the year, thus invoking the myth of Demeter, Hades, and Persephone.

The discussion between Minos, Aeacus, and Eunostos at the court in Knossos is interesting and highlights Swann’s most insistent theme across his work: the essentially irreconcilable conflict between humans and prehumans, Man and Beast, city and forest, civilization and nature—a conflict which the Beasts, and all they symbolize, always lose. The hybridity of Thea and Icarus, the fact that their very beings transcend the binary of Man and Beast, unlike all the other Beasts, whose cross-species offspring always result in a child that belongs fully to one species or the other (hence Eunostos is the son of a Minotaur and a Dryad), is on trial in The Forests of Forever. And the answer, decided upon by the supposedly just king Minos, is that the children are Man more than Beast. Their duty to humanity is greater than their duty to the Beasts but also greater than whatever harm is done to their mother. As Minos declares, “Kora must suffer so that a great empire shall be justly ruled” by her children, his heirs (146). We have already seen how this trial is relitigated in the earlier published, but chronologically later, novel Day of the Minotaur, where the answer is that the children are more Beast than Man, and so they leave Crete entirely with the Beasts—an exodus that is the outcome of Man essentially winning, of the world of human civilization becoming too dangerous, too xenophobic for the Beasts to continue living in safely. Here in The Forest of Forever, as in Day of the Minotaur, and as in many other Swann novels, we see that the foundations of human civilization—the ancient cultures of the past that sprouted up around the Great Green Sea (the Mediterranean)—are rooted in the destruction of the prehumans, in humans valuing themselves above nature, and in efforts to exterminate any hybridity between Man and Beast.

With Eunostos’s plea for the children rejected (which amounts to a plea to recognize their hybridity, that they are Beast as much as Man), Eunostos and Zoe return to the Country of the Beasts empty-handed. News reaches Kora before Eunostos and Zoe can tell her themselves and, when they arrive at her oak, she has set it ablaze. She dies in the fire, choosing her own fate after her dream turned into a nightmare. The Forest of Forever ends in tragedy: a Dryad mother’s half-Dryad, half-human children taken from her by the human man who could not see and love her as she was, but came to fear her and the Beasts instead. And Eunostos, who loved Kora so deeply and who considered Thea and Icarus to be almost his own children, finds himself unsure how to cope with such tremendous loss. He ends the novel by asking Zoe how one is supposed to move on, to live life in the shadow of such love lost and such tragedy gained. Zoe reminds Eunostos that there is always something to live for, his friends not the least, and she harkens back to her own memories of a love lost. When Eunostos asks if Zoe ever forgot him, she responds: “I didn’t want to forget him. He was much too precious to me. I just rearranged my memory. Forgot some things, remembered others. […] I haven’t regretted any of my loves. Least of all the ones that hurt the most” (157). With this ending, Swann suggests that another novel might tell the tragic story Zoe hints at; indeed, Swann’s final published novel, Cry Silver Bells (1977), published more than a year after his death, returns to Zoe’s story several hundred years before The Forest of Forever.

This ending also emphasizes another of Swann’s principal throughlines in The Forest of Forever, echoes throughout his oeuvre: love and romance. Swann’s novels are, to be sure, very romantic. In this regard, they are also sensual and occasionally sexy, though always subtly and metaphorically so. Take, for example, Swann’s description of Eunostos’s first ecstatic moments of sex with the Thriae queen Saffron, before things turn violent:

She had invited; now it was time to accept the invitation. When a lady opens the door and offers the hospitality of a warm hearth, does a man stand shivering in the snow? He entered the house with alacrity and, being a gracious guest, not without gifts…

Smiling, she took the gifts and, still smiling, she bit his ear. (62, ellipsis in original)

But while Swann enjoys playing with descriptions of sex (there is a long and much more beautiful sex scene in The Weirwoods), he excels at writing stories of longing and low-simmering love, which sometimes end in tragedy. And he often emphasizes how (would-be) lovers have different, sometimes overly rosy, imaginations of one another. This is a major theme of The Forest of Forever. Zoe as narrator and confidant of Eunostos continually reminds us and him that Kora is just a woman—an exceptional one, yes, but she is neither a dream nor a maiden from the epic poem, Hoofbeats in Babylon, through which Eunostos has come to view himself, Kora, and their potential relationship. Eunostos may have saved Kora from a devious enemy, Saffron, but he is not owed an ending like the poem’s hero. And Kora, too, struggles against her dream-vision of love, seeing the dream as more real than reality, and so values—wrongly, in her final estimation—a strange but exotic prince she hardly knows over the loyal Minotaur whose deeds recommend him more than any Man or Beast. This sort of tragic, too-late understanding of how to love contrasts to the more hopeful explorations of romance in Day of the Minotaur or The Weirwoods (though they, too, have their tragedies).

