2023 read #87: Harpist in the Wind by Patricia A. McKillip.

Harpist in the Wind by Patricia A. McKillip

262 pages

Published 1979

Read from August 14 to August 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Closing out the trilogy that began with The Riddle-Master of Hed and Heir of Sea and Fire, Harpist has some of the usual problems I find in trilogy-caps.

At only 262 pages, you can’t call Harpist bloated, but nonetheless it’s about 25% longer than the preceding books. The page count is padded with — you guessed it! — even more journeys back and forth across the continent, as if the bulk of the first two books weren’t travelogue enough.

Loose ends get tidied up in unsatisfying ways; one character’s father, whose disappearance in Heir was used as a source of tension and emotional stakes, just strolls back into their home and says (essentially), “Yeah, I was just looking for information.” Thanks, dad.

McKillip’s previously gentle touch with the setting’s magic, full of hints and unstated implications, here turns into an outright hand-wave, as Prince Morgon’s powers just happen to do whatever the plot requires. (Suddenly he can command the dead now? He can teleport??) Morgon, as a character, has devolved from refreshingly inept bumpkin into just another brooding, godlike being; the story becomes less interesting in direct proportion to the extent of his powers. Raederle, meanwhile, gets pushed into the background, even as she joins Morgon for most of his travels.

Yet, despite all that, the beauty of McKillip’s prose carries this story, shoring up the weaknesses of its chosen one narrative and its dimensionless battles between undefined powers. She lingers in remote plains and in forested lakeshores, bejeweled caverns and rocky headlands, intimate firesides and the heights of the sky. Her descriptions don’t approach Tolkien’s level, but at times they’re poetic enough. Even more Tolkien-ish: how readily her male characters cry and hold one another and speak of their love. All good things.

Ultimately, to modern readers, the Riddle-Master trilogy feels stiff and dated, bound to the archaic notion that the land’s power rightfully belongs to some blonde dude. McKillip’s potential as a storyteller struggles against this, and against other expectations of the nascent fantasy genre. There’s nothing in this story that benefited from the structure of a trilogy, for example. I’m pretty sure you could have condensed everything worth reading in these books into a single 400 page volume, and still had plenty of space for McKillip’s leisurely sense of mood and place, of landscape, all of which is integral to the story.

But hey! At least I finished reading a trilogy! That’s rare for me nowadays.