The Innkeeper's Song - Hardcover

Beagle, Peter S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0451452887 ISBN 13: 9780451452887

Publisher: Ace, 1993

Synopsis

As Tikat searches for the lover whose death and resurrection he witnessed, he meets three women--each of whom hides a secret, and who respectively each undertake her own impossible mission. By the author of The Last Unicorn.

About this title

About the Author

Peter S. Beagle, a World Fantasy Award nominee, is the bestselling author of the fantasy classic The Last Unicorn as well as many other highly acclaimed works. His novels and stories have been translated into sixteen languages worldwide, and his long and fascinating career has covered everything from journalism and stage adaptations to songwriting and performances. He has given readings, lectures, and concerts of his own songs from coast to coast, and has written several screenplays, including Ralph Bakshi's film version of The Lord of the Rings.

Reviews

Rather uncharacteristic dark fantasy from the stylish author of The Folk of the Air (1986), The Last Unicorn, etc. Ill-tempered innkeeper Karsh reluctantly accepts a disparate set of guests: Lal, a black-skinned sorceress; her companion Nyateneri, a warrior- priestess fleeing assassins; and poor, pale, drowned Lukassa, resurrected by Lal, who recalls little of her past but can see into the netherworld. Nyateneri's familiar is a fox who once had human form. Also on the premises are Rosseth, Karst's much-abused assistant, and Tikat, Lukassa's betrothed. In due course the fox brings to the inn an ancient, enfeebled wizard, The Man Who Laughs. The wizard's former apprentice, Arshadin, has sold his soul and his body's blood to demon Others in return for immortality. Arshadin intends to kill The Man Who Laughs, turn him into a ``griga'ath'' (an evil but powerful ghost) and send him to the Others in exchange for the return of his blood. Even though distracted by Lal and Nyateneri--she turns out to be a man--Arshadin cannot be prevented from defeating The Man Who Laughs and generating the griga'ath. But can Lukassa, once dead herself, somehow influence the Others? An inordinately complicated deal-with-the-devil variant. Beagle's inexplicable choice of narrative structure--ten different first-person narrators--is an irritating distraction. And the result, if often admirable, is detached and cold, the opposite of what was evidently intended. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Beagle, author of the esteemed The Last Unicorn (1968), adds this beautiful fantasy to his small body of work. The maiden Lukassa, who tells us that "death is a nowhere lined with lightning," drowns but nonetheless is abducted by an ethereal black woman with golden eyes. Lukassa's inconsolable sweetheart, Tikat, refuses to accept Lukassa's death and braves a long trek to find her; he is beset by savages and nearly starves. Lukassa is both corporeal and incorporeal; down beneath the riverbed where she drowned, down deeper still in a shadowy world Beagle draws so skillfully that Tolkein and C. S. Lewis come to mind, she is being pulled to her death by a powerful demon. Tikat and the women he has been pursuing gather at the inn, where another wizard--a mentor to the women and a force for good--lies near death. A fox--into whose feral, witty, magical mind Beagle takes us--rescues Lukassa, and, much changed, she joins the living and her faithful Tikat. Lukassa's haunting narrative--poised between life and death--hearkens back some 33 years to Beagle's A Fine and Private Place, about a newly dead man and woman who fall in love and then fade away as they forget what life was. The innkeeper himself is an unsavory but recognizable sort who observes these otherworldly doings with a disapproving realism--a useful but limited point of view, Beagle seems to say. Realism is all very well, but odd things happen, and only magic will explain them. A gentle, romantic, lyrical tale. John Mort

Three powerful women (each with her own secret past), a stable boy, a weaver's son, and an innkeeper set in motion a series of events that brings each of them face to face with the forces of magic and the workings of fate. Beagle ( The Last Unicorn , LJ 5/15/68; The Folk of the Air , Ballantine, 1987) uses many voices to tell this tale of love and death and what lies beyond both. A finely crafted piece as well as a rich, evocative fantasy, this novel should have broad appeal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ace
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451452887
• ISBN 13: 9780451452887
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368