Standalone Group Read - August - Song of the Beast by Carol Berg

Brutal imprisonment has broken Aidan McAllister. His voice is silent, his hands ruined, his music that once offered beauty and hope to war-torn Elyria destroyed. The god who nurtured his talent since boyhood has abandoned him. But no one ever told him his crime. To discover the truth, he must risk his hard-bought freedom to unlock the mind of his god and the heart of his enemy.

This is an early Carol Berg novel, but features her trademark deep characterization and interesting worldbuilding- and protagonist torture (Berg does not make things easy for her characters in any way).

What the blurb doesn't mention is that there is also an interesting, dark take on dragon riders- and the mystery of why Aidan was branded a traitor and imprisoned is interlinked with the dragons. There are other characters the blurb doesn't mention as well, like Lara, a woman who was badly burned when she attempted to become a dragon rider.

It's one of the first of hers I read, and I'm interested to re-read it- as the topic indicates, this is a standalone book, so it does end in one volume.

Loved this book - Berg is one of my favorite authors. She's never predictable with her plots.

I remember liking this one, perhaps I should re-read it at some point...

If I can get a copy of this I'll join, but it probably won't be before next month.

I do own a copy of this, and always thought it needed a sequel. I haven't read it for some time, and will happily re-read it. But it won't be until September.

>3 zjakkelien: >4 Sakerfalcon: >5 reading_fox: Maybe I should just move this one to September? :)

Well, my copy arrived today. Move this one to September and I'll have time to read it!

>7 jillmwo: Consider it September! Unfortunately I can't change the topic title now since there are replies, boo.

September bump! Hoping to start this one over the long weekend, maybe

I've got it sitting on the couch beside me with that very same plan!

I've started this and am really enjoying it so far. Some authors would have made Aidan too angsty, given what he has been through, but Berg restrains herself which I greatly appreciate.

I wish she hadn't used the male pronoun to refer to the non-gendered race. It makes the book seem very male dominated.

Berg's writing is so absorbing, I have a hard time putting this one down when I pick it up.

>11 Sakerfalcon: On the contrary, I'm about four chapters in, and it's... just too much to me at this point.

What's happened to Aidan is genuinely horrible, but some of the embroidery on it is straining my credulity at this point- specifically everyone important to him getting rounded up and executed in front of him? What benefit does that have? Aidan is widely-known enough that his sudden absence will already be noticed, and there's no specific crime that he's being made an example of for to the public- plus, if he and he alone is the Dragon Speaker, it seems like he's the only one they'd have to keep away from dragons, so murdering a prominent musician and whole merchant clan seems like it would just ruin relationships with those groups without any real benefit to the King.

It just seems like evil because evil- maybe some of the revelations later on about the nature of Aidan's "crime" will give it more context?

Completely agreed on the pronoun issue, though. I was quite uncomfortable with the exposition on their non-sexual-dimorphism being framed as "as people who try to assault them have discovered, they really aren't men or women!" too...

>12 sandstone78: I agree that what happened to Aidan was awful (and specifically that the event you mention was OTT and unnecessary for plot purposes); I meant that his narrative voice could have been made very woe-is-me and self-pitying in purple prose, which Berg resisted. Instead he is ... not detached, but focused more on moving forward than dwelling on his mistreatment.

I've now finished the book and will try to share some initial thoughts on it. I've put spoiler tags round possible spoilers as well as actual, just to be safe.

Overall, I lost some of my enthusiasm as the book progressed. It felt as though the action and character development slowed down about 2/3 of the way through and although it recovered for the ending, I couldn't recover the level of engagement I felt early on. I don't think the change of narrators helped - they were not distinct enough from Aidan's voice for me to remember that they'd changed, and so to me it felt like an authorial device for conveying information that didn't fit into Aidan's pov, not a deeper exploration of those characters.

The portrayal of the Elhim remained unconvincing to me. I never felt as though they were anything other than human men, apart from when Berg would tell us something to remind us - we weren't shown any real differences.

It took me a while to warm to Lara, the only main female character, perhaps because of the lack of a distinctive voice for her, as I mentioned above. She did become more complex, but I felt distanced from her most of the time. And I never felt the chemistry between her and Aidan, perhaps because both characters just tell us their feelings rather than us observing the growing love through their interactions.

