The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
One of my long-standing wishes is that Guy Gavriel Kay would turn his historical-fantasy approach to Asia — China, Japan, wherever. According to news posted by GGK himself to Bright Weavings, that’s exactly what he’s done with his new book:
The new novel is called UNDER HEAVEN. It is a long, single-volume historical fantasy inspired by the extraordinary Tang Dynasty, essentially 8th century China.
It will appear in the English-language markets in April and May of 2010.
Huzzah, again!
Eight hundred years ago today, the town of Beziers in Provence became the first city sacked in the Albigensian Crusade. Thus, it seems a good day to post this review.
After Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay continued his exploration of historical themes in fantasy settings with A Song for Arbonne. This was actually the first GGK novel I ever encountered, spotting it on the shelf at the Olean Public Library the year after I graduated college; I checked it out and read fifty pages before abandoning it, for some reason. I don’t recall why, since I was favorably impressed with the book. Maybe I went on a trip and forgot to pack it along, or something like that. I didn’t get to Arbonne for another year or so, during which I would finally delve deeply into GGK via Tigana and Fionavar.
If Tigana is set in a proto-fantastical Italy, Arbonne takes us to Provence in the time of the troubadours. Arbonne is a beautiful and wealthy land, generally peaceful, whose women tend to share political power with men and whose society is generally more “civilized”, placing a high value on love and poetry and song. The guild of troubadours is highly regarded, with many of the greatest musicians being celebrities of very high repute, classic songs enduring for decades and even centuries, and with other songs providing cause for war. In Arbonne the god Corannos is worshipped along with the goddess Rian, and the goddess’s worship is led by the priestesses of Arbonne.
To the north of Arbonne lies the more austere and warlike land of Gorhaut, a land devoted to the worship of Corannos and a land that generally views Arbonne with some superstition. Some years prior to the book’s opening, Gorhaut has lost a war with a neighboring country farther north, in a very stinging defeat that has seen Gorhaut lose some of its land to that neighbor. Gorhaut’s national pride is stung, and the King of Gorhaut is manipulated by his own High Priest, who wishes nothing more than to cleanse the world of the filth and blasphemy he perceives in the land of Arbonne. The main real-world historical analog to A Song for Arbonne, then, turns out the be the Albigensian Crusade. (GGK is wise enough to not have anyone utter the famous, perhaps apocryphal, battle direction from that Crusade against the heretics in Provence, when it was pointed out that one wouldn’t be able to tell the good Catholics from the heretic Cathars at sight alone: “Kill them all; God will recognize his own.” But the attitude behind that chilling command comes through in all its brutal hatred.)
For a time, GGK’s novels would follow a particular formula in their beginnings: they would start with a prelude set some time prior to the novel’s main action, in which we see an event that would shape everything to come. The event depicted thusly in Arbonne is, seemingly, of less import than the night-before-final-battle that opens Tigana; here, we see a woman ride out to a clandestine rendezvous with her lover. That affair, however, will all the same turn out to shape everything that is to come, as it lies at the root of a very public hatred and feud between two of Arbonne’s highest Dukes, a feud that comes to a head at the worst possible time: as Arbonne is facing invasion from the north by an angry Gorhaut that is eager to reclaim its standing in the world. Its “manhood”, perhaps; the differences in worldviews between men and women is a strong underlying theme of this novel.
While there are, as always in a GGK novel, many characters we come to know, the closest to a “main” character is a man named Blaise, a mercenary from Gorhaut who has come, for reasons of his own, to leave his own country behind and take employ to the Dukes of Arbonne. Blaise is intelligent and competent and destined for far more, obviously, but he spends a great deal of the book having his own preconceptions of Arbonne challenged and shifted. Few writers that I’ve encountered are as good at having their characters changed by the actions and events of their novels as GGK, and the same holds here.
A Song for Arbonne is less violent than Tigana and its following book, The Lions of Al-Rassan, and despite its focus on court politics and intrigue, it has a generally less epic feel to it. GGK’s ultimate theme in this book is to show how world events can be shaped by such simple and intimate emotions as love. I also have always found Arbonne to be more tightly constructed than Tigana, which, for all its virtues as a book, still feels a bit disjointed and episodic to me; Arbonne feels more confident in its structure. This might prove a small fault at the ending of the book, where things are tied up with surprising tidiness; but still, the revelation at the end as to just where a certain arrow was shot from, during the final battle, is a nicely satisfying surprise, and as always with GGK, he leaves certain questions unanswered – such as, to whom did Blaise eventually give the yellow rose?
