2022/084: Song for the Basilisk -- Patricia McKillip

She could not talk to birds, or summon monsters; she had no defenses against history. [loc. 3843]

A twisting, dreamlike tale told in McKillip's typically stained-glass, luminous prose, this novel from 1998 has been on my shelves, on and off, for a couple of decades: now, in memoriam, it's a book club read. McKillip's 'Riddlemaster' trilogy was a salvation to me as a teenager, and I read and reread those novels so often that even now I find fragments of McKillip's sentences glimmering in my own writing. For some reason, though, I didn't form similar attachments to any of McKillip's other novels, though in general I've enjoyed them. (Checking my reviews of her work, I see I have read at least one of them twice, with no recognition of the second time being a reread ...)

Song for the Basilisk opens with a massacre, and the sole survivor -- a young boy -- hiding in the ashes. He's taken north to the bards of remote, rocky Luly, and given the name Caladrius 'after the bird whose song means death'. Caladrius, who mostly goes by 'Rook', grows to manhood, sires a son, journeys into the hinterlands ... and eventually, accepting his true name and his fate, to the city of Berylon, where Prince Arioso Pellior, the Basilisk, rules. An opera is planned for the prince's birthday; a hoard of musical scores is discovered, and must be catalogued; a gang of revolutionaries realise there is more to fighting than just waving a sword around; and the Prince's younger daughter falls in love with the new librarian.

Song for the Basilisk features many of my favourite fantasy tropes: blurred identity, music both high (opera!) and low (tavern), revolution, hints of something 'older than human language', vengeance, a mature protagonist ... Yet it didn't quite click and I'm not sure why. Perhaps there were too many intriguing characters -- Caladrius himself, Giulia the musician, Luna Pellior, Hollis, Hexel -- for me to engage fully with any of them. Perhaps some aspects of the story were too oblique, or I missed or skimmed over important elements. (I do think this novel would reward a second reading.) Perhaps the beautiful prose lulled me into a dream-state and I simply accepted each plot development, each change of scene, without considering how it fit into the arc of the novel.

That said, I found the ending very satisfactory, and did not predict the various resolutions: admirable convergence of characters and plot-threads and themes, and much more positivity than expected.