Disposable Lit Reviews

Baen Books, 1994
370 pp.
ISBN 0-671-87601-5

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Having burned out on category fantasy in high school, I always appreciate a fantasy novel which is just a single novel, not a portion of an overextended trilogy or tetrology or umpteenbillionology. I appreciate the work it takes to craft a convincing and internally self-consistent world setting, but that doesn’t mean that I want to be led by the nose on an endless quest through every part of the author’s created world just so he can amortize the mental cost of its creation.

Pigs Don’t Fly solves the problem of world-creation economics by being awfully sketchy on the background milieu. This might work well to bring the reader’s focus into the foreground, but the novel’s pretty sketchy there too.

Our protagonist is Somerdai or “Summer,” though she grew up answering only to “Girl” from her mother, the town prostitute. She learned a goodly amount from all of the various tradesmen and clerics who were her mother’s regular customers, but when her mother dies during Summer’s eighteenth year, she finds herself unprepared to face the world alone. All she has is a small dowery of foreign coins which came from her long-vanished Gypsy father, and a ring from the same source — one supposedly made of unicorn horn.

The ring turns out to be a major mover in the plot; as she sets out to seek her fortune and maybe a husband somewhere south, she discovers that the ring actually is from the horn of a unicorn, and it confers on the wearer the ability to understand and speak to animals. In short order, she picks up a mangy village dog and an emaciated warhorse fresh from a minor skirmish, both willing to accompany her south.

South where, exactly? That’s where the sketchiness of the setting shows its head. It’s obviously someplace a little more European than the generic pseudo-Europe of so many fantasies; there are clear mentions of the Church, and the names (what few of them there are) are all of authentic European pedigree. On the other hand, the country in which the whole tale takes place is never named, and only vague allusions are made to far countries that correspond to Arabia and China. By the end of the novel, my best guess was that we’ve been travelling around rural France, but never really figured out the time period (before the Reformation, obviously), or why so many hints as to setting had been sprinkled throughout the book without it making one lick of difference.

An instance of sketchiness of a more immediate sort, and one which counted more as a stroke against the novel, is the revelation that Summer is fat. Hugely, grossly fat. Said revelation doesn’t come until the end of the fifth chapter, despite the fact that Summer is our viewpoint character. And it’s not as if she only becomes aware of her own girth at that point; it seems that her personality and worldview are deeply informed by her embarrassment and low self-esteem. Yet somehow this essential fact about our narrator didn’t make it into the text until page forty-nine, despite the fact that the preceding chapters had gone to great lengths to establish Summer’s history, relationship with her mother, and attitude toward the world. Rather than an ill-conceived attempt by the author to withhold information for dramatic effect, it seems more like a spur-of-the-moment addition to the character that would have been better integrated into the narrative if she had done a second draft.

Anyway. The next companion Summer adds to her traveling menagerie is actually a human: Sir Gilman, a young handsome knight whom Summer had once previously admired from afar as he passed through her village. When she discovers him now, he’s the sole survivor of the skirmish from which the horse escaped, and a blow to the head has left him both blind and amnesiac. She takes him under her wing, gleeful that the object of her admiration is now both unable to see her physical appearance and reliant on her for his daily needs. Naturally, the only thing they can determine about his origins is that he’s from somewhere south…

And so it goes. Along the way they pick up a turtle, a homing pigeon with a broken wing, and the most bizarre of all, a winged piglet from a traveling fair. The true origin and nature of the piglet is supposed to be a mystery, and a surprise revelation near the end of the book, but despite all of Brown’s best narrative efforts, whoever was in charge of designing the cover decided to give it all away before the reader has even glanced at the first page:

It’s like the posters for The Empire Strikes Back hinting at a family relationship between Luke and Vader.

The narrative moves along pleasantly, but it soon becomes apparent that it’s largely episodic, rather than having any real momentum. And those subplots which are supposed to be continuous elements tying the whole narrative together, like Summer’s unrequited love for “Gill,” end up lost in the shuffle. We have to be occasionally reminded in exposition of Summer’s feelings, because they very rarely manifest themselves in dialogue or action. And the importance of the magic unicorn ring isn’t as a thematic element, or even as a plot thread, but simply as authorial convenience; it assembles the menagerie Brown wanted traveling with Summer without the messy situation of having her communicating with all animals she meets (or any of the sticky ethical questions that treating animals as sentient and communicative beings might engender), and further, it even gives her a “spider-sense” of incipient danger whenever it’s necessary for the plot. (And when Brown wants them all to get into trouble, she just has Summer summarily ignore the ring so that plot complications can ensue.)

Despite all of my bitching and moaning, it’s not a terrible read. The prose style is light and easy, and the individual episodes are engaging if not terribly cohesive (although Brown has a terrible tendency to list details of the surroundings far beyond most readers’ attention spans — had I a photographic memory, I would now have an encyclopedic knowledge of the edible herbs to be found along the caravan routes of whatever locale this is). But the novel as a whole reads as a first draft, written with only a vague outline in mind and never revised for structure or dramatic unity; several plot twists in the last couple of chapters only solidify that assessment. Despite featuring a flying pig, there’s nothing here to make the book truly worth recommending or remembering.

Nathan Shumate