SOURCE: A Review of The Folk of the Air, in New Statesman, Vol. 114, No. 29,561, November 20, 1987, p. 31.

Below, Greenland argues that The Folk of the Air "lacks the mordant Jewish irony" that was present in A Fine and Private Place.

In (and out of) progress since 1971, and featuring Farrell, hero of a story from 1969, Peter S. Beagle's comeback novel The Folk of the Air is also somewhat concerned with old hippies. The protraction has not been good for it. Though this book has much of Beagle's former lyrical expansiveness and wry, lugubrious caricature in sidelights, it mostly lacks the mordant Jewish irony that, in A Fine and Private Place especially, co-ordinated the various purples of the prose. The titular Folk are a group of Californian Creative Anachronists, who put on medieval dress, talk like Robin Hood movies, and hold banquets, jousts, wars and so on. Initially scornful, Farrell, a...