I thought the dragons were excellent, not anthropomorphised at all, so neither good nor evil, just needing to be free to live according to their nature. The use of "beast" in the title was very appropriate.

I guess the main theme of the book is that of good intentions leading to evil deeds and how they spiral out of control to poison the future. I have to admit that I wasn't quite convinced that the villain would have chosen to compound his earlier evil by carrying out the possibly-even-more-evil plan in the novel - could anyone be that stupid and delusional? His refusal to believe the guy who has actually heard the truth from the dragon's mouth just didn't ring true to me and seemed like a poor reason for carrying out such a complicated scheme.

Berg's writing is always beautiful and this book is no exception; her prose is a pleasure to read, but in this case that was something of a weakness given its unvarying quality and tone. Aidan is a strong protagonist but the other characters didn't quite measure up, for me - although I really liked Caillie who sadly is killed early on Overall this wasn't as good a read for me as the first book of the Lighthouse duology or parts 1 and 2 of the Collegia Magica trilogy, although it was a lot better than much of the derivative fantasy writing out there.

I'm looking forward to hearing what others think when you finish reading!

Well, actually, I found the book interesting in that it was artfully constructed. As @JannyWurtz indicated, the woman does know how to plot. I did not see some of the twists and turns coming down the pike. The pacing was slow but well-considered; the language spare. As a creative expression, I give the author full marks because it's clear she knows what she is doing.

What I didn't care for was the emphasis on the experience of pain throughout the entire novel. Aidan, Lara, the dragons are all in constant physical pain, struggling not just against trauma, but physical impairment as well. It's not just mental pain or angst that they're coping with; it's past maiming and either "ghost" or on-going pain. The novel might as well have been about PTSD. In fact, as I think about it, that might well be the subtext. One thing that makes me think that is watching Aidan consistently push away those who might be trying to establish a connection with him (Alfrigg, for example). It is one behavior pattern frequently mentioned in the context of PTSD. The copyright date is 2003, so perhaps that makes sense in terms of historical context. But it's still difficult reading. I found the novel interesting, artfully written and told remarkably well in many ways, but I did not find it to be my idea of an light, engaging read I would periodically have to put it down and walk away in order to get a bit of distance. Yes, it ends on a note of hope, but I feel as if Berg might owe her readers a sequel to this particular standalone novel, just in order to flesh out that hope.

>14 jillmwo: I'm glad you had a more positive reaction to the book than I did, at least from a technical point of view. Berg certainly is an excellent writer, and I wanted to like this book more than I did.

I think your comments about the importance of pain are very pertinent. It continues to be a strong element in the later books of hers that I've read. In the Lighthouse books the protagonist Valen is tormented by his addiction to a strong drug; his longing for it is never far from his thoughts or his body. And one of the main characters in the Collegia Magica trilogy has a physical handicap, while other characters experience extreme physical duress, if not outright torture, as well. I haven't read any of her earliest books to know whether the theme occurs in them too or if it was indeed a reaction to 9/11. As I said above, I appreciate that Berg never lets her characters fall into "woe-is-me" self-pitying monologues (a la Mercedes Lackey, for example) to manipulate the reader's emotions, though given the hardships they've faced I might be inclined to give Berg's characters a break if they did!

Whoops... I actually finished this one the last weekend in September, but only just now realized I never posted about it! This one definitely starts out feeling almost grimdark in tone like Berg's Transformation and sequels- things Go Wrong for Aidan, at the worst possible moments, and it can get to be _too much_- sometimes I had to stop and read something else for a little bit.

However, like @Sakerfalcon mentions, there's a point part of the way in where this changes- the focus shifts to unraveling the history and nature of the dragons, and despite the introduction of multiple POVs which would presumably leave even our first-person protagonist at risk, I started feeling like all of the characters were perfectly safe as Berg needed all of the pieces to be in place for her conclusion. As it happened, for most of the rest of the book, Aidan is now a mastermind, and he came up with increasingly intricate long-shot plans that had _every opportunity_ to legitimately Go Wrong, and yet for the most part _everything_ went off without a hitch.

