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Entry tags:
Everyday Fantasy
09 Sep 2005
The Magician of Karakosk and Other Stories - Peter S. Beagle - Souvenir Press, 1999
* * *
There is a sort of fascism about epic fantasy. Too often the hero (who is almost always, knowingly or unknowingly, of royal blood) goes carving his way through the guards, monks or other assorted dispensibles on his quest to locate the Maguffin That Will Save the World without any consideration being given to the appalling consequences of his actions on their family and loved ones. Like traditional history and, for that matter, right-wing politics, epic fantasy assumes that only the powerful or the particularly talented are of interest or importance. This offends my sense of justice - ordinary people matter too, even if their stories are not so relevant or memorable. It must surely be possible to write fantasy stories about people lower down the social scale - the farmer's wife who's lost a cow, the down-on-his-luck minstrel, the cheese-maker under a witch's curse - who tend to appear but peripherally at best in your average fantasy novel. This is what Beagle is trying to do in this set of beautifully written stories and I applaud him for trying, but somehow they didn't quite work for me.
The tales themselves are pleasingly varied. The Last Song of Sirit Byar concerns a wandering musician who tries to put right an old wrong, while the title story is about a powerful but unambitious magician and his battle of wits with a wicked queen. My favourite is The Tragical Historie of the Jiril's Players, a comic tale which pokes gentle fun at one of the sillier plot elements in Hamlet. There are also stories about a thief who is sent to stop a peasant girl from being made into a princess, an interesting take on giants and a story featuring two of the characters from The Innkeeper's Song who go on one last quest to... well, it would spoil things to reveal its purpose, but suffice to say that it's human, decent, and not the sort of thing that Conan the Barbarian, Elric or any of your other fantasy heroes would think to do in a million years.
So why don't they work for me? The chief difficulty is the unnamed world in which the stories are set (the same one as The Innkeeper's Song, a book I have read but remember next to nothing about), which has no discernible magical system, history, religion or geopolitics (it does have geography, for which a map would have been helpful). This is quite deliberate - Beagle wanted a blank canvas on which to paint his characters - but means that the stories lack a sense of interconnectedness which ironically makes them less realistic than conventional epic fantasy, where the very fact of the characters' actions having such major consequences contributes to the notion that the world is a cohesive whole. The length of the tales - too long to have the punch of a short story and too short to develop the deep character empathy of a novel - also mitigates the emotional impact, making them touching rather than profound.
So - a brave attempt to write everyday fantasy, but I think it can be done better. And yes, one day I will try...
The Magician of Karakosk and Other Stories - Peter S. Beagle - Souvenir Press, 1999
* * *
There is a sort of fascism about epic fantasy. Too often the hero (who is almost always, knowingly or unknowingly, of royal blood) goes carving his way through the guards, monks or other assorted dispensibles on his quest to locate the Maguffin That Will Save the World without any consideration being given to the appalling consequences of his actions on their family and loved ones. Like traditional history and, for that matter, right-wing politics, epic fantasy assumes that only the powerful or the particularly talented are of interest or importance. This offends my sense of justice - ordinary people matter too, even if their stories are not so relevant or memorable. It must surely be possible to write fantasy stories about people lower down the social scale - the farmer's wife who's lost a cow, the down-on-his-luck minstrel, the cheese-maker under a witch's curse - who tend to appear but peripherally at best in your average fantasy novel. This is what Beagle is trying to do in this set of beautifully written stories and I applaud him for trying, but somehow they didn't quite work for me.
The tales themselves are pleasingly varied. The Last Song of Sirit Byar concerns a wandering musician who tries to put right an old wrong, while the title story is about a powerful but unambitious magician and his battle of wits with a wicked queen. My favourite is The Tragical Historie of the Jiril's Players, a comic tale which pokes gentle fun at one of the sillier plot elements in Hamlet. There are also stories about a thief who is sent to stop a peasant girl from being made into a princess, an interesting take on giants and a story featuring two of the characters from The Innkeeper's Song who go on one last quest to... well, it would spoil things to reveal its purpose, but suffice to say that it's human, decent, and not the sort of thing that Conan the Barbarian, Elric or any of your other fantasy heroes would think to do in a million years.
So why don't they work for me? The chief difficulty is the unnamed world in which the stories are set (the same one as The Innkeeper's Song, a book I have read but remember next to nothing about), which has no discernible magical system, history, religion or geopolitics (it does have geography, for which a map would have been helpful). This is quite deliberate - Beagle wanted a blank canvas on which to paint his characters - but means that the stories lack a sense of interconnectedness which ironically makes them less realistic than conventional epic fantasy, where the very fact of the characters' actions having such major consequences contributes to the notion that the world is a cohesive whole. The length of the tales - too long to have the punch of a short story and too short to develop the deep character empathy of a novel - also mitigates the emotional impact, making them touching rather than profound.
So - a brave attempt to write everyday fantasy, but I think it can be done better. And yes, one day I will try...