(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

Peter S. Beagle has for nearly four decades been considered one of Fantasy’s pre-eminent figures, but on the basis of the best of a very slim output: the urban fantasia A Fine and Private Place (1960), the seminal and self-analytical The Last Unicorn (1968), and The Innkeeper’s Song (1993), which lends a near-unique depth and sensitivity to the materials of full-blown High Fantasy. In the 1990s, leaving behind his oddly disappointing screenwriting (see, or do not see, The Lord of the Rings) and what seem to have been sundry bohemian distractions, Beagle has become (mildly) prolific at last: in addition to The Innkeeper’s Song, he has produced the novel The Unicorn Sonata (1996) and two collections, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche (1997) and Giant Bones. The last is superb.

Giant Bones is a cycle of six novellas occurring in the imaginary world first explored in the magisterial The Innkeeper’s Song. In that novel, Beagle brought a variety of feisty characters to a country inn, where they combated assassins, demons, and an evil wizard, while at the same time (unorthodoxly for figures in a Fantasy tale) developing friendships, and arriving at personal resolutions, of considerable mature plausibility. Beagle is at heart a mainstream realist author, for whom the whimsies of Fantasy require, if not domestication to the mundane, at least some accountability to the realities of human psychology and class structure; in Giant Bones, this reconciliation of elements proceeds impressively. Each story centers on people of low rank in the kingdoms and hierarchies of their nameless world; they struggle simply to be true to themselves, avoiding steadfastly any offers of preferment, any Rings or Swords of Power that might corrupt their integrity or creative independence. Like The Innkeeper’s Song, Giant Bones is told for the most part as oral narrative, in a succession of idiosyncratic and irascible first-person voices, some loud, some quiet, but all urgent with stories for which kings and great magicians would have no ear. Acting in this spirit, Beagle in this collection does for High Fantasy what Dan Simmons did for Science Fiction in Hyperion (1989): he provides his chosen genre with its Canterbury Tales.

The narrators employ their various vernaculars, but in every case Beagle’s fine poeticism, his strikingly unconventional metaphors, and his deft nuancing of character inform the speaker’s voice. A muscular virago tells of how she accompanied the land’s greatest (and humblest) minstrel to the place of his ultimate musical sacrifice; a magician describes how a mighty queen sought to make a village sorcerer into her creature, but was herself brought ironically low; the master of a troupe of itinerant actors decries the follies of princely brothers who farcically out-Hamlet Hamlet; the two aging soldiers-of-fortune last seen in The Innkeeper’s Song try to set right an old sin but instead prevent a new one; a young woman escapes marriage to an avuncular king in a tale of exceptional witty force; and a boy in a family of great clodhoppers hears from his father how it might have been worse. These stories are full of fanciful colour and extravagancy, the imaginative virtues of the best Fantasy; but they are quiet also, with a thoughtful restraint that is striking and admirable in its genre context. Giant Bones may well be the best story cycle produced by Fantasy since the heyday of Fritz Leiber.

ROC (USA). 1997. TRADE PAPERBACK.