How much the final published version of The Folk of the Air may owe to such books I couldn't say, but Beagle has captured the style of the subgenre perfectly. MacAvoy, and Brisingamen by Diana Paxson. If The Folk of the Air had been published five years ago, it would by now be seen as a foundation stone in the currently flourishing subgenre of contemporary urban fantasy - books like Moonheart by Charles de Lint, Tea with the Black Dragon by R.A.

And then enters, stage right, the magical subplot. (The League is introduced to Farrell and to the reader in a marvelously subliminal way.) Both the real Society and the fictitious League consist of people who like to dress up in medieval costumes and improvise at play-acting battles and other courtly behavior.

It's several years after 'Lila', and Farrell is making his first visit in a long time to his old stomping grounds in Avicenna, California, a city which the author describes as 'based on Berkeley, when I felt like it.' (He felt like it most of the time.) There Farrell has new encounters with old friends (there's a bit of sixties nostalgia about this book), and gradually drifts into a group called the League for Archaic Pleasures, which is to the Society for Creative Anachronism as Avicenna is to Berkeley. The main character is Joe Farrell, who first appeared as the hero of a short story called 'Lila the Werewolf' (which may be found in the omnibus volume The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. 'Gentle' is not a word I would use to describe this book, but it has a full measure of Beagle's humor, imagination, and eye for the strange. I didn't see it until December 27th, but it is easily the best new fantasy novel I read last year. The other reason for taking note is its quality. So the publication of The Folk of the Air is an Event, no doubt about it, which makes this book notable on two counts. ISBN 0345337824, hc, $16.95.ĭare I call this book Peter Beagle's Silmarillion? This is the novel he's been writing off and on for eighteen years, ever since The Last Unicorn was published, while fans of that gentle, slightly wacky fantasy, and the even gentler and wackier A Fine and Private Place waited patiently.

The folk of the air by peter s beagle