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language: English
country: USA
year: 1979
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Riddle-Master trilogy, #3
dates read: 29.10.16-30.10.16, 6.1.18-8.1.18, 15.4.19-19.4.19, 30.5.20, 2.6.22-3.6.22, 24.11.25, 27.11.25
Harpist in the Wind is the third and final book of Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddle-Master trilogy, and it has some of the most evocative and also the most emotional sequences in the whole trilogy. it is gorgeous and devastating and a fitting conclusion to the series.
Harpist picks up a few weeks after the end of Heir of Sea and Fire, as Morgon and Raederle set out in search of answers to the riddles that threaten the entirety of the High One’s realm: the identity of the shape-changers who have been pursuing Morgon and tormenting Raederle with a power she both fears and desires; the unknown histories that are determinedly exhuming themselves across the continent; the identity of the High One; the meaning of the stars on Morgon’s face.
to a significant extent this is a book about love, understood in an expansive sense as that which binds us to other people and to land. it is a book about the ways that love can be a cruel binding even when there is beauty in it (I am thinking of Dar Williams: “I heard love can fall so hard / it can bury a kingdom”). we can be bound by love even when we do not want to be, even when we would desperately like to shatter the binding.
it is also a book about history: I am always struck by Yrth’s observation about the war in Ymris:
[Astrin] is beginning to think that the king’s army and the rebel army are not fighting the same war…
perhaps even more starkly than the first two books, it is about the dangers of historical ignorance and of seeing the past as a closed book: for all that the College of Riddle-Masters enjoins its students to “answer the unanswered riddle” — an injunction that carries Morgon forward beyond hope through the entire series — it is also clear that part of what is at stake is precisely the containment of history within its walls. if we understand history as (only) that which lives in books we will be unable to reckon with its continuing effects until they are standing before us with a sword drawn.
this is the seventh time I have read these books, and each time I am struck by new things. I was struck this time through Harpist by how much happens in this book. obviously there are things I remember, things that are burned into my brain forever — much of the humor of the early part of the book, for example, and Raederle’s dry humor continuing throughout (“I flew.”). but there are things I had almost forgotten: I vividly remember the pursuit to Erlenstar — indelibly linked in my mind with WHYTE’s “Fairich” — but had forgotten the close encounter inside the mountain, for example. what a delight to be, still, continually surprised — and, precisely, delighted — by a book I have read so many times, a book that means so much to me.
I say “how much happens”, but one of the things I most value about this book is that even as events escalate rapidly and dramatically towards its devastating climax it still manages to make so much space for its protagonists to breathe. it would have been so easy for Morgon and Raederle’s trip to Lungold to be full of Things Happening; obviously, in fact, things do Happen — but also Morgon and Raederle are riding a dusty trading road into the backlands in the early summer heat and discomfort, annoyed with each other and with their fellow travelers. it is a terrible road trip independently of the dramatic Incidents that disrupt it, and McKillip gives herself the space to let us see it as a terrible road trip. one of her greatest strengths across her body of work is the way she moves between the everyday and the fantastic, and Harpist really highlights this — bringing us, in a way, full-circle, back to the beginning of The Riddle-Master of Hed and Tristan pouring spoiled milk over Morgon and Eliard when they trample her rosebushes.
and that’s the trilogy. compelling characters; gorgeous prose; an incisive exploration of the relationships between past, present, and future. read Patricia McKillip; read these books.
moods: adventurous, emotional, hopeful, reflective