Dorothea's Reviews > Pegasus

Pegasus was readable, to me, but I didn't come away very impressed.

I did like it better than (my memory of) Dragonhaven and Chalice. It's less rambling than Dragonhaven (which isn't saying very much, but everything McKinley writes is rambling to some degree and I think Pegasus is in the high, but tolerable range) and it's less ... vague? than Chalice.

Structurally, "vague" and "rambling" are still good words to characterize Pegasus with. McKinley does most of her exposition by interrupting herself in the middle of describing the main character having a conversation. In fact she sometimes interrupts the exposition with even more exposition.

I would say that this style of exposition mirrors a significant setting of the story -- the Pegasi Caves, which are miles and miles of underground tunnels and caverns that have been carved by the pegasi over millennia to represent scenes from their history and culture, and where someone who's just walking along can suddenly fall into a trance and have visions of the past coming to life. Actually, though, McKinley always writes like that, so I think it's more the other way around.

Because I am used to McKinley's writing, I didn't mind it in Pegasus, except on some occasions when the narrator doesn't mention something crucial to the here-and-now plot until after pages and pages of reflection, when the protagonist would have known it and have been thinking about it for a long time.

The other structural issue that you should really know about if you're thinking about reading Pegasus is that it's not a stand-alone novel. I knew this from McKinley's website, but the publisher foolishly doesn't mention anything at all about a sequel on the dust jacket. I won't say how Pegasus ends, but I think it would be a horrible jolting experience to turn the last page and not realize that there's supposed to be more story someday.

Knowing there's going to be a sequel is also helpful in making sense of the plot -- such as it is. What happens in Pegasus is: at the very beginning, the princess Sylvi is ceremonially bound to a prince of the pegasi kingdom, Ebon. Contrary to all known history, Sylvi and Ebon discover that they can communicate with one another easily without an interpreter. Then, for the rest of the book, Sylvi learns more about the pegasi and why they and humans can't normally communicate, while ominous occurrences pile up in her own kingdom. That's ... it.

I wondered at one point whether Pegasus would be almost a plot without conflict, but it's not. It's just that Pegasus is completely devoted to establishing what the conflict is; presumably the other two books will resolve the conflict.

(Other two books -- yes, according to McKinley's blog, she now thinks that Pegasus will be the first of a trilogy. It seems that she couldn't manage to tell the story in only one book, so she first decided there would need to be a sequel; then after the publication of Pegasus, she had great difficulty writing the sequel until she decided it needed to be split into two more books. And now she's taking a break from all of them to write a completely different book, which might come out next year. I am kind of wondering whether she'll finish the Pegasus story at all. People who sensibly refuse to start reading a series until it's completely published, please consider yourselves warned!)

***

The backstory is: centuries before this novel takes place, a military company of humans crossed some mountains and found themselves in a beautiful land uninhabited by any other humans, but occupied by the peaceful pegasi (plural of pegasus, intelligent winged horses) who were slowly being crushed by various predators. Through the efforts of human magicians and pegasi shamans, the two peoples were barely able to communicate, and formed an alliance whereby the humans would fight off the pegasi's enemies, the humans would get the lowlands of the country, and the pegasi would keep the highlands (which they liked best anyway, but which wouldn't suit the humans). In order to maintain personal connections between the two peoples, they established the tradition of magically binding each member of the human royal family to a member of the pegasi royal family. The bound pegasi frequently visited their bound humans at the human royal palace, but not the other way around, partly because the pegasi lands were only accessible through flying. At the human palace, magicians specialized in translating for bonded pairs. So the first conflict that appeared when Sylvi and Ebon found themselves able to speak to one another was the jealousy of a powerful human magician.

You might see now how just explaining all of this occupies so much space in Pegasus. McKinley describes Sylvi's relationship with: her parents, her siblings, her role as princess, her staff, Ebon, Ebon's family, the human magicians, the many other pegasi, and various historical and legendary persons. I think perhaps it might have been possible to cut the exposition down a little bit, but after reading the story as it was written and published, I don't know how.

