Subject: Book review of _The Innkeeper's Song_ (Peter S. Beagle)

From: [email-masked] (Ethan A Merritt)
Date: 21 Nov 93 22:06:56 GMT

Book Review:	_The Innkeeper's Song_ (Peter S. Beagle)

_The Innkeeper's Song_ is a sword-and-sorcery adventure told with
unusual fluency. As an adventure it is nothing special, but it is
nonetheless worth seeking out.  If nothing else it is a tour-de-force 
of stylistic control over a single tale told through many shifting
viewpoints. 

Peter Beagle has produced some of the most innovative, if all too 
infrequent :-(, fantasy of the last several decades.  Although his
works are not all of a piece, up until now each one has succeeded
remarkably in creating an atmosphere almost wholely un-beholden to
other works of fantasy.  Those who remember back to 1967 (or are lucky
enough to have found the 1978 Viking Press collection of _The Fantasy
Worlds of Peter Beagle_) may remember a first glimpse of the life and
strange times of Joe Farrell, who at the time was living with _Lila
the Werewolf_ in a New York City tenement.  20 years later we were
treated to a much longer glimpse of Farrell's penchant for
encountering unusual people, in _The Folk of the Air_.  At the close
of _TFotA_ Farrell was heading out of Berkeley (all right, "Avicenna")
in an old VW bus named Madame Schumann-Heink accompanied by an
Alsatian dog whom we strongly suspect of having once been a gryphon and
a Goddess's familiar.  The Goddess herself had fallen on hard times, and
for that matter denied being a Goddess at all, but that's another
subject and another review. In any event, since 1987 we haven't heard a
peep from Farrell or from Beagle.  I was hoping that _Innkeeper's Song_
would catch us up on the continuing saga of Farrell as he turns up the
unusual in new corners of late 20th Century America, but in this I was
disappointed.

Of Beagle's other fantasy, the best known seems to be _The Last
Unicorn_, which sets out deliberately to steal cliched fantasy
elements stretching from the Brothers Grimm through James Thurber and
recast them into a serious tale whose tone is nonetheless something
half way between a serious _Snow White_ and a slapstick _13 Clocks_.
However unpromising this approach sounds, it produced a lovely tale
which was, and is, far far out of what passes for the mainstream of
fantasy.

I was therefore surprised to find that _The Innkeeper's Song_ is,
unlike Beagle's previous work, very much a sword-and-sorcery yarn.  
A plot summary would make it sound like dozens other titles
you might find on the current fantasy shelves of a bookshop.
You know the line - inexperienced youth is unexpectedly caught up
in the magical affairs of powerful wizard; barbarian swordsmanship
triumphs over supposedly invincible magic; young peasant girl 
turns out to be the only one who can save the world -
so never mind a plot summary.

I suspect that Beagle intended to try the same approach as for _The
Last Unicorn_ (there is a passing nod to _Unicorn_ in the text at one
point), borrowing this time from cliched elements of current fantasy
works.  Unfortunately, it didn't work quite as well this time around.
Where _Unicorn_ ran to Thurber-esque clanking suits of animated armour
and bumbling magicians in funny hats, _Innkeeper's Song_ has 
*Ninja Monks* and *Female Barbarian Swordspersons* (TM).
The problem comes in reconciling this with the tone of the tale, which
this time approaches gritty realism.  It's one thing to incorporate some
random borrowed cliche for your own purposes into a brilliantly original
slapstick, and quite another to paste one into a novel which hasn't
diverged very far from the genre you are grabbing cliches from.

On the other hand, it is only familiarity with Beagle's earlier work
which leads me to analyze _Innkeeper's Song_ this way.  Treated
entirely on it's own the book is not a bad sword-and-sorcery tale. 
And what really stands out is the narrative style, which is free from
any of the above criticism.  Beagle has chosen to write from multiple
points of view, each close to stream-of-consciousness, and each very
short indeed.  For a page or three, enough time to walk from the inn
to the stable, we see through the eyes/mind/personality of Lal
(wandering sailor and swordswoman extraordinaire). The action flows 
seemlessly as we shift in viewpoint to Rosseth (stableboy, mooncalf,
hopelessly enamoured of Lal and her companions).  Shift again to view
the various humans from the eyes of Nyateneri's pet fox (not since
John Crowley's _Engine Summer_ have I been so impressed with an
animal stream-of-consciousness).  

Beagle manages to to maintain distinct voices for 5 major viewpoint
characters and as many minor ones.  Despite the jump in viewpoint every
couple of pages, the continuity is flawless.  If there is any weakness
in the execution of the narrative, it lies in the lack of perceived
historical depth to the characters. We know how it feels to _be_ these
characters from their distinctive individual narrations.  But we don't
know where they came from, or indeed how or why such a person should
exist in the fantasy world depicted.  Perhaps this follows inevitably
from the construction of the book:  The characters didn't flow naturally
from a conception of the fantasy world, they were born as cliches and
given flesh only in the eternal present of the narrative.  In the
process they gained an impressive presence as individuals in the here-
and-now, but they don't have the power to give life to a surrounding
world which is otherwise unexplained.

Not all authors care to spend their effort in  world-building.  
That's fine for fantasy set more-or-less in the world we all live in
anyway;  the reader can fill in any necessary background from real
life.  Most of Beagle's earlier fantasies fall in this category. 
_The Last Unicorn_, which might otherwise be the exception, similarly
works because the reader slips naturally into the shared world of
fairy-tales.  But the tone and genre of _Innkeeper's Song_ is one which
usually strives for some level of world-building and description, and I
found its lack to be a weakness.

Pick up a copy of _The Innkeeper's Song_.  Read it for the marvelous
writing, the character depiction, the not-bad fantasy adventure. 
All of Beagle's fantasies are worth reading.  Still, I hope he
eventually returns to chronicling the adventures of Joe Farrell!

				Ethan A Merritt
				[email-masked]

%A	Peter S. Beagle
%T	The Innkeeper's Song
%D	1993
%I	ROC/Penguin
%G	ISBN	0-451-45288-7
%P	346 pages (hardcover)

%A	Peter S. Beagle
%T	The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle
%D	1978
%I	Viking
%G	ISBN	0-670-30725-4
%P	430 pages (hardcover)

%A	Peter S. Beagle
%T	The Folk of the Air
%D	1986
%I	Del Rey/Ballantine
%G	ISBN	0-345-33782-4
%P	330 pages (hardcover)