Next up: The Lions of Al-Rassan (although I’m taking a small break from my GGK re-read, in order to knock off some other books I’ve been wanting to read).
Tigana was Guy Gavriel Kay’s fourth novel published, and the first after the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. It stands with a number of marked differences from Fionavar, pointing the way toward themes and a general approach to fantasy that would dominate GGK’s work for the next six novels, until Ysabel. (Time will tell whether Ysabel represents a momentary diversion or a whole new direction for GGK.) With Tigana we get not a series novel but a stand-alone work that focuses on the political goings-on in a fantasy domain that is nevertheless based closely on a real locale, the better for GGK to examine historical themes and events without being constrained to observing the outcomes of history too precisely. Here, GGK delves into the fantastical history of a fictional analogue of Renaissance Italy.
As the book opens, we find ourselves enmeshed in the politics of the peninsula of The Palm, a roughly hand-shaped peninsula that is divided into a number of smaller duchies and principalities, many of which look upon the others with suspicion. Each of the kingdoms owes allegiance to one of two tyrants, both wizards: Alberico and Brandin. Alberico is an extremely harsh dictator, killing any messenger who brings him bad news and responding to acts of insurrection with the random executions of dozens of people. (His preferred method of execution, “death-wheeling”, is never described, but its brutality can be inferred from afar). The other tyrant, though, is the one who commands more attention, because of the events that have gone before, roughly twenty years prior to the main action of the book.
The title Tigana refers to one of the kingdoms of the Palm, the principality of Tigana, a land of very long and proud history whose royalty traces its lineage all the way back to the god and goddess they worship. However, in the time of the novel, Tigana is a forgotten land – literally forgotten. In the final battle of the war in which Brandin took control, his son was killed; and in his grief, Brandin used his powers of wizardry to call the worst curse he could think of down upon the whole of Tigana. He strips the land of its name. Only those who are native to Tigana remember it, but anyone else not only forgets it, but they can’t even hear the name “Tigana” when spoken. Brandin insures that Tigana itself will die out completely once all of her native sons and daughters are dead, a generation hence. Working against this curse is the exiled Prince of Tigana, Alessan, and a band of fellow natives of Tigana he recruits throughout his travels as a wandering musician. His plan is to engineer a war between Brandin and Alberico, knowing that to destroy one tyrant whilst the other lives is to allow that other to rush in and fill the power void. What ensues is an amazing story of war, patriotism, revolution, court politics, magic, the morality of adhering to causes in the face of complete destruction, and all through that, love.
What makes Tigana such an effective novel is, in addition to GGK’s gifts for language and character, the moral ambiguity he conveys throughout. It would be easy enough to cast both tyrants as completely evil and Prince Alessan and his cohorts as pure and good, but GGK isn’t content to do this, and it is this – his willingness to present heroes as partly villains and villains as partly heroic – that tends to elevate his novels above many others. Alessan does things in the course of the book that cast question on his goals and his devotion to them; we wonder, at many junctures, if he is really doing the right thing in striving so hard to bring Tigana back into the world. At one point, he uses his own magical power as a Prince of Tigana to bind a free wizard to him, literally enslaving the man; the wizard, Erlein di Senzio, bitterly points out that things in the Palm have actually been much better since Alberico took over. There are no easy answers in Tigana.
Moreover, while Alberico himself is depicted as a sadistic and cruel lout, Brandin is portrayed with a startlingly high degree of sympathy for a dictator in a fantasy novel. Brandin’s grief for his son is very real, as his love for his wife, Dianora. This kind of thing makes Tigana a very refreshing read: I find myself not entirely rooting for Alessan, nor did I find myself rooting against Brandin. The eventual moment of reckoning, when it comes, is partially satisfying and partially bittersweet and partially very sad. Tigana is a book where some villains get what they deserve, while others don’t deserve what they get.
