You have probably heard of Robin McKinley.
Maybe.
I've always seemed to have known about her. I read her retelling of Sleeping Beauty years ago, and came away with the conclusion that she was a "real" writer. I'm not sure what I meant entirely. It was before I found out you could hate books and authors and so I went around feeling a little lost instead. Wondering if I had missed something. I know I didn't like the book. It was so close to the characters' thoughts that it made my head heavy, as if I had caught the flu. And yet there was a wall, a wall of words like the fine mesh on your window, between the reader and the people in the story so that, even if were my head weren't buzzing, I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to see them clearly. McKinley doesn't write in a pure stream of conscious, but sometimes the effect is the same. I probably put the book down blinking and saying "Ooooookay."
Later on I read a few of her short stories, and that cemented the idea in my head that Robin McKinley's purpose in writing was not to breath life into a character and that her plots were weird. She was about ideas, the ideas that stay right out of reach in the back of your mind and can only be seen out of the corners of your eyes when they think you aren't looking.
A few months ago I borrowed The Hero and the Crown from the library and was surprised by how fast I grew to love Aerin. Ah, here was McKinley's shimmering writing watered down enough for me to see through it into the Heroine's heart! And then something shifted in the last half of the book, the story that I was reading ended and the story McKinly meant to tell began. I was disappointed. But unlike similar situations where authors have failed me halfway though, I wasn't disgusted. It wasn't the way I would have ended my book. It wasn't the way I thought it should have ended. (I didn't finish it, just skimmed through the last page for closure - I may not be purple hat age yet, but I'm old enough to stop reading things that make my eyes roll). But it was her book and I could see, grudgingly, why she ended it that way.
McKinley writes for Ideas.
I've just read Chalice (I've always wanted to keep bees) and Pegasus (which felt less well put together) and they were interesting and intoxicating for someone who now spends more time watching TV than she does actually reading. And they both had "real" characters, with the main girl feeling quite human and the others taking their cues from her. The first made my head swim a little while I adjusted to the fact that McKinley does not think people are truly linear, and tries to prove it by jumping all around in the past and present. This helps her be wonderfully vague – so that you might not know until chapter seven that the tutor is a magician even thought after that it seems wonderfully obvious – and makes the magic in her books more magical, and therefore more real. And so you begin to feel that her true purpose is to tell you about the magic, only it's a thing that can't be put directly into words and so she must show it to us through the story and the characters. This is as close as I can get to explaining what I mean. McKinley writes for notions in the same way a science fiction author might. In fact, I read Isaac Asimov's Currents of Space in between these two books, and the similarities in the way information is presented - half in the background until we become so used to it we just assume we were told, and half two chapters after we needed it - was really amusing.
Equally amusing is the knowledge that there is another person who does something similar in fantasy literature, and I found out about her quite by accident because I was wanted to start reading McKinley again. It was before Hero and the Crown, I think. I went to the library, found the Mc's, and pulled off a book that looked likely. It was In the Forests of Serre - and though the first paragraphs made me think more of Howls Moving Castle than anything else, I soon found the book had taken my words away and pulled them into a neverland where sound and spacing wove around in all the colors of connotation. I did not mind that I spent much of my time confused and in a daze - who is alert and analytical in fairyland? The purpose of the book was the words. It was like a backwards painting, I thought after reading Ombre. If you looked at it from a distance you saw words and when you cam up close they faded away into a plot, a story. But then, if you took the time to exam even deeper you found that, really, the story was words too. The end result is a heady concoction indeed.
Unlike McKinley, I do not really feel that McKillip is trying to tell me something profound. Or maybe she is, but she doesn't feel it's something flightily and hard to get at. She shows, with every line and page and chapter, what words can do and how powerful they are. She exults in that power, that beauty, and wants her readers to as well. And then when you have finished her story and looked back at the plot you find even that was nothing more than an allegory about words. Like McKinley, I feel her books are full of subtlety, and yet I can not tell you where the subtle lies. To say that it lies in the words its to say a tapestry is subtle beacuse of its millions of tiny stitches. When you are done with a McKillip book you are out of it, as if it were a dream. And when you are done with a McKinley story you left with bits of it in the back of your mind, as if it had actually happened long ago, when the world was wilder place.
How can two people be so the same and yet so different, even down to their names? It can only be through magic.