Editorial Reviews: |
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Peter Beagle has made an exemplary career in the fantasy field by not doing what was expected of him; until now, he has always resisted sequels or even doing the same sort of thing twice. The Innkeeper's Song was his first and only tale set in anything that resembled the worlds of conventional heroic fantasy, although its games with techniques of narration, its sense of the incalculable wild costs of magic and its bitter-sweet romances took it well away from being quite what the audience for such books would expect. Somewhat to his own surprise, in The Magician of Karakosk he has produced, something that almost resembles a sequel: a book of tales in which one features characters from the earlier book and all of which are set in its world. Furthermore, all of them are tales about story--the way that the telling of tales and the knowledge that any adventure that is survived will become a tale. This consciousness means that when Beagle talks of a pedlar kidnapped by dying giants, a peasant stolen to be a queen whose mother hires a thief to steal her back or a magician forced to teach an evil ruler the spells she will misuse, we can never entirely rely on expectation--these are stories which fly off the handle. In the end it is a matter of how he tells them--gorgeously: "She told it in almost the same words that the girl had used, but in a voice like muffled drums and like sails snapping in the wind. Now playful, now resonant with action, now shivering with pity or wonder or rage, now briefly flowering into song, her voice built and kept a hypnotic rhythm that held the girl absolutely still even after the tale was over". --Roz Kaveney
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