Peter S. Beagle’s Summerlong Is a Gentle, Masterful Meeting of Fantasy and Reality

It begins just as winter is breaking on an island in Puget Sound. With the spring comes Lioness Lazos, a woman with uncanny gifts. She meets Abe and his almost-wife of 20 years, Joanna, as they sit in their worn usual chairs, in one of their worn usual haunts. Abe and Joanna have almost raised a kid together—Joanna’s daughter Lily, her child from a previous marriage—but he is Uncle Abe to her, not Dad. Abe and Joanna have also almost lived together for decades, but they keep a studied distance, not quite man-and-wife. Abe keeps house on the island, writing history and playing the harmonica to annoy his neighbors. Joanna keeps her apartment on the mainland, a manageable distance from the airport, where she’s grinding out her last years as a flight attendant. She pivots between her time on the island with Abe—familiar, careworn, affectionate, if slightly stale—and her time on the mainland—as routine, but her own.
Lioness comes to live on Abe’s property, heading out each day on her bicycle to her waitressing job on the shore. Though in many ways Abe and Joanna maintain a careful distance from his new lodger—this is, after all, how Abe and Joanna know how to be—her introduction into their lives knocks them into a vernal awakening. Abe brews beer and blows his harp for a band helmed by a madman. Joanna learns to kayak, striking out from Abe’s island into the sound, and almost to the open water beyond. Their lives ripen with the pathetic fallacy of ripeness. Not only do they spring to life, but the island itself grows fiercely during a strange, beautiful, summer.

Beagle made his bones exploring the intersection of myth and reality. He’s best known for the bittersweet, lovely, literate fantasy The Last Unicorn, which absolutely slays me with its strangling poignancy. In his hands, this imaginary isle on Puget Sound comes alive with some of the most careful character work I’ve seen, crosscut with shocking moments of fantasy clarity. A child pulls blooming flowers out of raw earth. Orcas breach and play just there, in the harbor. The opening half is languorous, shrugging on the lives of Abe and Joanna, as comfortable as they are confining. But Lioness has a secret: someone is following her, like winter follows summer. When he steps onto the island, the winds change.
Under everything thrums one of the oldest myths, a story of seasons and families. (I don’t want to name it; that feels wrong.) The way the stories of Abe, Joanna, and Lily intersect with that myth is glancing and odd, one of those puzzles to which you’re given interlocking pieces and told to create a Möbius, or a duck, or what have you, but you can never fold it quite right. If the ending feels a little rushed, that may be just right: the way every autumn is a surprise, even, especially, after a long, perfect summer. One day you’re basking; the next, you’re searching for wool socks. One day you think you know yourself, and your daughter, and you not-quite husband, and this island, and its tides, and the waters beyond; the next day, well.
So rarely do people write about aging, about being old, about being the adult parents of adult children, about the way the seasons pile one upon the other into a refrain of this is how it is. So rarely do people write about how that breaks, and how in breaking, it is complete. Ah.