The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

"Patricia McKillip is consistently brilliant and does not seem to be read as much as she should be. You can pick up almost any Patricia McKillip book and have an amazing time. She’s a brilliant writer sentence-by-sentence. I picked this one, which is quite an early McKillip, partly because it has that status as a classic: it’s been reprinted in the Fantasy Masterworks, it won the first World Fantasy Award… In some ways, it’s a book written with the purpose of expanding what fantasy can do. If you read interviews with McKillip, you learn that she wrote it very deliberately with a female protagonist, because that was something she wasn’t seeing in fantasy. There’s an important strand of writers doing that, including Le Guin and Tamora Pierce, but McKillip was thinking about writing believable, interesting, active women in fantasy pretty early. She’s also a good representative of the fantasy tradition that draws more strongly on fairy tale , which I think sometimes gets blocked by the epic or romance-inflected tradition that was more important to Tolkien. But there’s a long line of fairy-tale fantasy going back through people like Sylvia Townsend Warner and Hope Mirrlees to Victorian writers, and forwards to modern fantasy through writers like Terri Windling and Robin McKinley, and works such as John Crowley’s Little, Big . That line often gets subsumed beneath the epic books following Tolkien, but it’s equally interesting and important. Like a lot of fairy story writing in the 1970s and 80s, McKillip’s work applies quite a critical lens. The central character, Sybel, has very powerful magic, but she’s grown up with her forgotten beasts and her almost silent father in the woods, and has the social skills you would expect from that. One of the things she has to do is learn how to operate with other people in ways that will make her comfortable. She’s the child of a coercive relationship, and there are some really serious questions raised about coercive relationships in the book. McKillip writes great magical beasts. The greedy dragon, the amazing falcon, the wise boar…. While they’re all called and bound to Sybel, they have goals and ideas of their own. They’re not resenting service necessarily – you get a real sense of how the relationships Sybel builds with them become her ethical compass in a rather wonderful way towards the end of the book. It has the stuff of epic fantasy – kings and princes and magic – but it’s also about the building of weird communities between unusual people, and I think McKillip’s very good at that. Some later McKillips are perhaps more deliberately subversive. I really love Alphabet of Thorn , which is about people who live in a magical school and a library, and which feels like it’s building to a military crisis – but McKillip’s not really that interested in military crises, so it goes in a completely different direction. Or The Bards of Bone Plain , which is about a world where magic seems to have slipped away, but you realize as you move through that magic is always working subtly, woven through everything. McKillip is really wonderful at writing about consequences, and about characters building genuinely interesting connections. She doesn’t just rely on romance to create meaningful bonds. Often, there’s quite a complicated webbing together of her characters for different kinds of genuine reasons. Like Le Guin, she doesn’t usually write enormously long books; Ombria in Shadow is quite chunky, but most of them are 200 to 300 pages. If you’re a fast reader, you can read one in an evening or a couple of days, and you will have a great time doing so."