Giant Bones by Peter S. Beagle
273 pages
Published 1997
Read from November 24 to November 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
It's been a while since I read and reviewed a collection of short stories, hasn't it? (Ignoring Dandelion Wine, which was a fixup and accordingly not reviewed chapter by chapter, it's been nine months and almost sixty books since my last dalliance with the short form.) I'm no stranger to Beagle's short stories -- I read one of his collections last year, in addition to sundry inclusions in various best-of anthologies -- but this book takes an odd tack, presenting six new stories set in the world of The Innkeeper's Song. When I recall that book, I think of its multiplicity of perspectives and the vividness of many of its characters. What doesn't spring to mind is, well, the world. I remember the inn well enough, but the rest is a minimally defined map of rather basic fantasy terrain: the bucolic home village, some woods or something, a river in a gorge, the villain's fortress on a crag -- and I'm not even certain of some of those details. As Beagle himself says in his introduction, the "world" of Song "was never supposed to be more than a backdrop, a stage-set. It wasn't intended to last." Only one story here concerns characters from Song itself. So heading into these tales, I'm skeptical of the collection's premise -- what, exactly, makes any of these stories a certain part of the Innkeeper's world? -- although I have trust in Beagle as a storyteller: even his most mediocre stories have been reliably tender and intimate, sentimental (in the positive reading of that term), very human, as I've emphasized in past reviews.
Onward to the stories!
"The Last Song of Sirit Byar." The magic of song is one of the hoariest fantasy cliches out there. I tend to give Beagle the benefit of the doubt, and he did manage to squeeze a sweet little tale out of a hackneyed general premise, but I'd rate this as far from his most affecting venture. As soon as the titular bard went into the "songs have power" line, then opened up about the dangling loose end of his tragic backstory, it all became pat and predictable, albeit spun along its inevitable course with Beagle's signature softness and humanity.
"The Magician of Karakosk." A perfectly pleasant little fable with a surprisingly old school fantasy feel -- this would have been right at home in the sword 'n' sorcery days of the 1970s, except, of course, for being far better written than almost any of those stories. It stirred some nostalgia for Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy anthologies, though this was better than 90% of what I read in those all-too-often garbage volumes. Think of this story as the fantasy equivalent of a classy chef doing his rendition of pub grub: tasty and comforting, with less of the grease, and fewer stomach pains.
"The Tragical Historie of the Jiril's Players." A passable exercise in escalating farce, with outsize villains upstaged in a theater plot by an unassuming bit player, all structured quite tidily but lacking a certain oomph. Somewhat of a forgettable piece, honestly.
"Lal and Soukyan." Thus far the uniting thread through all of these stories (as well as The Innkeeper's Song itself) is not so much the setting as a certain style of narration, each tale (or chapter, in the original novel) related, ostensibly orally, in the first person by a personable narrator. This, the only story in Giant Bones involving characters from Innkeeper, eschews this stylistic uniformity in favor of third person. It fits the story, a sweetly melancholy spin on the old school fantasy staple of two mismatched adventurers, finding Lal and Soukyan reuniting for one last journey, a quest for a sense of atonement in their twilight years. Soukyan's motivation -- to apologize to the son of a prison guard Soukyan shamed in front of him, forty years before -- never quite feels solid to me; the idea that this one incident in a long and checkered career of near escapes and mercenary violence would plague him near the end of his life seems on the shaky side, especially as everything resolves very tidily when Soukyan is made to understand that other people benefited from that long-ago jailbreak, which is so damn obvious it makes Soukyan appear stupid. The stuff in between, with the geriatric pair intervening to save an escaping slave from his vengeful captor and the former slave's fixation on finding the ghost of his father -- is satisfying, albeit never operating at the level of brilliance and affect Beagle is capable of at his best. I've been craving old school fantasy infused with a more modern sense of emotional complexity, so I have no real complaints, even if (like the rest of the stories so far) "Lal and Soukyan" is content to hit the obvious beats.
"Choushi-wai's Story." A cute little just-so story about a clever peasant girl abducted to be the bride of a kindly old king, the talking fish she befriends, and their escape with the aid of a thief called the Thief. Winsomely narrated but insubstantial.
"Giant Bones." Another sweet but slight tale. Not a lick wrong with it on a technical level, and deft and kindly as Beagle's stories tend to be, but, like essentially every story in this volume, it doesn't bother to transcend sweetly-sad to become anything deep or affecting or heartbreaking, not like Beagle's best efforts do. I mean, it does become unexpectedly moving toward the end, with that sweet humane acceptance of mortality that pervades Beagle's work, but even if I were to say this is the best story in the collection (which it might very well be), that doesn't elevate it to Beagle's upper tier. Perhaps it's too much to expect a particular author to crank out the equal to A Fine and Private Place or "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here) anytime he chooses; perhaps if this were any other author, I might be more lenient with the overall rating (though they're all arbitrary, every one of them). But none of these stories (with the possible exception of this one -- it's much too soon to tell) seem likely to really linger with me, not the way I expect Beagle stories to do. None of them were really great -- merely amiable, and sweet, and a little melancholy, and pretty good, like this collection as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment