Persevere, hopefully you will get into it. The emphasis is definitely more on the characters and the prose than the world building with this one and I thought it was a masterpiece.
Here are some unappreciative comments on a first reading of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld that people can read if interested. I might not have been fair to the book because some things put me off so much.
*******SPOILERS**********
Why does the title call the creatures "forgotten"? Everyone in the story seems acquainted with them, by reputation at least, so far as I remember. Does McKillip mean that
we, readers in the (then) 20th century, have forgotten them? Also, is the Blammor/Rommalb a "beast"? But it seems to be one of the members of Sybel's gathering of creatures, at least eventually.
One of the things that put me off this author before was the names. "Eld" is the name of a realm, or a shortened name of one (Eldwold), but of course it is an old or poetic word meaning "long ago" -- "Of eld it was told that," etc. Is McKillip deliberately playing with that? if so, it compromises the self-consistency of that world to use the word intending a modern English meaning too, I suppose.
Other names put me off as well -- Sybel (sybil), Drede (dread), etc. This is the same author who wrote a book about the Riddle-Master of Hed (head; I guess riddles make you scratch your head). Other names seemed freely borrowed from Tolkien: the royal city of Mondor, the Mirkon Forest. However, Lomar, in Chapter 6, is a name I remember from the Weird Tales circle.
Lynette sounds like a country-western singer's name, to my ear.
There was much dialogue and it was rarely impressive. The characters are supposed to inhabit a remote and beautiful realm of magical perils, but they talk like this: "How did you talk her into that?" ..... "I never wanted anything special before" (pp. 110, 114 of my paperback edition; both from Chapter 7). And they start to say something and then break off, like characters in banal popular fiction.
The use of similes, usually with
like, was really obtrusive; I found myself anticipating the next one, like dreading the next cough of a nearby fellow bus rider when you are trying to read. And I felt that I was constantly being reminded that the book was by a woman because there was so much in it about people's hair and about their clothes.
It didn't seem to me that the core story had to be a fantasy. The magical animals appear (off-stage) to break up what would have been a worse war, but otherwise it doesn't seem to me that they are all that important. The core story seems to be Sybel's love of her foster-son, her developing feelings for her good suitor and then husband, Coren, and her outrage over her "violation" by Drede, which makes her want revenge at whatever cost to anyone, even alienating Coren. Turns out that during much of the time she was plotting Drede's demise, he was already dead. At the end of the story, she and Coren are reunited, she receives his forgiveness. Very well, but did this story demand embodiment as a fantasy? It seems a story much like this one could have been cast as a realistic story, since, for me at least, on a first reading, the author did not have the imaginative power needed for excellent fantasy.
But I have to question my reading -- or perhaps misreading. The book won the World Fantasy Award. More significantly to me, it prompted my favorite teacher from undergraduate days, after I had my degree, to send me a postcard -- the only time he did so -- commending the book to me and claiming it "flies in company" with
A Wizard of Earthsea, George MacDonald's
Lilith, and Charles Williams's
All Hallows' Eve -- very high praise indeed. Maybe I'd be more impressed on a second reading... but I don't expect to give it that attention. I guess I don't much like fantasy, the modern publishers' genre, though some fantasy is about as important to me as a book can be.