Tigana was the first GGK novel I read all the way through, way back in fall of 1993. I had previously started, but not finished, A Song for Arbonne. (I don’t recall why I didn’t finish that one, except that it wasn’t because I wasn’t enjoying it. Even while reading it I made a mental note to get back to this one.) I last re-read Tigana in 1999 or 2000, if memory serves; it had been a while, so long, in fact, that I was happy to discover that some of my earlier preconceptions about the book no longer held. I liked certain characters more than I recalled liking them before (Dianora chief among them), but I was again struck by what I’ve always felt is a problem with the book’s pacing. GGK’s books never stick to a single point-of-view the whole way through; instead, he switches back and forth among fairly large casts of characters. With Tigana, I have always felt as though he didn’t quite have the kinks worked out of this particular approach, as entire sections of the book become engrossing, only to bring on a switch to another person’s POV. What’s more is that the early part of Dianora’s part of the tale is given over to a long section of backstory. It’s basically an infodump. Now, GGK is a far superior writer to, say, David Weber, to name a writer who is famously prone to disastrously momentum-killing infodumps, so when GGK does this, it’s not fatal to the book. But it is noticeable.
Another facet of GGK’s books that is always noticeable is that they rarely end with a full-stop. He is superb at leaving that lingering sense that life does go on for the characters, even if we can’t follow along and see what that life entails. I won’t spoil it here, for those who haven’t read it and might, but the device he uses to end the novel is inspired, and it’s generated some serious discussion on nearly every forum on which I’ve seen this book discussed. The other thing that always stands out for real GGK fans are the tiny references he includes in all of his books to Fionavar; remember, Fionavar is the first of all worlds, so each of his novels to come along after that reflects this in some tiny way. It’s a tradition that actually started with Tigana, the first of his books after the trilogy.
Tigana is a wonderful, superb book, and it’s a testament to GGK, I think, to say that it’s never been my favorite book of his. But on this re-read, I found myself appreciating it a great deal more.
After finishing my recent re-read of The Fionavar Tapestry a month or so back, I found myself not having a whole lot new to say about it, mainly because of all of Guy Gavriel Kay’s books, Fionavar is the one with which I am the most familiar, having re-read it more frequently than any other. But I did have a couple of new ruminations of late (Spoilers follow):
:: GGK has noted that in this trilogy he wanted to play with the standard tropes of epic fantasy a bit, stand them on their head a bit. His model, most clearly, as Tolkien’s mighty Lord of the Rings. How does it compare directly, though?
Well, Fionavar is more of a “trilogy” than LotR is. LotR is, at its heart, a single book chopped for editorial reasons into three parts, where the three contituent volumes of Fionavar are more of a trilogy with three distinct parts that still tell a single story. Each book has its own part of the tale to tell.
GGK has openly discussed the “middle book” problem with trilogies — i.e., that Book Two can often suffer by the fact that it neither begins nor finishes the story. GGK solves this by creating a specific task that must be accomplished (in Book Two) before the BIG challenge, the confrontation with Rakoth Maugrim, can be addressed. It’s not dissimilar from what transpires in The Two Towers (although more in the movie version than the book version): Saruman must be dealt with before they can turn their attention to Sauron. There’s a similar motivation at work here, but it’s a bit more sharply drawn.
:: As a world, Fionavar somehow feels smaller than Middle Earth. I’m not sure why that is. It’s a similar fault I found with the LotR movies, as opposed to the books; Tolkien is able to convey that Middle Earth is pretty vast, where the movies sometimes make it seem as though all locations are within a day’s ride of each other. Tolkien refers, if memory serves, to the lengths of time involved in the journeys from one place to another, where GGK doesn’t do this as much; more than that, a look at the maps of the respective worlds shows something important. In GGK’s books, we visit virtually every single location named on the map. This isn’t true of Middle Earth; a look at Tolkien’s map reveals that in the tale of LotR the reader actually sees a relatively small portion of Middle Earth. Tolkien is stronger at suggesting the huge amounts of story that take place outside the peripheries of the one he’s telling at once.
:: Paul Schaefer and Galadan are presented as “two sides of a coin”: both are tortured by the deaths of their beloveds, and both are angry at the world. Paul’s anger is directed inward, though, while Galadan’s is directed outward, which is what makes Paul’s redemption and triumph over his anger more believable, or satisfying, than Galadan’s. Galadan takes his rage out on the world, which leads to him allying himself with evil for a time, and when his redemption comes, it comes almost completely out of the blue. To this day, Galadan’s redemption is the part of the book that troubles me the most.
:: Kevin Laine’s act of self-sacrifice — giving up his own life so he can end the unnatural winter — is still one of the most memorable episodes of the book, but I do wish it had been set up a little better. The problem, I think, is that there is little sense of what “Liadon” means until we are on the very cusp of that part of the story.