Swann’s exploration of gender in The Forest of Forever extends beyond his (admittedly very heterosexual) handling of romance—where he disabuses characters and readers alike of both a quintessentially masculine vision of heroism and a quintessentially feminine one of the dreamy prince who brings happily ever after with him—and finds its most fertile ground in the Thriae. While part one sits awkwardly with the tone and plot of part two, such that it feels that part one belongs almost to a different novel (with the exception, perhaps, that it sets up the theme of heroic romance by casting Eunostos in the role of the hero, only to have the gains of that heroism—the maiden’s hand in marriage—undone by the arrival of an actual prince, thereby teaching Eunostos a lesson about romantic epics and their relationship to reality), part one spends a great deal of time discussing the Thriae and their strict bio-social hierarchy that troubles notions of gender. But not in the way you might expect.

The Thriae are split into three castes: the all-female queens, the all-female workers, the all-male drones. Workers, though, are exquisitely unfeminine by virtue of their distractingly ugly and unshapely bodies. Perhaps because of their unattractiveness, the workers are also both incredibly vain—easily distracted by a gift of makeup—and horrified by the sight of their ugly faces in a mirror. The drones have the opposite problem: they are too beautiful for men, too feminine, and because of their sublime beauty they are lazy and useless and, most importantly, impotent lovers who cannot seem to impregnate (or sexually please) their queen. Finally, the Thriae queens, though petite and disarmingly beautiful, are too skinny to be desirable as lovers (in Eunostos’s estimation) and hardly measure up to the voluptuosity of Zoe or the nubility of Kora. Moreover, the queens’ mating practices are not mutually pleasurable, so that male (hetero)sexuality is abject to the Thriae: its practice—when a drone can get it up—is a death sentence.

The Thriae, then, are presented as disturbing the masculine and feminine ideals embodied by Swann’s main characters throughout his oeuvre. Notably, the Thriae can easily be read as quite sexist or even homophobic caricatures: ugly but nonetheless vain women, too beautiful men whose femininity makes them decidedly unmanly. And I certainly think there’s something to that reading; those undertones are not not there. At the same time, having read Swann deeply now across six novels, I understand that Swann is very much invested in a vision of gender that is, yes, binary—there are men and women, masculinity and femininity—and that does, yes, hold up certain characters as ideals of each binary—his supremely manly men (Arnth, Eunostos, Zeb) and his nearly untouchable, goddess-like women (Vegoia, Kora, Rahab)—but that also sees the blending of masculinity and femininity as equally ideal. The Thriae pervert the ideals of femininity or masculinity that are so central to Swann’s work, though it’s hard to deny the surface sexism and homophobia that can be read in how Swann writes them.

More often than not, Swann’s main characters are men who are more feminine than other men in the novel, and whose femininity enhances their masculinity, enhances who they are as men. Swann’s ideal is a man who is “gentle,” a term that comes up again and again in his novels and was noted by those who knew Swann personally. I think, I highly suspect (as I suggested in my essay on Lady of the Bees), though I have no direct confirmation, that Swann was himself queer. And part of the queerness of his work shows up in his admiration for “gentle” men alongside his deep affection (and often his characters’ obvious desire) for the manly man characters in his novels, and his holding the tragic goddess-like women above them all (a move that is highly reminiscent of queer writer Robert Graves’s The White Goddess). This dynamic of a (more) feminine man, a (more) manly man, and a perfectly feminine woman often implies a love triangle between among the three of them, with the affections between the men often being incredibly—sometimes subtextually, as I’ve shown in previous essays, and sometimes explicitly—queer.

The potential for homosocial and queer readings that often inhere in the close, deeply felt relationships between Swann’s principal male leads is, interestingly, never entertained in The Forest of Forever. Eunostos and Aeacus become fast friends at first but their friendship is almost immediately transformed into a one-sided heterosexual rivalry, not over Kora herself, but over the affections of Kora and Aeacus’s children. This deeply heterosexual anxiety—that another man (or, in this case, Beast) might hold a greater place in his children’s affections, in effect replacing Aeacus as a father figure—is also paired with Aeacus’s fear and rejection of the forest as a way of life and ultimately of the Beasts. He signals this rejection in so many ways, but perhaps most importantly in his hunting and slaying of a bear. The latter is an explicit repudiation of the Beasts’ ethical system of relationship to nature and the animal world, as much as it is a spurning of the Beasts themselves as people worthy of ethical equality with humans.

