Thomas the Rhymer

"Thomas the Rhymer is one of the books in the fairy tale series that Terri Windling published. By all rights, I shouldn’t like Thomas the Rhymer , but Ellen Kushner is a very, very good writer. It is a book that is set in Fairyland, and it’s taking the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer , which is a traditional ballad, and putting it into a real moment of history. It’s a very solid, well-thought-through world. The part of it where Thomas comes back and he can only tell the truth is wonderful. All of the characters are very real. Fairy is very much the other, the numinous, the fey – the slightly cruel side of fairy that we get in those kinds of stories. Ellen Kushner is a terrific writer. I really like all her work, and she’s one of the very few Americans who’s written something set in the Scottish Borders that feels right, and doesn’t do that thing where writers don’t understand that a hundred miles is a long way. She does – she gets it. Her Fairy in that book is wonderful as well, really alien and effective. I talked earlier about everybody using Fairy as a metaphor for things. I think that often fairy books, particularly books that set fairies in the modern day, fall down by trying to use it as a metaphor for too many things, and not consistently. Kushner is using it as a metaphor for romantic love: for the way that you fall in love, and everything is wonderful, and then it isn’t, and the person seems to be cruel because they won’t give the thing you want back. And addiction too, very much. It’s a very readable book. Everything is kept at the right level of reality, so that you just one hundred percent believe all of the magical things in there. You don’t need to know the ballad well to enjoy the book. But it is very, very faithful to it. If anything, slightly too much! There’s a moment in the ballad where they sit under a tree, and a character says, ‘Do you see that broad, broad road? It’s the road to hell. And do you see that narrow, winding road with thorns? That’s the road to heaven. But there’s another road, which is the road to Fairyland, which you and I will go this day.’ And there’s a scene in the book where they literally sit under the tree and have that conversation, and I felt, ‘Okay, there’s being true to the Ballad, and there’s just putting the Ballad on the page.’ But for the rest of the book, I never felt that. I felt that she kept it at the right distance."