Rhymer by Gregory Frost (A Review)

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Today, I'm posting a straightforward book review of a fantasy novel I admire a great deal... 

 

Rhymer by Gregory Frost (Tor Books)

 

Gregory Frost’s Rhymer is easily the best thing I’ve read in the past year. It’s a… and already I’m having trouble finding the right descriptors. Initially, it looks to be a Celtic fantasy, with Thomas the Rhymer waging a one-man war against all Faerie. But the elves, it turns out, are an invading alien species from another dimension, so it’s actually science fiction. Oh, and because Frost keeps the historical events consistent with those we know, it’s also a secret history. And the elves themselves are straight out of a horror novel. But it could also be that it’s actually an alternate history.

 

Let me start over again.

 

Thomas Lindsay Rimor de Erceldoune is mad, to begin with. Mad and cursed with the gift of prophecy, he is clearly a precursor to or avatar of Tom O’Bedlam. One night, the Queen of Faerie comes hunting with her elf-troop and takes True Thomas’s brother away with her as a sacrifice to the Teind. On a whim, she cures Tom of his madness (but not his visions, which take the form of epileptic seizures and prophesies he cannot understand). This, as it turns out, is the biggest mistake she will ever make.

 

The newly-rational protagonist learns of the elven/alien plot to first reverse-terraform and then take over our planet. Being immortal, they can take their time. Being shape-shifters, they can assume powerful positions in human society. To oppose them, Tom must first learn how to use weapons. And before that, because even a hero must eat, he must learn a trade, that of stone-cutter.  

 

Everyone knows the pleasures we expect from an action-adventure novel and Frost delivers them most ably. But he’s also too canny a writer to give you exactly what you’re expecting. Through all the many twists and turns of plot, he carefully avoids those that have grown trite and predictable through overuse. And though True Thomas is the hero his world needs—experiences he’d much rather have avoided have made him immortal and given him the elven power of glamour—he’s also a convincing human being in a world that is recognizably our own. He has friends and family and loyalties and, in the course of events, a wife.

 

This wife is Janet of the green kirtle who, in the Child ballad “Tam Lin” (Thomas has many names in the course of his long life), saves her own true love from the Fairy Queen, and she is one of the most engaging aspects of this novel. Not only is she stalwart and capable enough to rescue Thomas from the darkest night of his soul but she is convincing as his spouse as well. They two form a working marriage, a union of peers whose support for each other strengthens them both. And how often do you see that in a fantasy novel?

 

There is so much to praise about Rhymer! All the characters in it ring true. The stonemasons sound like working class men. (When Thomas’ mentor, Alpin Waldroup, is asked in what battle he was injured, he replies, “Has it a name? I never heard it.”) The elves are everything that’s wrong about aristocrats, and then some.  The worldbuilding, both of Faerie and the Scottish Borders, is exemplary. I could go on and on. Suffice it to say that Gregory Frost has done the hard work that is the making of a great book and reimagined everything about it afresh. This is one hell of a satisfying novel.

 

Much more could be said. But I will stop here, before I drown you in a sea of superlatives.

 

In the way of such fantasies, there are two more volumes on their way. Rhymer: Hoode, in which True Thomas assumes the guise of a certain bow-carrying outlaw, available now, and a third book, which I understand will be set in Elizabethan times, will follow soon. As of this writing, I am midway through the second and avid to read number three.

 

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