panguitch's Full Review: Patricia A. McKillip - The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld
Stories that deal with the world of faerie often have at their root the idea of communicating with the other. A human may pass through a misty border to a magical realm, treat with its inhabitants, experience wonders and dangers, and (perhaps) return to tell the tale. In ways this is not dissimilar to tales where humans interact with beasts or science fiction stories dealing with human-alien encounters. There is in man a yearning to commune with something other than himself, a need to not be alone.
Some of the best modern tales of faerie have inverted this pattern. Rather than introduce a human to faerie, they introduce a being from faerie to the human world. As this fairy comes to terms with what it means to be human so does the audience. Peter S. Beagle’s marvelous The Last Unicorn is an excellent example. Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is another, and in many ways it addresses this theme in a more intimate manner.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
by Patricia A. McKillip, 1974
From her mother Sybel received her pale slender frame and ivory hair. From her father, heartless black eyes and a wizard’s power. From her father, and from his father, she also inherited a crystal domed refuge high on Eld Mountain, above the din of humanity, surrounded by gardens and the most fantastic menagerie: the Black Swan of Tirlith, the riddle-speaking boar Cyrin, Gyld the green-winged dragon, the golden Lyon Gules, the witch-cat Moriah, and blue-eyed Ter Falcon.
Sybel lived alone with her animals, holding the keys to books filled with forgotten stories of kings, quests, and beasts. In one of these she read of the Liralen and undertook to call it to her as her fathers had called the other creatures. Instead what came to her was a baby, left by Coren of Sirle. She came to love the child named Tamlorn, but he was a prince, and soon his world came to take him from her.
Ice-white Lady . . . they say never, never look upon the face of beauty. And you are beautiful, ivory and diamond-white, fire-white, with eyes as black as Drede’s heart.
So Sybel is forced to enter the world of men. Indeed, her story revolves around men. Men who would take her, marry her for her power and beauty, keep her in a cage like a wondrous, rare treasure or wield her as a weapon. Men who would love her, surrender their years of hate to be with her. And the young man Tam becomes, her beloved foster son who also loves her enemy.
She is drawn down from her mountain into their world, exposed to their passions. Moving for the first time among other humans she begins to be more human herself. She learns fear from one man, hate from another, and love from a third. Vengeance and the sorrow that it costs she learns for herself.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld won the first annual World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1975. It is not an adventure, nor is it an epic. It’s a story focused on identity and control. Sybel not only keeps her beasts, but their names and their stories, and in these lies her power. She must keep her own name frozen deep within her for if a man takes it he can control her. And as she learns, it is easy to let a man into your house, but hard to make him leave.
Sybel is an odd character, strangely elegant but as sympathetic as stone. She warms very gradually across the book’s sparse 200-odd pages. McKillip’s writing style mirrors Sybel’s detachment. Perhaps 90% of the text is dialog, and never is there interior monolog, and only rarely introspection of any sort. We know the characters’ thoughts and hearts through their voices, and while they all speak openly, the effect is nevertheless distancing. Moreover, the diction and syntax are somewhat stilted. At times this serves the story, at others it distracts.
In these ways The Forgotten Beasts of Eld mimics its protagonist’s strangeness, itself like an interloper from the world of faerie. While this construction is artful, it somewhat disengages the reader from the text and I regret not being able to more fully experience this story. Instead it seems the faded memory of a tale overheard in darkness, a grasping after the wonder of a world passed beyond mortal reach. But there is sweetness in that yearning, however futile.
– Panguitch
Greatpilgrim makes the point that this fantasy novel is unusual for its concentration on mood, which it establishes with scant, ambiguous detail, an approach much more in the tradition of fairy tales than of modern fantasy. Her review is well worth reading.
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