To make things even more obscure, Sylvi gradually realizes there's some kind of magical problem that, itself, obscures communication between most humans and most pegasi. Whatever this problem is, it acts as a sort of mental fog that prevents people from noticing that there is a problem or doing anything about it. Because it affects Sylvi too, the fog extends to the novel itself and acts as another slowing-down agent on the story, which ... really doesn't need that.

***One thing that Sylvi thinks about a lot throughout the novel is the power dynamics between humans and pegasi. She knows that, in theory, the two peoples are equals, but in practice it doesn't always seem that way. Starting with the unreciprocated attendance of important pegasi at the human court, she notices that in certain social customs the pegasi are always in the background and underrepresented. She believes that this is because most humans have never been able to communicate with pegasi, so it's hard to think of them as people. But she finds that when her ability to communicate with Ebon gives her greater insight about pegasi in general, a lot of powerful humans continue to resist learning anything from her. There must be something else besides simple lack of communication that informs the way humans relate to pegasi.

It's difficult to write clearly about what is actually wrong about the human-pegasi relationship, because even by the end of the book, when Sylvi has a better idea that something is wrong, she still doesn't know exactly what caused it. Also, not only is there something wrong with the status quo, there's something wrong with the status quo that apparently hasn't been even questioned for nearly a thousand years. And it's clear from the beginning that although Sylvi is unusual among humans in even realizing that something is wrong, even her intuitions about the situation are often mistaken.

There's a scene, early on, which made me really suspicious of McKinley's explanation of pegasi and human history:

[Sylvi said:] Do humans ever go there? To your Caves?

Ebon looked at her, puzzled: head low, chin pulled in, one ear half back. Not that I know of. Humans don't come to us. We come to you. The Caves aren't a human sort of thing. [...]

Sylvi [said:] DOn't you -- mind? Mind always coming to us?

Ebon shrugged again -- she was sure, now, that it was a pegasus shrug. What's to mind? That we keep our quiet and our privacy? That we don't have to worry about providing dead flesh for you to eat? And chairs? I would not be your father, the human king, to have the winning of that old war carried on my back, and on the backs of all the kings and queens after me, until the end of humans and pegasi -- and the winning of any other wars. We are free, we pegasi, thanks to you. We are glad to honour you in this way if it pleases you -- if it means you'll go on carrying the burden for both of us.

I know McKinley likes Rudyard Kipling, but really??? Eww!

I was kind of glad of that passage, because it put me on my guard. Without it, I might not have noticed (being either swept up or confused by McKinley's writing style) that the pegasi are the perfect fictional colonized people for the twenty-first century.

They're exotic and unknowable and beautiful!

They're a self-sustaining people, apart from their inability to defend themselves, but compared to humans their history seems completely static!

Everything that makes them different from humans makes them more interesting and appealing to humans, but it also means that they need and love humans!

They've achieved some utopian kind of social structure in which everyone is at peace and nobody ever thinks about power or aggression or feels resentful -- especially not in regards to humans!

They are being oppressed somehow, but it's really difficult to figure out how, and it seems likely that their oppression is also secretly really, really bad for humans, and only advantageous to a very small group of other humans whom nobody really likes anyway!

But because they can't talk to humans, their only hope is -- a very unique, special human girl! Whom they all cherish and to whom they show all their greatest secrets, which she instantly understands!

And the other reason this is all a bit difficult to perceive is that Pegasus isn't actually about pegasi; it's about Sylvi and the burdens she has to take on in being the only human who can communicate with the pegasi: "all the thankless years, / Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom, / The judgment of [her] peers!"

I'm going to read the other two books (if they happen) because I did enjoy Pegasus. Sylvi's situation is complex and interesting and pretty thoroughly thought-out -- from her point of view. The pegasi are also very interesting, when one's mind is not rebelling against the story (also against their biology. Since Dragonhaven the science-loving part of my mind angrily refuses to shut up for Robin McKinley where it would otherwise shut up in a fantasy novel, and here it wouldn't rest until I'd imagined a completely new plan of vertebral body-segment evolution). And enough is left ambiguous at the end of Pegasus that the sequel could go anywhere -- it could even, maybe, subvert what I've just described and actually say something true about colonialism. I doubt that, but you never know.