Title The Folk of the Air Series --- Author Peter S. Beagle Cover Art Romas Publisher Del Rey - 1988 First Printing Del Rey - 1988 Category Urban Fantasy Warnings None Main Characters Farrell, Ben, Julie, Aiffe, Nicholas Bonner, Sia Main Elements Witches, goddesses Website ---

When Farrell returned to Avicenna after years away, he found his oldest friend Ben living with an older woman, Sia. Ben was also mixed up with the League for Archaic Pleasures - a group that playacted at medieval chivalry.

Nothing was quite as it seemed. Some members of the League were not just playacting - they sometimes were the medieval characters they portrayed. Sia's house had rooms that appeared and disappeared. And Sia had enormous powers when she chose to exert her will.

Whie attending a League revel with his girlfriend Julie, Farrell saw the young self-proclaimed witch Aiffe conjure Nicholas Bonner out of the air - and Bonner had been sent to limbo five centuries before!

Bonner and Aiffe made malicious chaos of the League's annual mock war. But Bonner really sought the defeat and end of Sia.

Gradually, Farrell realized that Bonner was an evil greater than the modern world had ever known. Only Sia could stand against it. But Sia retreated to a room that could not be and hid in illusion.

What if you think you are pretending to dress as wizards and goddesses and then found out, that in fact, there might be a might more truth to it than you expected? Farrell is the classic wandering minstrel, he even plays a lute in modern day California, never staying long in one place, trading odd jobs even more often. But this time what he has come across is a little stranger than normal (and normal has included the occasional drug orgy).

While dressed in medieval garb he witnesses a teenage girl summon...someone...something?...an young man who, isn't, and Farrell realizes this. It doesn't help that he's staying with his high school friend Ben who has shacked up with a very unusual woman. She is large, heavy, old...and yet incredibly stricking, and very, very powerful. Not just in personality but it seems, in something else as well.

The first time I read this book years ago, it weirded me out so much I was quite disturbed by what I had read. Now I'm older, and I've read much weirder stuff so I didn't have quite the same reaction. But it was still...different. Beagle's writing is beautiful, same as in The Last Unicorn. We manages to weave a magical atmosphere from hints and guesses, nothing concrete, just senses and thoughts. Even the mundane bits sound like the are part of a tale told by a bard. And this is I'm sure partly why it won an award.

However I still found I didn't really like the book. The Last Unicorn whisked me away, but this book, well it was still kind of disturbing. There's trantric sex, and aging goddess losing her powers, and the fact that we're dealing with gods, they can't be judged by human standards so what is good or evil in such a context? There were moments when I was reading it I was determined it was time to give the book away. And then there were moments where something so incredibly surreal but beautiful (or dark) occurs and I'd think, you know, this is a lovely piece of literature.

Since I'm having trouble figuring out my own thoughts I looked through Goodreads reviews to pick some out:

"I’m not sure what I just read. But I know that it was beautifully written and intensely satisfying."

"A flawed masterpiece. Although parts of the book were less engaging than I might have hoped for, most of it sang to me."

"Sometimes the plot doesn't show up until half-way through the book and that's fine."

"This book is like laying in a lazy river, slowly being pulled downstream, and watching the sun wink through the tree branches overhead. It's a lovely journey."

Although I will add, that when you look away from the sun shining through the trees, you will find dark things peering at you from the bushes. This story had an under current of true darkness, of evil. Even the good guys, like Ben, could do bad things simply because he took pleasure from it at the expense of the life and sanity of another.

But the "bard in modern America" was a theme I really enjoyed, and yeah, I'm probably going to keep the book. Maybe a third read will result in yet another different reaction to it. In fact maybe I'll try to read some other examples of Beagle's work in between to compare. I have several on my towering to-read list...

I'll end this with a quote since I think it kind of sums up the surrealistic, poetic, lyrical, weirdness that is this book. Here Joe has asked Sia about herself, this a woman in whose house he is living, who shuffles about in shapeless dresses and slippers, who he sits down to eat breakfast with every morning:

I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, and young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees. Since you ask.