Robin McKinley: Chalice

I don't read much fantasy. I find a lot of it poorly thought out and derivative to the point of absurdity. You know, smiths who make swords, but nobody is mining anything, that sort of thing. Huge armies with no way to support them. Impractical romanticizing and fetishizing of a particular pre-industrial moment in human history, but without all of the negatives that would imply. 

Point being, this is one of the rare fantasy books I've read over and over. 

Mirasol gets the role of Chalice because some rods (???) divined that she's the one. And she definitely is. Her bees suddenly make enormous quantities of honey, her goats are producing prodigious quantities of milk, and some mead in the cellar overflows and fills the whole space and smells up her house so much that she has to sleep outside.

This is why I love Robin McKinley for fantasy. She's practical and grounded and knows how things actually work. So maybe that's what I dislike about most fantasy. It's full of farming and beekeeping and soldiering and so on written by people with zero idea what they're talking about. That's so irritating no matter what the topic is. Luckily we can all learn! We can get on YouTube and get an education even if we're the laziest writers who ever wrote.

So Mirasol becomes Chalice, one of the essential circle of roles that run the demesne. That's another thing that tends to irritate me about fantasy, as long as we're looking into that. Oddly inappropriate medieval terminology. But in this case, it's fine. It's out of place because it's a French word and would be used post-1066 and not before, but there's no sense that this is a world in which 1066 happened. But unless you're a medieval linguist, this probably won't bother you. 

(She also uses sennight for a week, which does bother me. What's wrong with week? It's a perfectly good old Germanic word. It's almost identical in German and Norwegian as in English. So if it's a prejudice against Latinate words sounding too French and post-1066, this makes no sense.)

ANYWAY.

Mirasol doesn't know how to do the job, never got trained, but figures her way through it by instinct and trial and error. She's doing great, but feels highly insecure about it. And then she makes a big mistake because she was never trained and accidentally shows support for this awful Heir brought in to supplant the actual Master.

There isn't really magic in this book so much as things working the way they do in a somewhat mystical or supernatural way that is perfectly normal and part of life. I like that very much. I get extremely annoyed at most uses of magic in fantasy, like it's a get out of jail free card. If it can do absolutely anything any time, it utterly ruins the narrative. Where's the tension? Where's the agency of the characters? Most of the time it's a disaster for narrative tension. Then you end up with artificial limitations put on it because suddenly the writer realizes there's no tension. So it can do anything except when it's convenient for it not to do anything. Annoying, again.

Mirasol's Master is the sort of lord of the country/county/state. It's not a huge area but it's not small either. He's not so much a political leader as an integral part of the land, which I like very much. And because he was sent away to become an adept of Fire, when he's suddenly brought back, he's not quite human. The first thing he does is burn Marisol's hand to the bone. But then later when he realizes, he takes some fire and squeezes it down to a drop of honey and puts it on the burn that has stubbornly refused to heal, curing it immediately. 

This I like. I like that he's absolutely devoted to fire and became part of the fire to the point where he can hardly walk and can't touch anyone without burning them. Marisol is all about bees and honey all the time, to the point where they follow her around and cover her with a warm bee blanket when she's cold. It's not control. It's becoming part of the thing. This is something I adore about this book.

There are the usual rituals that make no sense in any way, as always with anything having to do with magic. I don't ever get those. You have to say these words and drink this thing and then something happens. I don't ever like it because it's nonsensical and it's just reenacting our regular Earth experience of religion, where it also seems nonsensical to me. I understand the psychological power of ritual, but I don't see that it actually does a thing in the world. 

And so when Mirasol has to spend a whole week racing around the entire demesne sprinkling specific drops of this or that mixed with this special water to wake up or align the earthlines (???) I just roll my eyes and skip ahead. I understand the narrative point of it. She has to Do a Thing to make everything all right. But dripping special honey water on a rock does what how? Burning a certain candle does a thing how? None of it works for me. And it goes against the earlier sense of how these things work.

It works in the story, though. She manages to line up all the earthlines or whatever with the Master's help and unify the demesne and help him fight off the stupid hateful Heir, who gets blasted into a burned up cinder because somehow Marisol's power and millions of bees take all the fire out of the Master and put it into the Heir.

See. If I feel stupid saying it, there's an issue. It's a weaker ending than the book deserves. Because ultimately Marisol is a fantastic character who is in over her head and trying her hardest to do the right thing, something I always adore in any fiction. And the Master is likewise pulled away from what he was devoted to and is trying to do the right thing despite his obvious red-eyed situation and the burning touch and all. 

You have to work super hard to write magic in a way that won't set off my alarms. I wrote earlier that magic should be like another skill we have in the world. Snowboarding, or playing piano, or using computer languages, or whatever. I think we do best with a good analogy. Here we do great with the analogies she uses, up until suddenly we're in do the thing and say the special words world, ugh. 

What else do we have to show this narratively besides doing the thing and saying the special words, though? This is the pickle that Chalice always leaves me with. What else is there? Most amazing things in the world are done either by practicing over and over, boring to watch, or sitting quietly and working with a pen and paper or computer, also boring to watch. So I'm not sure what I would like to see. Yo-Yo Ma's magic comes from many years of practice and innate talent. He performs as a RESULT of that. He doesn't do the magical thing right then.

I'm about to read Naomi Novik's Uprooted, so we'll see how that measures up to Chalice. 

And if anyone knows what happened to Robin McKinley, please let me know! She disappeared off the internet in about 2018. I hope she's okay! I want to read The Blue Sword soon also. When she's good, she's incredibly good.