PEGASUS

I’ve been putting off writing about this because, honestly, I’m a bit embarrassed to have read a book called Pegasus. I mean, it sounds very My Little Pony, doesn’t it? Right from the first line:

Because she was a princess she had a pegasus. 

But this book is by Robin McKinley, author of The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword, and many other YA classics I have loved since my preteen years, and she is messing with you with that first line, because the next sentence begins:

This had been a part of the treaty between the pegasi and the human invaders nearly a thousand years ago… 

In the world McKinley depicts, the pegasi are not cuddly, pastel Lisa-Frank-style winged horses, but intelligent beings with their own intricate civilization (including a semi-telepathic language, agriculture, history, and beautiful arts and crafts that they create with tiny proto-hands) who share their land with humans in exchange for protection against incursions of various monsters. The arrangement includes a system of binding ceremonies pairing royal/noble humans with royal/noble pegasi of the same age. This is intended to promote understanding between the races, yet even paired humans and pegasi can only communicate with each other via a rudimentary language of gestures, with the aid of a specially trained magician. (Humans and pegasi are also not allowed to touch, supposedly to protect the pegasi from being treated like common horses.) No one really questions this until 12-year-old princess Sylvi meets her pegasus, Ebon, and finds that they can talk easily. The unheard-of close friendship between Sylvi and Ebon rocks their respective societies to the core, with some hoping that it will lead to greater cross-cultural understanding while others maintain that it spells doom for the entire kingdom.

I really liked Pegasus, but I’ll be the first to say that it’s an odd book. Like another of my faves, Connie Willis, Robin McKinley is Not for Everyone. Her books are often long, she breaks many of the traditional rules about showing vs. telling with large passages of exposition and description and little dialogue, her stories hinge more on abstract/internal conflicts than traditional actiony plots, and she yanks you right into the worlds she creates, leaving you to gradually figure out their rules later. Pegasus in particular could be considered very rambling and slow-moving, although I found it fascinating and prefer to think of it as expecting a healthy level of intelligence on the part of its readers. I can definitely see why some people were frustrated with it, particularly because (again like Connie Willis, with Blackout and All Clear) it ends with a jarring surprise cliffhanger. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it a cliffhanger—it’s an ending of sorts, just not a happy or satisfying one—but most people are referring to it that way, and at least Willis included a mention of her planned sequel at the end of the first book, whereas I had to track down McKinley’s blog to learn that there would indeed be a Pegasus 2. The funny thing is that as I reached the last sentence and realized the book was going to end on a major downer with everything unresolved, even as I suspected this must mean there would be a sequel, I was totally willing to believe that this still might be a standalone book, and that McKinley was just trying to do something wildly experimental, albeit severely depressing. I certainly didn’t get as enraged as many of the Internet reviewers; I just thought, “Huh. That’s weird, and if that’s really the ending it’s kind of a bold choice.”

So, like Willis’s Blackout, this is really one huge book split into two volumes, which pissed off a lot of people but which I enjoyed, even though I can’t really render a final verdict on it until I read the next one. I definitely loved the characters, especially Sylvi and her badass mother, liked the concept, and adored the comfortable, lived-in way McKinley always writes—her fantasy is not high-flown, but very realistic, rooted in little everyday details, giving you a sense of what it would really feel like to inhabit that world. Also, although I haven’t reread The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword in years (time to remedy that, I think!), I suspect that McKinley dropped some clues in Pegasus that might tie it in with the world of those books, which would be awesome.