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Tad Williams has become quite well-known in recent years primarily through the success of his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, and his new Otherland series. However, he has been an active author for a number of years, and one of his very best books is his first (I believe it's his first, in any case). Tailchaser's Song is a fantasy novel in which all the major characters are animals (a la Watership Down for example), in this case cats. The hero of the tale, Tailchaser, is a young tomcat whose "girlfriend," named Hushpad, has gone missing. He embarks, of course, on a quest to find her, but becomes mixed up in an extraordinary situation involving a terrible (or perhaps catastrophic - sorry, I had to do that at least once in this review) danger rooted in ancient feline legend. Any number of cats are encountered along the way, including Pouncequick, a kitten who accompanies Tailchaser on his quest, Eatbugs, an apparently insane old tom, and Roofshadow, a young female first met at the court of the Queen of Cats.
Tailchaser's Song ranks easily in the top echelon of fantasy writing, for all the animal-as-main-character idea's having been done before. Williams does a very competent job of portraying the world through the eyes of a cat (at least, I imagine that the job is competent). Of particular pleasure are the evocative names given to the different cats - the dominant tomcats have names like "Quiverclaw" and "Brushstalker," while the overweight and dignified Chamberlain of the feline Court is named Rumblepurr. The other denizens of the animal kingdom are similarly seen through feline eyes, and include such animals as the rikchikchik (squirrel), hlizza (snake), and ruhu (owl). The story itself is also quite solid (there is a considerable element of horror in the evil that is threatening the cat world), and Williams has gone to some pains to create an appropriate mythology and cosmology for cats (the book actually opens with the feline creation story). So, if you're looking for a bit of a change from the standard sort of fantasy novel, Tailchaser's Song will provide a very enjoyable change of pace indeed.
Reviewed by Patrick Conway on Saturday, October 24, 1998. Photograph from CatPaws UK.
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