The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley
273 pages
Published 1982
Read from August 4 to August 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Another month, another exigency slowing down my reading pace. This time it's been my rediscovery of Minecraft, which I had thought I'd gotten out of my system last year. I've been playing so much Minecraft the past week or so that whenever I tried to picture this novel's generic desert scenery, I could only see square blocks of sand and pixelated brush. Prompting myself with memories of the Mojave or the Sonoran, or ransacking the cultural zeitgeist of "desert" for some Arabian or Saharan wallpaper, had no lasting effect -- the cubes could not be conquered.
The Blue Sword is another data point in my quixotic survey of fantasy fiction's transition from stale '70s sword and sorcery to the more naturalistic, somewhat less formulaic, occasionally pseudo-literary offerings of the '80s. In its opening chapters The Blue Sword shows promise; McKinley's voice hadn't yet mastered the charm and humor of Spindle's End (though glints of it brighten exchanges between Harry and Colonel Jack), or the unflinching compassion of Deerskin, but for almost the entire first half of the book, the narration is brisk and absorbing, delivering the story far more crisply than I would have expected from an early '80s YA novel (even one that netted a Newbery Honor). The early worldbuilding has a proto-steampunk feel, full of telegraphs and trains and British-y soldiers and bureaucrats and petty nobility stationed in a border outpost of a queen's expanding empire. The local culture is a less interesting affair, more of a generic "noble/magical desert tribe" extracted from Dune and any number of Lawrence-ian romances; McKinley sidesteps making them mere proxies of the mujahideen by avoiding religious trappings altogether, but doesn't provide them much cultural substance of their own. Harry is typically YA-bland, with little to distinguish or motivate her beyond an inborn craving for adventure and new horizons, ambitions quashed by her pseudo-Victorian upbringing until circumstances (and a magical kidnapping) embed her in the brotherhood of the totally-not-mujahideen (who will soon war with a behemoth army of not-quite-humans trundling in from the north). It all makes me want to read a history of the Great Game instead.
As often happens in action-driven fantasy novels, the book's momentum hits a plateau after our hero's training montage, stalling (in the sense of an airplane engine) the narrative to position her in a not particularly interesting or creative (or consistent with desert nomad culture, for that matter) fantasy palace, which sprawls across a mountaintop in unlikely spires and ridgelines of stone, before promptly abandoning that scene as if it never mattered in the first place (because it didn't). Around this point Sword loses its more forward-looking vibe and becomes a classic sword-and-sorcery number, to its detriment. The final confrontation is as generic as they come, finding Harry and her devoted band of stragglers defending a mountain pass from a vast "black army" under a laughing sadist-sorcerer, and the day is saved by the chosen one listening to her destiny and unleashing a big ol' blast o' magic at the most convenient time. Yawn.
Nonetheless, I've developed a fondness for this book and its characters -- perhaps because it took me so damn long to read the thing, but also because McKinley's human touch, though lacking its later refinement, drew me in despite the story's more dated elements.
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