The Thinning of Thinness: Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar
Of the many useful terms suggested by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, perhaps the most useful is the idea of ‘thinning.’ Clute sees certain archetypal patterns frequently recurring in fantastic fiction and thinning’s a part of that. It is the lessening that afflicts threatened fantasylands, a type of diminishment. It’s the fading of magic, the passing of the great old order. Sometimes, eventually, the greatness of the past is restored, though perhaps in a different form.
Archetypes by their nature are constantly taking on new guises. I found an intriguing example of the thinning-and-recovery motif of fantasy in Susan Palwick’s 2005 YA-ish novel, The Necessary Beggar. Her second novel, it won an Alex Award, awarded by the American Library Association to books written for adults, but with “special appeal” to teens; her first novel, 1993’s Flying in Place, won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel. In 2007, Palwick published her third novel, Shelter, as well as a collection of short fiction, The Fate of Mice. 2013 saw the publication of her most recent book, Mending the Moon.
The Necessary Beggar is an interesting exploration of thinning because it literalises and inverts the whole idea. It follows a family exiled from their home in the (relatively) magical land of Gandiffri after one of them is convicted of murder. They’re sent through a dimensional portal, ending up in this world, in Nevada in the not-too-distant future. They’re held in a refugee camp for a while, but eventually manage to leave the camp and try to make a new life in America.
