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A review by mafiabadgers
Song for the Basilisk by Patricia A. McKillip
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
First read 01/2025 for the r/Fantasy book bingo (bards square)
I tried to read Jaleigh Johnson's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter (oof ouch my colon) for the bards square, and it went terribly, but I managed to finish this one! Since I picked it up for the bingo, I didn't really know anything going into it, except that Patricia McKillip was one of those writers who's meant to be Very Good. Not merely in the sense that she can come up with a cool worldbuilding idea, or make a particularly twisty plot, but that she can write, and that problems in her books are unlikely to be solved by a bout of convenient violence. She won the Mythopoeic Award four times, which should tell you something.
This was a more or less accurate impression. The plot is a fairly standard tale of the lost heir returning for revenge, but the opera within the book very neatly pokes fun at this whilst lifting the drama to new heights, so it gets a pass. There was more violence than I expected, but it didn't really provide tidy solutions. In fact, the majority of it happened in the background, and mostly to people who'd done nothing to deserve it; the casual brutality was rather shocking after 250 pages of peace and plotting. Good stuff.
The writing was indeed impressive, but at times it definitely seemed to be trying too hard. There were a number of points when it flat-out contradicted itself in an effort to be poetic, like so:
I tried to read Jaleigh Johnson's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter (oof ouch my colon) for the bards square, and it went terribly, but I managed to finish this one! Since I picked it up for the bingo, I didn't really know anything going into it, except that Patricia McKillip was one of those writers who's meant to be Very Good. Not merely in the sense that she can come up with a cool worldbuilding idea, or make a particularly twisty plot, but that she can write, and that problems in her books are unlikely to be solved by a bout of convenient violence. She won the Mythopoeic Award four times, which should tell you something.
This was a more or less accurate impression. The plot is a fairly standard tale of the lost heir returning for revenge, but the opera within the book very neatly pokes fun at this whilst lifting the drama to new heights, so it gets a pass. There was more violence than I expected, but it didn't really provide tidy solutions. In fact, the majority of it happened in the background, and mostly to people who'd done nothing to deserve it; the casual brutality was rather shocking after 250 pages of peace and plotting. Good stuff.
The writing was indeed impressive, but at times it definitely seemed to be trying too hard. There were a number of points when it flat-out contradicted itself in an effort to be poetic, like so:
She waited for Brio Hood. He came silently, but she heard him before he wanted her to. His shadow, she might have told him, brushed too carelessly across stone. Still, she did not move before he spoke. Then she turned, smiling at him, the brittle collection of bone and cold shriveled thought that no one ever noticed, even after it was too late.
Please don't try to convince me that he's never noticed when you've just told me that someone's noticed him. I'm not quite that thick. The opening was also wildly confusing; being the first pages of a fantasy novel, pretty much anything can happen. If the book tells me that the ash is looking around the room, then crawled out of the hearth, I will believe that this is some sort of sentient ash spirit. If it's actually narrating a traumatised child perceiving himself as dead/ash, I'm going to have to go back and reread it once I figure this out. It would have worked in the middle of the book, once a precedent had been set, but right off the bat? It's too poetic, too fast. That said, the magic was incredibly vague in a really good way, so that I was never quite sure what it was going to do, or what it might be capable of. A lot of the time, the characters didn't know either. It felt very appropriately magical.
I didn't have high hopes for this bingo square, because I worried that a fantasy writer doing a bards novel would produce pretty hackneyed stuff, and it was rather hackneyed, but I'm happy to have read it all the same. Music was given an appropriately large role without ever feeling like it characterised the whole setting, and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Caladrius and his adult son Hollis. The book mostly centred around men, but the female characters were varied and interesting, particularly the rather enigmatic Luna Arioso. It wasn't by any means a horny book, but the world had very relaxed attitudes towards sex, which is an uncommon combination in fantasy novels, particularly when the society created remains misogynistic ("I'll find you a husband, to keep you out of trouble," says one character.) Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading more McKillip.
I didn't have high hopes for this bingo square, because I worried that a fantasy writer doing a bards novel would produce pretty hackneyed stuff, and it was rather hackneyed, but I'm happy to have read it all the same. Music was given an appropriately large role without ever feeling like it characterised the whole setting, and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Caladrius and his adult son Hollis. The book mostly centred around men, but the female characters were varied and interesting, particularly the rather enigmatic Luna Arioso. It wasn't by any means a horny book, but the world had very relaxed attitudes towards sex, which is an uncommon combination in fantasy novels, particularly when the society created remains misogynistic ("I'll find you a husband, to keep you out of trouble," says one character.) Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading more McKillip.