Chalice by Robin McKinley

Chalice by Robin McKinley

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Decent work by McKinley. I always love her stuff, and this follows a lot of her patterns. For instance, characters have relationships with animals that give away true character, and friendships with animals save everyone in the end.

The beginning starts out thick and hard to follow simply because you are thrown right into the Chalice universe, and the rules of the universe are not explained all up front, but rather like a mystery that the reader needs to unravel. The writing itself is a little convoluted at times and some sentences take a read or two to digest. I knew it would pay off and so I plowed through it, but if this was the first book of hers I had picked up, I might have abandoned it early.

The dialogue in this book is unnatural and characters can carry a monologue for pages instead of the preferred natural conversation devoid of plot-forwarding information. McKinley could have been more subtle with her informative revealing methods than to have the characters tell it to each other. With her current method, you don't get a really good grasp on the characters themselves, because instead of their talk exposing who they are, it simply exposes what they have figured out and what they are still pondering.

Chalice is almost entirely narrative, with only a few scenes that offer immediacy and sensory details. The memorable scenes, when she heals the rift in the field, when the master pulls the bee off his arm while he talks to her, the Seneschal speaking candidly to her in the library, these are what make the book great, and there are just so few of these moments interspersed between so much summary and distanced description that it is hard to stay interested.

The variations of honey and their powers are a fascinating prospect and really gives this book the meat that makes it worthwhile.

I was hoping the idea of the circle and their role in the universe would be similarly structured and explained as the honey and its powers, but too much of the circle's purpose and day to day workings are still left vague in the end. You never get a handle on exactly what these people do. It is rather formless and not properly spelled out. I suppose McKinley was trying to leave it on a less detailed level so as to make it seem more mystical, but I really wanted to have a better understanding of what the rituals were supposed to do for the land, much like Marisol healing the rift. More scenes and less summary would have helped, I think. Or maybe a situation where it was required to spell out their roles, purposes and powers outright, instead of bit by bit. As it is in the book, Marisol knows a lot and doesn't have good reasons to explain it to the reader.

The ending is trite. Robin McKinley always struggles with her endings and either ties up ends in such a rushed way it seems insincere (hey, why don't we just get married?) or jumps back to such a distance of summary that you lose the intimacy you were hoping to keep with the character through the denouement (and they lived happily ever after).

This particular ending of hers is the trite kind. Perhaps because she never developed the relationship fully between the master and the chalice; their conversations were all trading of information and not exposing of how they reacted to each other. The Chalice and the Seneschal, on the other hand, had a suitable and satisfying ending to the conflict in their relationship. But the best moment of this novel is when the master saves the chalice's life with his priest fire, an action that takes selflessness and restraint and concern, and makes him really lovable, but the ramifications of that on the intimacy and depth of their relationship is never explored ('hey, we should just break another rule and get married' just doesn't do it for me).

The political conflict between the overlord, the heir, and the master was handled well, probably the best of all the conflicts McKinley tried to resolve in the end.

Using the bees as the climax catalyst was a conclusion weakly constructed. Did the bees do it for Marisol or because they were animals tied to the land? Did they have any ties to the Master himself? Couldn't we see some foreshadowing of a smaller group of bees sacrificing themselves for the good of something? It did help that they swarmed the House after she fainted, but I think there should be more alluding to their significance in the conflict between the bad humans and the land.

The best part is the heroin Marisol. She really is the kind of girl we love to read about from McKinley. Marisol is the kind of girl we all want to be. The Master was promising as well as his relationship with Marisol. Very sad that part fell flat in the end when there was potential for a truly great love story in addition to her imaginative structure of magic and decent political web.


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