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Patricia McKillip
Whenever a wonderful writer dies, one of my reactions is always, selfishly, Damn, we won’t be getting any more books from them. And Patricia McKillip’s books are amazing. They seem genuine stories from Elsewhere, told by the bards of strange and magical places. Her worlds are more than just a scattering of information, a description of food here and a fact about a king there. They are complete, of a piece, each part adding to the whole and creating lands that are utterly believable.
She wrote like a poet, in gorgeous, jewel-like sentences. Often while reading her books I would want to stop and savor a perfect phrase, even while another part of me was urging me to keep going, to find out what happened next. Here are wizards, calling animals from legend to be part of their collection, in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld: “He sent the powerful, silent thread of his call into the deep, thick forests on the other side of Eld, where no man had gone and returned, and caught like a salmon the red-eyed, white-tusked Boar Cyrin, who could sing ballads like a harpist, and who knew the answer to all riddles save one… The blue-eyed Falcon Ter, who had torn to pieces the seven murderers of the wizard Aer, shot like a thunderbolt out of the blue sky onto Ogam’s shoulder…” If that doesn’t take your breath away, well, I can’t help you.
Her characters are both heroic and down-to-earth, a hard trick to pull off. Her wise men and women are actually wise; they speak with a hard-won understanding of the world, their advice matters. Another hard trick to pull off, you might think, except that it wasn’t a trick. Anyone who created these characters had to be wise in herself.
So when I met her, I had an outsized view of the person who wrote these books. I knew, of course, that most writers do not walk around uttering gnomic phrases; in fact, they seem mainly to talk about how awful their publishers are. And for the most part she seemed commonsensical enough. But every so often I would catch a glimpse of the writer behind the novels. There was the house she shared with David Lunde, filled with strange and glittering objects, and her friends, mostly poets and musicians, none of whom seemed inclined to talk about publishers. And once, when we were complaining how slowly our writing was going, she wrote me, “Link by link is chain mail made,” changing something dull and plodding into a beautiful and necessary process.
I remained in awe of her, though I hope she never knew it. Still, being wise, she probably did.
