Fantasy gem #1
Long ago and far away, when I was a teen-seguing-into-young-adult, I worked downtown in Chicago. A block away from my office was Carson Pirie Scott & Co. (…sigh…), there were glamorous stores galore on State Street, and half a block away was the wondrousness that was Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore. The paperback books were downstairs, and the science fiction area was tucked away in the back righthand corner. It was a glorious spot for me to hang out in on rainy or snowy days, either during lunch hour or after work.
For a few years, I noticed a book on the shelves called “The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
Anyway. One day, I broke down and bought the book.
I have been hooked on Patricia McKillip’s writing ever since.
The writing is lyrical, poetic, spare, sometimes haunting. It is as if someone had taken an old myth, sung and storied for hundreds of years, and written it down as a novel.
Sybel is a witch, living isolated and alone on the top of a mountain, the daughter and granddaughter of cold, emotionless wizards who lived apart from humanity and “called” to whatever they wanted–including female companionship. She has inherited a collection of Beasts, magical, wondrous creatures from myth and legend, who were “called” by her father and grandfather to live upon the mountain. There is the Cat Moriah, there is the Falcon Ter, the Lyon Gules, the dragon Gyld, and most wondrous of all, the white-tusked Boar Cyrin, who speaks in riddles and koans. (”The giant Grol was struck once in the eye by a stone, so that it turned and looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.”)
All Sybel wants is to live her life with her Beasts and to find the Lyralin, a huge white bird with trailing wings, and “call” it to her. But one day, her life is upended by a man in armor pounding at her gate. He is carrying a baby. He insists she take and rear the child, because it is the only place in the world where the child will live.
She takes in the child, saying she has cared for Beasts before, and surely caring for an infant can’t be that much different?
The warrior returns over the years at uneven intervals. And between these visits and the growth of the baby, Sybel becomes drawn into the loves, hates, dramas and wars that pervade the outside world. All the while, she is searching for the Lyralin, and begins being stalked by a mysterious, dark, foreboding being called Blammor.
Darkness and light, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, isolation and immersion, and the nature of being true to yourself are all balanced in this book, written in a murmuring, poetic manner.
It’s short, it has absolutely no Dark Lords or elves or we-must-stop-the-end-of-the-world quests, but it ended up winning the World Fantasy Award the year it was written. It was out of print for many years, and apparently McKillip does not regard it fondly, but it has been re-released. I love McKillip’s later books as well, and would recommend any of them, but her writing is more…um…mannered now. Beasts is McKillip as a fresh young writer, finding her voice, and it knocked my socks off 30 years ago (almost forty?!).
