What We’re Reading: Summerlong

Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications, September 2016)

Peter S. Beagle is a treasure of the fantasy field. His novel The Last Unicorn will forever be a seminal fantasy text, and he deserves an award—more awards, actually, since he already has so many—for suffering through what sounds like the worst manager situation ever. Summerlong is his first book in more than a decade, and the anticipation surrounding it was deservedly high. And while the book has moments of Beagle’s old magic—moments that capture and ensorcel, prose more melodic than music and images carved out before your very eyes, perfect and powerful—I confess to finishing this book with more than little disappointment, frustration, and despair.

In Summerlong, we follow Abe and Joanna (a couple for more than 20 years but unmarried) as they meet Lioness Lazos, an enigmatic woman who comes to live in Abe’s garage. But things begin to go a little strange the more Lioness hangs around, and soon her mythic past begins to catch up with her—a mysterious mother and a dangerous husband. Lioness pulls Abe and Joanna (and every minor character, too) into her strange orbit, disrupting their lives, at once bringing magic and chaos to them.

Beagle is at his best in this book when he’s placing his characters and story in the world. The narrative takes place on and around Puget Sound, and Beagle manages to make that drizzly, grey (though, once Lioness shows up, not so grey) world feel totally real. Here he is, doing his thing:

The island’s highest ridges were a ragged, foggy tonsure where only owls and eagles nested, and where a few overgrown dirt paths still opened out into wide lawns and stone houses: last survivors of Gardner’s great lumber days, now inhabited by fourth-generation website designers and financial planners.

Summerlong features a nostalgia and romanticization for a simpler past that is unswerving and unironic. Abe and Joanna always go to the same diner, always sit in the same booth, have a familiar patter constantly running between them. He plays the harmonica and she wants to go kayaking, but alone and in a whale-skin kayak (she settles for something a little more modern, but still). He brews beer and gets romantically and stereotypically lost in the 14^th century while working on his book, and she shoots baskets and goes to the market. There’s a sort of very genuine, very romantic nostalgia here, unapologetic and earnest—Abe and Joanna don’t take themselves too seriously, always joking and laughing about getting old and being crotchety, but there’s another way in which they take themselves totally seriously. This genuine crush on the old and forgotten ways of the world—harmonicas and self-brewed beer, diners where everyone knows your name—oscillates between totally charming and way too much.   

Endings, we all learn, must be surprising and yet inevitable. Summerlong, sadly, features an ending the attentive reader will have seen coming from the early pages of the book—not because the narrative has set us on a course of impending inevitability but because Beagle deals with two narrative engines here: one the unassailable, inflexible myth of Persephone (here personified as Lioness), and the other the frustratingly stock romance between a quippy, old-but-still-good-looking academic and a near-retirement flight attendant anxious from page one to dump the academic and reconnect with her daughter. Yes, of course the academic discovers his deep and profound musical ability with the harmonica, and yes of course the couple stays together for awhile out of sheer convenience, and yes of course it ends when he sleeps with a much younger woman (the sex scene being described, of course, as one of domination and liberty). The story doesn’t earn this ending so much as it screams it at the reader from the very first pages, and the frustration I felt in finishing the book had everything to do with seeing a story that might have been wonderful smothered beneath the weight of a barely-covered myth retelling and a cliched real world narrative.

But here’s the real problem: after the inevitable and unsurprising climax of the book (the first of two, I suppose, though the only real one), which pulls apart the only relationship Beagle has invested any real time into throughout the novel, we’re left with characters who feel out of sorts and relationships that at once need to be meaningful and important but simply can’t be—they’ve been ignored or lightly treated for the previous 150 pages. Joanna has what could be a momentous and important kayaking trip with her daughter Lily, but their troubled relationship was painted with only the broadest of brushes, and so comments from Lily like, “I’m not Outdoorsy Girl, I’m sorry. Let’s just go home, and you can be ashamed of me all you like, I won’t say a word,” come across as flat and clunky, emotionally manipulative or narratively unearned. These on-the-nose statements assure me of the realities of this relationship but they also serve to highlight how little I believe in those realities. If this relationship is earned, if it’s been built over the course of 200 pages, then a statement like that isn’t necessary; I already know. Instead, we’re left with a denouement filled with this kind of emotional telling, and the process of reading it is an often discombobulating one.

Often frustrating and disappointing, Summerlong nevertheless attempts to reinvigorate a favorite theme of Beagle’s: what happens to everyday life when it meets the magical, the unexplainable? How do we live after such experiences? Although Beagle’s newest novel falters at times in its answers to those questions, I remain glad that one of fantasy’s greats is back and publishing novels again.

What new books from favorite authors have you been reading lately, dear reader?