It’s possible, then, to read Aeacus’s rejection of the Beasts and his friendship with Eunostos, in light of Swann’s other novels, as a rejection of the Beasts’ much more homosocial and queered relationships to one another both across and within gender categories, where sex and sexuality are more fluid than among humans (though Swann also explains that the Cretans have something like gender equality, though only among the upper classes; Zoe’s experience among a farmer couple on her journey to Knossos suggests traditional patriarchal gender relations among the laboring poor). This is interesting because Aeacus fits the mold of some of Swann’s more feminine male characters: he is physically smaller, a deep thinker, and a romantic. At least at first. He is the Remus to Lady of the Bees’s Romulus, the Bard to Moondust’s Zeb, the John to The Tournament of Thorns’s Stephen, and so on. Aeacus is meant to be contrasted to Eunostos but he vehemently and fearfully spurn such comparison. He resists being interpolated into Swann’s paradigms of homosocial and queer gender relations, and so rejects them outright, leading to tragedy.

As the above attempt to dissect the way gender and queerness are working in this novel suggests, Swann’s The Forest of Forever is messy. It has to be put into conversation with some of his other, much clearer, novels to really understand what’s going on—to pick apart some of the potentially problematic elements. And even then, the Thriae remain rather problematic. They are also from the East, from “the land of the Yellow Men.” This latter term, “Yellow Men,” is used throughout The Forest of Forever and in most of Swann’s novels whenever he wants to reference Asia. Though Swann’s use of the term tries to make clear the simple fact that (East) Asians might look different to people around the Mediterranean, while acknowledging that Swann couldn’t use “Asia” since that term was already in use in the ancient world and had a different meaning, “Yellow Men” is still, to be clear, a racist term that emerged from eighteenth-century racialist thought about the hierarchy of races. It’s an especially problematic term to use so soon after the US’s racist anti-Asian propaganda of WWII and Swann’s own service in Korea. Moreover, the Thriae are said to have interbred with East Asians, a fact that is noted because the Thriae have “slanted” eyes. Yes, “slanted.” So, The Forest of Forever is truly messy and the Thriae are especially messy, even if it’s still possible to see what Swann is trying to do with gender and sexuality, even if Swann does most of what he’s doing in this novel better in novels like Moondust (also messy) and Lady of the Bees (not messy, absolutely amazing).

In the end, I’m not sure The Forest of Forever was a story that needed to be told. Perhaps that isn’t fair. Who gets to judge whether a story needs to be told or not? Rather, what I mean is that I don’t find Eunostos to be a compelling character and the setting of the Country of the Beasts feels underbaked. I felt the same way in Day of the Minotaur and The Forever of Forever hasn’t changed my mind. If anything, The Forest of Forever frustrated me precisely because it tried to make Eunostos a more interesting and tragic character by retconning him into being a more significant part of Kora’s story (notably by casting him as a love interest for Kora and sending him to Knossos to try to bring back the children, neither of which was part of the original story).

But Eunostos was Swann’s first major character, his breakout star, and he clearly liked the Minotaur quite a lot. In a note at the end of the novel, where he acknowledges that a rewrite of Day of the Minotaur was warranted by the changes made in The Forest of Forever, Swann comments that he could not forgive Kora for choosing Aeacus over Eunostos in this novel. Swann found something admirable about his Minotaur. Eunostos is a literalization of the kindly manly beastliness that is seen more often in Swann’s admiration for the soft-hearted manly men who appear throughout his work as paradigms of good, non-toxic masculinity and queer desire. And like all of Swann’s most attractive characters, he is a muscle-bound redhead. Eunostos, the Country of the Beasts, and Minoan Crete were Swann’s starting point for all of his prehuman stories to come and so it seems natural that he wished to explore that setting and those characters a bit more.

In The Forest of Forever, Swann was clearly still figuring out what worked for him and what he wanted to do with the major themes that energized his writing. Some of it is good, more of it is just OK, a little of it is bad, but none of it is truly great—and even the supremely weird Moondust had moments of greatness, as did his first two novels, Day of the Minotaur and The Weirwoods. And in the end, I’d rather a mediocre novel with interesting themes and ideas developed unevenly than a well-written novel with little to say. At least The Forest of Forever has bite.

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