Song for the Basilisk by Patricia McKillip

[lightreads]

Decades ago, Prince Pellior came bloodily to power in the ashes of slaughtered Tormalyne House. Far to the North on the island of Luly, a man without a name or a past trains at a school which teaches music and, to those who listen well enough, magic. The prince’s birthday opera is approaching, and as the story weaves the lost and bastard sons of Tormalyne House with the teachers at the city’s music school with the daughter the prince has molded in his own terrifying image, music and magic begin to tell the story of the past and the future.

Huh. Okay, so either McKillip has gotten a lot less abstruse since the last book of hers I read (The Tower at Stony Wood), or I’ve become a more inductive reader. A bit of both, I think. In any case, I enjoyed her usual imagistic style, where the entire book is wrapped in layer after layer of metaphor and the magic is as puzzling and inexplicable at the end as at the beginning. The thing about McKillip is that her universe is governed by the rules of story, rather than the rules of, say, Einstein. Her characters’ lives have a sort of epic poetry about them; they inevitably circle back to their roots, fall in love with a downright Shakespearean sense for the dramatic, and generally live lives that are shaped like the very oldest stories we know. Everything means something – reality is metaphor and metaphor is plot.

Which, taken as a whole, is both an acquired taste and one I have particular and limited need for in my diet. McKillip writes beautifully, with a compactness which requires of her reader a great deal of close attention. I admire the guts it takes to write like that, as well as to tell stories in a way which is so very different from contemporary norms of character and style. And so I really enjoyed this book, like you do a particularly rich and rare chocolate, even though it failed in multiple ways (the linchpin which turns the climax was not particularly explained, and the ultimate message about history and power and rewriting for the future took a lot of grasping on my part). But that’s the other thing about McKillip – she somehow places herself outside the censure of my usual critical tools, letting me enjoy the hell out of how she does her work, while making me go blinkblink at exactly what she’s doing.

Incidentally, she does include one of the most succinct and lovely definitions of magic I’ve ever seen.

““What is magic?”

She paused. “A word. It changes things, when you know what it means.””

Comments

[minyan.livejournal.com]

Not all McKillip is as circular as that one — they don't all talk in blackbirds when they're telling you that a child hid in the fireplace. I know what you mean, I think; her language can be powerful when it's opaque from pure lyrical momentum. But my favorite Mckillip is plainer spoken. The Cygnet books have myth and different speech rhytms and enough epigrams in them, but they also have people with literal minds, defending the places they care about. Mckillip has a trick too of making you think you know what's going on, and who's on who's side, even when you like both sides — and then turning everything inside out in ways that shouldn't surprise me but do.

My favorite McKillip is one I didn't know existed until my dad found it at a used bookstore somewhere: Fool's Run. It's early, I think, and it has some metaphoric loose ends, but it's gripping and blunt and almost Sci Fi. It centers around a woman who has been sentenced for life in a high security orbital prison for attacking a thousand people with a laser rifle. She seems insane. And then the prison invites a band to play there on tour. It's about a cop who can't let go of the chase, an administrator who's too good to escape his job, two twins who can't look at each other, and evasions, and symbols, and nursery rhymes... but the emotions are clear, and they hurt, for all that.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I think; her language can be powerful when it's opaque from pure lyrical momentum.

*nodding*. To borrow the book's language, sometimes reading her is like a non-musician listening to intricate classical music -- it's really pretty, even if you can't deconstruct it.

Which ones are the Cygnet books? I have <FR sitting around somewhere waiting to be read, but I'm not sure about these.

[minyan.livejournal.com]

The Sorcoress and the Cygnet and
The Cygnet and the Firebird,
with Meguet (which i've always mentally pronounced Megué, as if it were French) and Corleu and Nyx, and the house of Ro. They have a lot to do with the power and shelf life of stories. So does FR.

And I just saw today that she's got a new one out, something about the Od school of magic and a gardener. I think I know what my sister's getting for her birthday now. We've taken two long trips together, and both times McK has helpfully come out with a new book for us to read aloud in the car.