18 October 2001
Peregrine: Secundus
Avram Davidson
1981
166 pp (PB)
I found this book very perplexing.
Undoubtedly, this is partly because it is a fix-up book (of two stories-- "Peregrine: Alflandia" and "Peregrine: Perplexed"), and a sequel fix-up book, to boot. It's about the "adventures" of one Peregrine, exiled bastard son of a local "king" in a weird verson of Dark Ages Europe.
The perplexing thing is that this book has no plot. The main character has no personality. He doesn't do anything, throughout the entire course of the book. Basically, Peregrine is guided, pushed, and dragged by authorial fiat from one strange situation to another, in which he acts as a foil for various odd and humorous characters. After spending some hundred-sixty pages in his company, I finished the book with no idea of his personality. Well, that's not entirely true; I finished with the idea that he lacked anything resembling one.
And yet, I didn't hate the book. On the whole, it's rather amusing; in places, it's downright hilarious. The writing (as in the actual prose) is good. The various goofy characters Peregrine meets on his travels are almost Pratchettian. The daft elderly scholar-priests who preside over the opening ceremony of the Umbrian Games would be perfectly at home in Unseen University, and King Alf of Alfland would fit in in the highlands of Lancre, no problem. (Of course, these stories were written before The Color of Magic.)
Really, it's clear that the odd situations and characters are the main focus of this story. I'd go as far as to guess that was Davidson's whole reason for writing it (or, rather, the two original stories that went into it)-- to play around with silly characters with funny accents and just have a generally good time. That sort of conceit certainly could have worked well for novellas or short stories; in something purporting to be a novel, it's not so great.
Conclusion: this is a fix-up novel that shouldn't have been fixed up. Nowadays, I guess they'd just publish all the Peregrine stories together as an anthology. I think they're worth checking out as a light read-- the priests really are hilarious-- if you come across it in a used bookstore (like I did), but I wouldn't go out of my way to seek it out.