:: That said, Kevin’s motivation — his feeling of nearly complete impotence in the face of a war that could determine the fate of all the worlds — stood out for me a lot more upon this re-read than it ever did before. I’m not sure why, but it did. Especially his vow to “make answer” to Rakoth Maugrim’s crushing of Jennifer Lowell, a vow which seems fated to be useless until Kevin finally discovers his way to make it true.
And that should about do it.
Since finishing my re-read of The Fionavar Tapestry a week ago, I’ve been trying to think of something new to say about the trilogy. I re-read this series just three years ago, and many of those observations still hold. This is also the work of GGK’s with which I am most familiar over the years, so it doesn’t hold much for me by way of outright surprise. Still, I found myself throughout rooting for the characters, feeling a bit of the sense of betrayal when it turns out that Metran has turned against the Light, and the deep sorrow when Kevin Laine sacrifices himself in order to break the winter.
What I did notice anew this time was the character of Dave Martyniuk.
At the very end of The Darkest Road, Kim Ford reflects that of all five of the “real world” characters who have gone to Fionavar, Dave has changed the most, and on this re-read I got more, much more, of that sense. Previously I’ve tended to see Dave at first as something of a selfish jerk, but this time, I saw him probably more for what GGK intended: a nervous and tense man, driven to succeed but also very wary of not merely expressing his emotions but actually feeling them in the first place. Dave is reluctant to go to Fionavar at all, and he tries to break away in the transit, ending up alone on the northern plain, where he meets the Dalrei. His trials there lead him to make his own resolution with the internal conflicts he is fighting, most of which spring from his strained relationship with his father, a relationship that is emotionally, and possibly physically, abusive.
I further noticed that Dave Martyniuk, alone of all the major characters, is never really called upon to make a choice of self-sacrifice or self-denial. Instead, he becomes something else: a man who would be willing, if called upon, to make that choice when presented. Dave comes to terms with himself in a powerful way that I’d never noticed as strongly before.
Choice is really what drives this series, an endless series of choices presented to characters who can’t possibly be expected to know what it is they are choosing, and yet the choices are made each time; what’s more, the crisis that forms the spine of the series — the freeing of Rakoth Maugrim — is also depicted as the result of a series of choices made by many people in many places, over many years. The Fionavar Tapestry is not one of those fantasies where it seems as though everything that happens is in accordance with some ancient prophecy; there’s no sense that anything is truly fated to happen. In fact, the one group of characters who are tortured by the fact that they are trapped in a series of sad fates — Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere — are finally allowed the choices they’ve never been allowed before. The story of Fionavar derives enormous tension from the way characters make choices that may, or may not, turn out disastrous, and the moments of highest tension come from situations in which the choices the characters have are basically between “dying horribly now” and “dying horribly in a little while”.
So there we have it: Fionavar in 2009. I suppose I’m good for this series until 2013.
In comments to my post the other day on my complete re-read of Guy Gavriel Kay, Tosy and Cosh poses the reasonable question:
I have never read any GGK. What one book should I request from the library to see if I like him?
Not the easiest question, really, since GGK’s books seem to fall into three “phases” thus far. I say “seem to” because it’s not clear yet as to whether Ysabel represents a definite shift in his career, or if it’s a one-off.
So far, GGK has only produced one work of traditional “high fantasy”; that is the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. If one is most comfortable with fantasy of that nature, then that’s the place to start. Fionavar does take a little while to get going, but there’s a lot of poetry in the prose, and it does get moving eventually — especially by Chapter Nine. However, if one is looking for a single book and doesn’t want to commit to an entire trilogy, then look to the historical fantasies. (Although it’s not as if Fionavar is terribly massive by contemporary standards; the entire thing is about as long as The Lord of the Rings, which is, as most readers of contemporary fantasy are aware, dwarfed nowadays by the massive doorstops that constitute high fantasy now.)
But after that begins his “historical fantasy” phase, when he would use each book to create a fictional world based on some real historical locale, so as to explore various historical themes without having the constraints of real historical events. This phase begins with Tigana and possibly ends with The Last Light of the Sun.