I was bothered by the lack of female characters- almost every female character mentioned is either a. dead before the story begins (or within the first chapter, sigh, the "whore with a heart of gold" whose only function is to show how good the hero is when he saves her from rape and then to show how evil the villains are when they kill her off- to be frank, I still don't know the purpose of killing all those people in Aidan's backstory, and why the Dragonriders never faced any consequences for it, especially at the end when they were sort of over a barrel), or b. a minor male character's nameless wife, used to give us the flavor of the particular culture (Dragonrider wives are X! Noble wives are Y! Merchant class wives are Z!).

We do have Lara, though, who is at first so interesting. She decided she wanted to be a dragon rider when she was a child, though the Rider culture of course forbids women from doing so, and after years of plotting in secret she stole a dragon, only to end up thrown off and burned nearly to death in the wilderness- whereupon she is rescued by an Elhim (read: elf) with an agenda regarding the dragons who needs her knowledge, nursed back to health, and lives alone in the woods making a living as a tracker and trapper.

Unfortunately... in what I've come to think of as "River Song" syndrome, almost all of those traits are retconned to be because of or all about Aidan- she had given up on being a dragon rider until she heard him sing, whereupon she determined that she was definitely going to become a dragon rider so she could take him riding with her and show him the truth of what he sang about, and to this day as an adult she maintains a somewhat obsessive crush on him (at the same time hating him and blaming him for what happened to her); she was only able to steal a dragon in the first place because Aidan had agitated them and made it possible; she was only kept alive because her knowledge was useful for what to do about Aidan... blah. I was pleased that she took some time to figure things out on her own instead of immediately riding off into the sunset with him at the end of the book, though, it made up for the above somewhat.

I was also somewhat uncomfortable with the gratuitous makeover scene at the masquerade ball where "masculine" Lara learns that Femininity Isn't So Bad in a heavy-handed manner that felt less personal exploration and more making her a suitable love interest for Aidan...

A note about the Elhim, there seemed to be a curious lack of intimate relationships, eg lovers, in their society. I would think this could be because they reproduce singly/autonomously rather than sexually, but there's a scene where Aidan asks about their reproductive organs and one of the flustered Elhim says that Aidan will find out if he gets close enough to an Elhim- the implication I got is close enough to become lovers. I'm a little uncertain how I feel about that- it felt like the Elhim's biology was just there to further characterize the Elhim as "alien" and Other, which makes me a little uncomfortable.

>14 jillmwo: >15 Sakerfalcon: I felt the same way as you did, @jillmwo, though as I mentioned above that did lighten at some point for me. Berg's first-published book, Transformation, is even grimmer than this one- it's pretty much one horrible, traumatic event after another, and even success is bittersweet- the protagonist is a member of a people responsible for protecting humanity from demons, and most of his people have been killed or enslaved; he himself is a slave to a prince who his people's legends say might be able to save the world. (Now that I think about it, with regards to this novel, it's as if Aidan was in Narim's position.) The setting is so creative and so well plotted, but after years I've still never been able to read the third book, Restoration.

I think that looked at in context, this book (2003) and Berg's Tranformation and sequels (2000-2002) fit right in with a subgenre of brutal, intimate (first-person POV) dark fantasy books published around that time. I feel like Robin Hobb's intensely personal, intensely torturous Fitz and Mad Ship books (from the mid-90s through early 2000s) were probably the start of it, but there were also other books like Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart (June 2001) and Lois McMaster Bujold's Curse of Chalion (August 2001).

(I feel like Hobb's books in particular were maybe a response to say, Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series of the 80s, where tons of horrible things happen to the characters but it comes off as more angst than trauma and there is generally magical mental health treatment available- on the realism scale, though, even all of these books are a realism step away from the numb, grim world of Octavia Butler protagonists or C.J. Cherryh's neurotic heroes.)

As an afterthought, I suppose that three books of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire were also out by that time too, but they feel much wider scale and gratuitous than this niche to me- it feels more a response to epic fantasy a la Robert Jordan, and the perspective is more with the people dealing out the torture than the victims of it.

(There's a fairly obvious author-gender-based argument as to why there, but I'm not sure how well it would actually hold up under scrutiny: it's very curious, for one thing, that most of the works above are women writing about tortured men, and then there's Carey, for whose female protagonist torture is pleasure. It brings to mind the theories- which I admit I myself am a bit dubious about- that say some women are unconsciously drawn to m/m slash as a way of exploring romance and sexuality from a distance, and makes me wonder whether there's some kind of analogue here about traumatized male characters being used as a device to explore the nature of trauma.)