2015 read #12: The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle.

The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle
348 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 4 to March 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

After reading all those Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies from the 1970s, perhaps it's inevitable that I would pick up on the idea that The Innkeeper's Song is, essentially, a classic sword-and-sorcery tale seen through an intelligent, literate, humane lens. Or in other words, exactly what you'd expect if Peter S. Beagle tried his hand at it. There are battling wizards, extradimensional horrors, wandering heroes with tragic backstories and assassins hot on their heels, a perilous venture into the stronghold of the evil wizard, and much of the story takes place in and around the sort of crossroads inn found primarily in adventurers-on-a-quest fantasy (and hardly ever in history). But the characters feel distinct and well-rounded, fundamentally human in the best Beagle tradition, motivated by their emotional states, growing and changing through interaction. The emotional core of each character feels vivid and real.

The narration is excellent overall, after a forbidding start -- each the first eight or so chapters have a different narrator, relating overlapping sections of story from their own point of view, which felt a bit overwhelming at first, possibly because my brain is still muddy with whatever has been mucking up my reading abilities of late. But once each character established herself or himself in my head, this structure paid off with differing insights and complications, rather than merely spreading the story too thin, as multiple perspectives and main characters sometimes do (as in the later Song of Ice and Fire books). Multiple p.o.v.'s crowding for attention also made for perhaps one of the most memorable and unusual group sex scenes I've read to date, a thirty page opus (or derailment, depending on how you feel about it) bouncing between all four participants, as well as a shapeshifting fox (who, spoilers, turns out to be some kind of ancient extradimensional being later on). Beagle takes great pains to establish the emotional landscape leading to the foursome, and spends the protracted scene exploring ideas of comfort and intimacy and need, so I can't say it felt exploitative, but it was an unexpected tangent, at the very least.