Gardner Island off the coast of Seattle is home to a quirky,
aging couple: Joanna Delvecchio, an energetic flight attendant; and Abe
Aronson, a gruff professor emeritus. Once a wild pair, they have settled into a
comfortable life with each other, their hobbies, and their shared concern for
Joanna’s passionate, adult daughter, Lily. Into their vividly human world steps
Lioness Lazos, an unobtrusive yet utterly captivating young waitress who
appears at the local diner as though she has always been there. Upon learning
she has no home, no possessions beyond her dress and her bicycle, Joanna and
Abe offer her a place to stay. Lioness has a way of brightening everything she
touches, and even the sea and the seasons of Gardner Island seem to offer her special
hospitality. Yet throughout the impossible summer she brings, the horizon hints
at trailing shadows of the past from which she has escaped only temporarily.
Beagle’s special mastery is his ability to step into any of
a variety of genres and pull from them the fundamental elements of human
experience. In this book there is a mythos I found vaguely reminiscent of Neil
Gaiman, though subtler, as Lioness is kept a mystery for the better part of the
novel. The human interweaves with the eternal in a way that is not immediately
noticeable, although it does draw our attention. Fantasy takes a back seat;
more entrancing than the supernatural details are the quirks of each character
that make the reader gradually fall in love with each one. Joanna shoots hoops
to burn off energy and is torn between motherly and disdainful feelings toward
her junior flight attendants. Abe annoys everyone with his harmonica and loses
himself in primary accounts of thirteenth-century politics. Lily hides her
feelings from her mother and endlessly falls for narcissistic lovers who are
even more lost than she.
This effect of genre illustrates a crossroads I’ve reached
in my own writing, and one that factors significantly into the worldbuilding of
speculative fiction. For my whole life, my own fantasy stories have been set in
medieval or pre-medieval civilizations, following the mold of my favorite
authors, including Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin, Donaldson, and Jacques. This
stereotype of setting is important because it evokes the connection to the
eternal we seek in fantasy; if the story feels like our myths, it feels that
much more eternal. Yet few authors can peddle fluently in the human details of
premodern civilizations, even if they’re classical scholars or geniuses of the
human condition. Perhaps I can invent a profound character, but if I don’t know
how she brushes her teeth in a kingdom without manufactured toothpaste, I’m
missing an aspect of her that she accesses every day. I can make up a solution,
but without good information I’m liable to fall short.
Thus one role of fantasy is to bring the modern into the
realm of the eternal rather than the other way around. This is nothing new;
Shakespeare’s lovers in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream did not go into the ancient past to encounter Titania and
Oberon. They merely went into the woods. The building of ancient-seeming worlds
totally separate from Earth is actually primarily Tolkienian in origin, and he
himself was actually trying to retroactively invent a mythology for England,
one better to his tastes than the Arthurian legend with more Welsh and French
blood than anything else. Many have followed less grandly in Tolkien’s
footsteps, including most recently George R. R. Martin. Others have had other
approaches. Le Guin, like Beagle himself in The
Last Unicorn, minimalizes the minutiae of her worlds in a way that
emphasizes their grandness. Savant-like authors like Susanna Clarke are able to
weave pastiches of specific, real civilizations. But Beagle’s method of
painting Summerlong like a photograph
of gods dancing in my own backyard is one that increasingly tempts me to try it
out.
The bulk of the story is character-driven rather than
plot-driven, but when there is plot, it happens all at once, with hurricane
force. A signature of Beagle’s is that change is irrevocable and when it
happens, nothing ever goes back to normal. Even despite knowing this from page
one, I was unprepared for just what the changes were and how they came about.
Summerlong is one
of Beagle’s more adult works (there is little violence but sexual themes
throughout); beyond this, I recommend it to anyone looking to be entranced by a
medium-length novel. The prose, though poetic, is extremely accessible in a
Fitzgeraldian way. And the true theme, which shows its face only after the
plot-twisting climax, is one that none of us can live without.
