Two Short Takes

I’ve read that The Innkeeper’s Song is Peter S. Beagle’s favorite among his novels, and I think I can understand why. He writes the novel from no less than ten points of view — including a shapeshifting fox — allowing him to show events from numerous different perspectives, to show how the same actions have different meanings depending on who is telling what happened. The book is named for the innkeeper, but it doesn’t begin with him, and though it more or less ends with him (told from another point of view) the inn is only incidentally and intermittently a place for the novel’s action. The title, then, is just the first of many of Beagle’s acts of misdirection concerning this novel.

I’ve shied away from calling The Innkeeper’s Song a story, because another important thing that Beagle does is keep the reader guessing about what kind of story the book is, or rather, keep the reader interested in all of the different kinds of stories that the characters are living through. One seeks his true love beyond death and back. She, for her part, wonders why she is returned, and who is this overly earnest boy anyway? The two other women traveling with her have their own quests though they, too, may be in the dark about what they are really up to.

At each turn, the story becomes something else. The desperate quest for a lost love becomes an attempt to find a new place, and to understand whether a connection that felt like it should last through eternity can continue even into the next year. A different quest for a lost friend and teacher brings the questers into the middle of a terrible, slow-motion feud. Did the old wizard want to be found? Did he know he would be regardless of his own desires, and did he use that as another gambit in his deadly game?

Nothing and nobody in The Innkeeper’s Song are what they seem at first, or even at second. That must have been a great pleasure to write. Each character becomes, and in their interactions they reveal still more possibilities. Beagle does not confine himself to one story; instead he takes his characters seriously as individuals and as protagonists in their own lives, and he shows how that affects the people around them. There are thrilling adventures along the way, and suspenseful moments, and the sweet heartbreaks that are a hallmark of Beagle’s work. On the other hand, the shifting sands of the narratives and the varying points of view kept me at a distance from the novel as a whole, and it took me much longer than usual to read all the way through. Looking back, it feels more like an achievement to be admired than a story — or even a set of stories — that I want to return to. Authors often have a different view of their work, and so it is here for me.

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Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan is also a work of many elements, though for a different reason than with The Innkeeper’s Song. Fathomfolk is her fist published book, whereas The Innkeeper’s Song was at least Beagle’s sixth. (His online bibliographies are poorly organized and confusing.) I understand the urge to put a lot into a first novel, and so Chan gives her readers a partial retelling of “The Last Mermaid,” an explication of that story from the villain’s point of view, family intrigues, social climbing, a love story that crosses racial and class lines with the tensions that both of those entail, meditations on integration versus assimilation, refugee stories, commentaries on masks within a marriage, the effects of social hierarchy on children who are too young to understand, climate catastrophe, magic, exploitation of both workers and refugees, the attractions of revolution, high-status people playing at revolution, lower-status people who are not playing but may be getting played, and probably several more that have slipped my mind at the moment.

The city of Tiankawi has survived the drowning of most of the world, and its combination of technology and subtle magic allows it to offer a haven not only to its many citizens but to a limited number of refugees who make their way to the city from poorer settlement. The refugees are all fathomfolk: mermaids, selkies and many more types of persons who can breathe in water and who can, to a greater or lesser extent, transform into some form of sea life. Humans, despite their lack of adaptation to a water-dominated world, hold all of the power in Tiankawi, and will go to great lengths to keep it that way. They are literally higher up in the hierarchy of towers and aerial connections between them; the fathomfolk are down on the lower levels and in the underwater parts of the city.

The story mainly follows Mira, an immigrant to Tiankawi who has made it into the border guard and who is the first of the fathomfolk to be promoted to captain. On the one hand, she benefits from a very high-status marriage (her husband isn’t quite equal to the prince of “The Little Mermaid,” but he’s not far off) but on the other that very marriage thrusts her into intrigues in the city’s upper strata for which her upbringing has given her no preparation at all. Her visible position in the guard means that fathomfolk look up to her, and also hope for favors from her. The visibility also draws unwelcome attention from people who are happy with the status quo and do not want someone from the underclass to succeed.

The book sprawls. There are entanglements when fathomfolk Mira is connected to get arrested; she tries to balance civic patriotism with efforts to reform its class-bound and deeply racist structures. The book lives up to its title in that humans are rarely seen on its pages. Readers hear about humans but spend most of their time among various kinds of fathomfolk. For a book that’s trying for nuanced views of intrigue, social change, reformism and attempted revolution, that leaves the other side a bit flat. There are subplots concerning the magic of the world, the kind of bargains that a seawitch can brew up, and the complications that ensue. Chan spends a fair amount of time showing what the witch thinks that she is doing, and where that leads her. I’m sure that plenty of readers will find the many aspects engrossing, but like The Innkeeper’s Song, the surfeit distanced me, and I was able to set the book aside for weeks at a time before eventually returning. There’s a bang-up finish, and the sequel Tideborn was published in March. The title of the sequel refers to Mira’s idea of a synthesis between the city’s established order and its newcomers; the tideborn are not the fathomfolk of the open sea, but neither are they solely folk of the air. Fathomfolk left many characters in dire straits, but with the possibility of finding a way out.