Levi Hobbs's Reviews > Wizard of the Pigeons: The 35th Anniversary Illustrated Edition

It’s fascinating to see where your heroes started.

Seven years ago, I was strolling through McKay’s—a massive used bookstore in Nashville—and I did the unthinkable. Well, for me, anyways. I bought a book on whimsy. Normally I research to death first, but this time, this one time, I saw a book called Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, and picked it up capriciously—the author’s last name was almost identical to my own—and I began reading.

“My pen falters, then falls from my knuckly grip, leaving a worm’s trail of ink across Fedwren’s paper. I have spoiled another leaf of the fine stuff, in what I suspect is a futile endeavor. I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.”

And then he goes on to describe his first memory as a boy, his hand gripped in a much larger, callused hand, dragged to massive fortress doors on a dark night of icy gray rain. And as the narrator describes these things, these little memoir-like asides creep in, these comments wondering about his lack of memories, comments mentioning drugs and bitterness and death, as if from the perspective of a very old man looking back over a lifetime of hurt and regrets and…life.

Immediately there was something about this that felt cozy and comfortable and exciting all at once. All I knew was that this book was “large” enough to contain both coziness and adventure and sadness and rawness—having “assassin” in the title, after all—and that was enough for me. I bought it, took it home, and read it in the evenings while drinking malbec and eating peppered jerky and romano cheese, because food like this is mentioned so much in this book that you find yourself craving it like a heroine addict.

And I developed a bit of a habit. Now I’ve read three complete trilogies by Robin Hobb, and two of those trilogies I have actually re-read; I got my wife and my mother into it and we have read them all together as a group and discussed every week for a few years now.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that Robin Hobb was a pseudonym, and that Megan Lindholm was not only the author’s real name, but also, Megan Lindholm was a name that she had written several other novels under in a distinct voice. I became intrigued to hear this distinct voice, but years went by, I was busy, and I never got around to it.

Until this year. For some reason, although I have always been a skinflint with buying the cheapest possible books, I found myself actually in a place where, as just one act of self-care for my own mental health, I started to actually spend a little bit of money on myself. Primarily through buying very nice copies of the Fitz and the Fool trilogy, but also, this nice 35th anniversary edition of Wizard of the Pigeons. For after all, this is the original break-out book Megan Lindholm, and she’s one of my favorite living authors.

How different this is, and yet the same. Right from the first page I was drawn in. She writes in the style of a fairy tale, but it’s also very specific to the city of Seattle; like James Joyce said of the book Ulysses, if Dublin (or in this case, Seattle) disappeared from the face of the earth, it could be re-created block by block with the detail in this book. I learned a lot about the Free Ride Area and the King Dome. And the sidewalks, oh the sidewalks…they used to be a whole story above ground, you know…

I also read this because of the premise: a homeless man on the streets is actually a modern street wizard, a type of wizard which Megan is creating out of whole cloth—in fact, I have seen this book cited as the prime precursor of the urban fantasy genre. How cool is that? But back to the book.

Our protagonist—a Viet Nam vet named Wizard—is not the only wizard in his world. He and the other street wizards follow a similar pattern: they each have unique powers and each have unique rules in order for their magic to work.

Wizard’s particular gifts are endearing. Inspiring, even. I really love them. He has a gift of Knowing the inner truth that people need to hear. People are drawn to him, strangers, who come to him and pour out their hearts to him, and then he Knows the Truth that they need to hear, says it to them, and if they receive it, it changes the whole trajectory of their lives. This concept alone made the book worth gold to me.

But Wizard is a difficult character to be the protagonist of a whole book. He’s a laconic character, silent and stubborn, immovable as a brick wall seemingly. He exhibits signs of depression and PTSD, and he is sometimes maddeningly silent. Yet for all this, the story good enough with pacing and plot and description that it still worked for me.

Something interesting to see in this book is that Robin Hobb’s knack for writing compelling characters is at work here. Here she has several very distinct, compelling characters. But they aren’t as developed over several books as she did later. It’s neat to see her craft being germinated here. It’s also neat to see her real-life compassion for the homeless (which you can learn about if you read her blog) shining through.

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The main conflict of the book is centered around Wizard losing his magic when a romantic interest shows up, Lynda, who starts basically taking over his life, and he starts to break his rules. He loses the magic more and more until it seems that he is irrevocably lost.

But then he meets with the other wizards again, one in particular who has been his mentor. And she says some things that really resonated with me at a level that transcends the story. Although I wonder if these will make sense out of context, I wanted to try to bring the magic of this book to you through sharing some of them here.

“You invented those [rules] yourself, knowing you couldn’t keep them. You wanted to break yourself so the magic would go away, so you wouldn’t be a wizard and have a duty to it. But even in your desire to be free of it, the magic went to deep in you for you to destroy it…you made up your own rules to break.”

“Stop pretending that you’ve been pretending.”

“She believed all the old myths: Men have no feelings such as women harbor; they can share your home, your bed, and your money, but not your life. She knew all about ‘how men are,’ but she had never really spoken to one. She wasn’t going to let him get through.”
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So, enough said. This book is iconic, a legend. Read it, if you must. Or try to resist, if you dare. Perhaps though, the more you run from it, the more inevitable it will become.