Harder to Tame than All the Beasts
A review of Patricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.
Personal rating: 5/5
Recommended if you like:
- A Wizard of Earthsea
- The Tombs of Atuan
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is, to me, a sister of the Earthsea series: a peaceful, growing, balanced world of nature, humans, beasts, lands, and rivers, populated by bards singing in tender, elegantly-paced language; the timeless story unravels itself, in which time flows like a winding river, often slow, other times speedy, sometimes fierce like a waterfall, never linear. Like A Wizard of Earthsea, it is about 60 thousand words in length, great for a soothing afternoon of reading that might change your life.
The protagonist, Sybel, a young woman with the ability to call legendary beasts with their names, lives alone on Mountain Eld, fully immersed in a world of magic. Until one day, a man on horseback sends a newborn infant to her doorstep, asking her to take care of him. But little did she know, that this one single act would be a strange knot in a fabric being woven, bound to propagate its quirk through all future that is to come, as she must be involved in the human world below, its love, and hate, and history, and fate.
What's harder to tame than all the powerful beasts in the world? More elusive than the boar of wisdom, sharper than the falcon of insight, fiercer the dragon of dominance? What can you see, marvel at, and feel in every hair and bone, but absolutely cannot catch with force — what kind of strange beast must you wait for its arrival, when you least expect it?
This is what Sybel is determined, destined to find. And you must too: some say, this will be the most important task of your lifetime.
Like Earthsea, Forgotten Beasts starts very slowly, and a large number of readers might find it hard to enjoy. But, like all great classics, Forgotten Beasts is not defined by its plot only: the meaning is present in the prose, and often in the surroundings that look like background decoration. Just like a cold hearth is never simply a pile of rocks, and a mind-control magic never simply a plot point — the beasts are never simply "fantasy livestock". This is a book that you must read with your soul: open the book; open your soul; and sense what every plot point and being is representing, between the lines. If you are familiar with how the human psyche works, you might be able to see the ending when you are halfway through the story. However, I am still strongly pleasantly surprised by what happened near (at) the end, which made me decide to rate this book as a 5 instead of a 4.
Give it a try, dear reader. Feel it with your heart.