Now, each of these books contains small touches — “grace notes”, as GGK calls them — which reference Fionavar, but none of these books assumes a previous reading of that trilogy. Also, The Lions of Al-Rassan, the Sarantine Mosaic duology, and Last Light are all set in the same geographical world, but none of these books assume a reading of the previous ones, although there are again “grace notes” which those who have read the previous works in that world will understand. These books and their historical analogs are as follows:
Tigana: Renaissance Italy
A Song for Arbonne: Provence in the time of the Albigensian Crusade
The Lions of Al-Rassan: Spain at the time Ferdinand and Isabella drove out the Moors
The Sarantine Mosaic: Byzantium at the time of Emperor Justinian I
The Last Light of the Sun: Britain at the time of Alfred the Great
These historical parallels are very broadly portrayed, so readers deeply familiar with any of these time periods coming to GGK’s book in that same general timeline may find themselves frustrated if they don’t understand what GGK is actually doing. So which of these to start with? I’d recommend either Tigana or Arbonne, actually. Lions wouldn’t be a bad starting point either, although since it’s my favorite I tend to lean toward saving the best for last. The Sarantine Mosaic is in two volumes, so if one wants a single book, look out for that, although again it’s not like we’re talking about a level of commitment like one of George RR Martin’s tomes. The prologue of Sailing to Sarantium is a bit difficult sledding, I admit.
I don’t think I’d recommend Last Light as a starting point, for several reasons. First, it does seem, if I remember correctly, to assume a greater familiarity with GGK’s fantasy Europe than the others set in that same world; second — and I’ll flog this point more when I re-read the book — it has no map, which I think is a much bigger flaw than GGK himself seemed to when I reviewed the book; third, its emotional tone is cooler than his earlier works. He had reason for this, and it works, but the book does stand as something a bit separate, on that basis.
That leaves Ysabel. I’m a bit conflicted on whether it’s a good starting point for GGK or not. It is, in part, a direct sequel to Fionavar, or at least a follow-up; but it’s set in our world and not Fionavar, so I’m not sure how well it works for people who haven’t read the Tapestry. It’s a “magic in our world” story, which puts it more in line with the kind of thing Charles de Lint writes than GGK’s previous output. As of this writing, no one knows what GGK’s next book is going to be, so we don’t know if he’s moving in this “real world fantasy” direction or if he’s going back to his fantasy Europe or somewhere else. (I’ve long hoped he’d do a “historical China” novel, as long as he was doing his “historical fantasy” thing, but we’ll see.) I think one could start with Ysabel, with the warning that it does represent something fairly different from GGK’s previous output.
Boiling down: I’d either start with Fionavar, Tigana, or Arbonne.
After clearing the decks of some earlier reading I wanted to get out of the way, I’m finally embarking on something I’ve intended to do for a couple of years now: I am re-reading every word Guy Gavriel Kay has written, in the order that he wrote them. Why? Because he’s my favorite living author, and it’s been a while since I’ve gone through his work. Here’s how it breaks down:
:: My last re-read of The Fionavar Tapestry was almost exactly three years ago. This will be, by my count, my fifth complete re-reading of the trilogy, although I have dipped into it to read favorite passages too many times to count.
:: Then comes Tigana, viewed by many as GGK’s finest work. It’s not my favorite of his, but it is wonderful. It is also the first of GGK’s books that I ever read in its entirety. The last time I read it was, I believe, in 2000. That’s far too long.
:: After that is A Song for Arbonne, which seems to be held in less regard than GGK’s other works. It was the first time I ever encountered his writing, when I saw the book at the Olean Library and was intrigued enough by its cover to check it out, but for some reason I didn’t finish it at that time. I think school got in the way or something…I’m not sure. This was in 1992 or 1993. My last re-read of Arbonne was in 2001; that I remember because I recall the apartment we lived in at the time. This will be the third time I’ve read it.
:: In 2005 I re-read The Lions of Al-Rassan for the third time, so this will be my fourth trip through what is my favorite of all of GGK’s books. This book, with its tragic love stories and its wonderful characters and gorgeous setting just hits on every level for me.
:: Of the two volumes that make up The Sarantine Mosaic, I have only re-read the first, Sailing to Sarantium, a single time, and that was in preparation for the release in 2000 of the second book, Lord of Emperors. I have never re-read Lord. This may be the one I’m looking forward to the most, at this point.
:: GGK’s book of poetry, Beyond This Dark House, came out in 2003. I read it, and since have dipped back into it a bit, but now I’ll re-read it in its entirety.
:: I reviewed 2004’s The Last Light of the Sun for GMR, and since then I have not re-read it. I remember this book very favorably and look forward to seeing if it measures up to my memories of it.
:: And finally, 2007’s Ysabel, which I blogged about when I read it. This will end up being the shortest period of time I’ve ever gone between full re-reads on a GGK book.
