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.

[readerjane]

This sounds wonderful. Trying to remember if I've ever read any McKillip. I think I have not, but maybe my daughter has brought some home from the library. Will have to ask her. If she hasn't, she might enjoy PM too.

[grievous-angel.livejournal.com]

I haven't read McKillip for years, but I do remember being profoundly moved by her ability to say it *all* in a line. "One day you will learn how it feels to say your name into an empty room with no-one on earth to answer to it" (that's paraphrased like fury, but hopefully the meaning is there - although I've probably got it the wrong way round or something!)

She has a real gift.

catching up on your booklogging today

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

This was the first McKillip I actually enjoyed. I actively hated The Winter Rose, and I was into the third book of the Riddlemaster trilogy before I abandoned it due to nothing-happening-itis. This one worked for me, despite the fact that I read the first page four time before I figured out there was a kid in the fireplace, because ... hm. I think it was kind of like half-closing your eyes and stepping back from a really complicated painting and just getting the tone and general ideas, whereas before I was lost in the details. (Which is pretty much exactly like your classical music analogy above, now that I read upwards.)

Her books work best when there's something real under all that icing (Shadow in Ombria is a pretty book with zero heart), and SotB works on that level, I think. She has to work hard to balance that load of very heavy, opaque description and metaphor, and when she slips it's almost unreadable -- Riddlemaster is three books of unparalleled worldbuilding and characters, but the plot was so thin, and wandered so much, I got bored and gave up.

The funny thing is that my critique of McKillip is characterstic of my tendency to get especially irritated with authors who have my own flaws. I'm always a hairsbreadth away from wandering into complete opacity and disconnection with the real world, via pretty language, and since I've worked so hard over the years to overcome that, it's a huge thorn for me when reading McKillip.

The fact that all of her climaxes occur in some "magical" realm of feeling and thought, with people not doing anything so much as, I don't know, magicking and feeling their way out of things, grates on me after a while. It's lovely at first, but then you want to know what mystical power is responsible for making things happen, why laying the silver acorn on the golden plate in the heart of the wood ends the sleeping spell or whatever, and you just never get it. She means to be fantastical and fairytale, but sometimes it comes off as lazy.

Anyhow. This book spun such a pretty tale, and I liked the setting. The Book of Atrix Wolf is clearly French, Ombria strikes me as Italian, Winter Rose is English, and I loved the baroque German feel of Basilisk.