Book Review: The Innkeeper's Song

Peter S. Beagle
1993
Awards: Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This is one of those fantasy novels set in a medieval-style place and time in which technology has not progressed beyond swords and horses and carts, and there are wizards and strange mythical beasts. And it is well told: very human and accessible, occasionally action-packed, somewhat scary, a little poetic, and a little bit cute.
   
The story starts out with a pair of young lovers: a girl, Lukassa, and a boy, Tikat. The two are billing and cooing on a bridge over a river near their village when the bridge railing suddenly gives way and Lukassa falls into the river and drowns.

The boy, Tikat, is disconsolate, weeping by the river all the next night and day. But then a mysterious warrior woman rides up, raises his dead girlfriend out of the river, brings her back to life, puts her on her horse, and takes off.

Tikat rushes after them and chases them for miles and miles and miles, never catching up. Along the way he encounters a group of bandits who are harassing an old man. He rescues the old man from the bandits and they travel for a while together. The old man turns out, however, not only to be an associate of the warrior woman who raised Tikat’s girlfriend from the dead, but also a mystical beast himself, whose natural form is that of a red fox. Promising to leave a trail that Tikat can follow to find them all, he turns into his fox self and runs off to join the women.

One of the nice techniques Beagle uses is that he switches his narrator every chapter. Each one is narrated by whichever character is most appropriate to tell that part of the story, and every character gets a chance to be the narrator at least once (including the Fox, who has some of the best narration in the whole book).

This means that while we’re following Tikat chasing after the women, we also get to find out what’s going on with the women as they race across the countryside. It turns out the warrior woman, who is named Lal, is the former student of a wizard. On the road, they join up with a woman named Nyateneri, who is another student of the same wizard and who is just as much of a bad-ass warrior as Lal. The two of them are desperately searching for their former teacher; they believe he is somewhere in the area, hiding from a terrible rival wizard who wants to kill him, and they are determined to defend him.

The three women eventually stop at a crossroads inn. The fat, cantankerous innkeeper, Karsh, has been up to now perfectly happy whiling away his days running his inn and beating up his staff, including his teenage stable boy and semi-adopted son Rosseth. But these three women are destined to turn Karsh’s and Rosseth’s lives upside down—and the inn’s staff are destined to help the three women in their goals (albeit mostly unintentionally).

Lal, Nyateneri, and the Fox manage to find the old wizard hiding in the nearby town and they bring him back to the inn to live while trying to gather their strength for the coming confrontation. They have several smaller adventures including the killing of two men sent to kill Nyateneri, a fairly lengthy episode of gender-bending group sex, and an ill-fated journey to find the wizard’s nemesis, until finally it all culminates in an enormous, inn-destroying wizard-on-wizard face-off across both physical and metaphysical planes.

Sometimes I think there are two ways storytelling can be good. If the author does a great job creating and executing a riveting overall story arc, it doesn’t matter so much if the details aren’t perfectly described. And, on the other hand, if the author keeps our interest with entertaining conversations and richly detailed scene-setting, it can be okay to have a relatively basic, less inherently exciting plot.

(If an author can do both, of course, the book has the potential to be truly amazing, rather than just good—but that seems to be relatively rare.)

This book of the second type. The overall plot is simple and not all that exciting in itself. But Beagle keeps us reading along nicely with his colorful and detailed atmospheric, emotional, and scenic descriptions, as well as the interactions between the characters. And the strength of some of the main characters (Lal, Nyateneri, the Fox) helps to distract us from how tiresome some of the supporting characters (Lukassa, Tikat) can be.

He keeps us reading along nicely, that is, until the final showdown—which starts out with a lot of suspenseful promise and then blurs out into an ill-defined and overblown abstract supernatural scene that reflects none of the detailed physical grounding so present in the rest of the book.