All this means that if GGK has a new book out next year, which seems a reasonable expectation (he seems to go about three years between books), I’ll be totally up to speed on his oeuvre. And that’s a good thing.
Even though I already own every one of his books, for the sake of this project I spent some time on eBay last December searching out new copies of each, in different editions. I’ve sometimes found that when you re-read a book that’s very familiar to you, but you read it in a different edition than the one you’re used to, with a different typeface and different cover art and so on, some details in the story stick out more than they otherwise would. I’m already noticing this in Fionavar. I already owned two editions, one a mass-market paperback edition that was my first copy and a trade paperback edition with new cover art; but both editions were done by ROC Books, and both used identical type-settings. This edition I’m reading now uses a totally different font, even, so I’m finding the experience of re-reading just slightly different. This may sound goofy, but we’re talking about books I’m sufficiently familiar with that with some passages, I know where they physically appear on the page. Now those passages will have, well, shifted.
(Besides, my original copy of Last Light of the Sun is actually an advance reading copy; the thing doesn’t even have cover art. I’ve rectified that with a hardcover version, albeit a book club edition. Nothing’s perfect.)
I’ll blog my way through these, obviously. I’m not sure if I’ll be reading them all back-to-back-to-back, or if I’ll read something else in between once or twice, just to cleanse the palate a little, but I’m hoping to be done with this at least by the end of summer, if not sooner. We’ll see…but for now, I’m off to Fionavar!
Yesterday morning I finished re-reading The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. Each time I re-read this trilogy, I wonder if the tale’s final 150 pages or so will still pack that same emotional punch, given how well I know the story by now.
Sure enough, I was blubbering like a baby through it all.
I’ve only read Fionavar in its entirety four times, with the last coming four years ago, a few months before I launched this blog. The timing seemed right — with Kay being my favorite living author, he’s on the short-list of authors whose books I actually do re-read completely. But I don’t like to do it too often: I prefer to wait long enough that while I know the large-scale course of the story, I am still surprised anew by other, smaller plot points. And I also find other things in the books, things that I may have missed in earlier reads. (Even though this was only my fourth complete re-read of the trilogy, I dip into favorite passages very frequently indeed.)
I first read Fionavar in 1994. It wasn’t my first brush with GGK. I’d earlier started, but not finished, A Song for Arbonne and read Tigana in full. So Fionavar came as something of a surprise: I was already familiary with GGK’s trend toward “historical fantasy” and away from the traditional, quest-based “high fantasy” that’s dominated the entire fantasy genre ever since The Lord of the Rings was published.
For those who haven’t read Fionavar: a wizard named Loren Silvercloak comes into “our world” and asks five young University students to return with him to “Fionavar”, the “first of all worlds”. This is ostensibly to provide some “bang” for a celebration for High King Ailell’s fiftieth anniversary of taking the throne in Paras Derval (think Minas Tirith), but we rapidly get the impression that there is more going on in Fionavar than Silvercloak discloses at first and that he hasn’t chosen these five strangers at random at all. Our five heroes go with him and are thus plunged into a world where the Dark God, Rakoth Maugrim, is about to be freed and where a war is about to begin which, if lost, would give Rakoth freedom to spread darkness throughout all the worlds.
I haven’t done the story justice at all in that brief summation of the background, believe me. What makes Fionavar interesting are some subtle ways GGK plays with the themes of “traditional” fantasy. Yes, we have elves and dwarves and the like, but their roles are very different from what we’ve been conditioned to expect from LOTR, and GGK provides deep glimpses into their respective cultures. We don’t just get a Dwarf who’s along for the ride, but an entire culture of them — and a culture that, as it turns out, may not entirely be on the side of Light. Character motivations in Fionavar tend to be quite a lot more complex than in run-of-the-mill fantasy.
I’ve always been amazed, in GGK’s novels, by his recurring theme of self-sacrifice. At some point in every one of his books you can count on some character making a major difference in the story by undergoing some act of self-sacrifice, usually heroic. In Fionavar, the self-sacrifice is cranked up to ’11’ on the provebial amp; just about every character in some way or another is eventually called upon to an act of self-sacrifice. And it starts, even, before the story in the books takes place: the backstory of Fionavar is replete with many acts of self-sacrifice. It’s no accident that so many of the book’s finest moments, in terms of sheer writing, are moments involving self-sacrifice, and it’s no accident that The Summer Tree (the first book in the trilogy) doesn’t really start to get involving until Paul Schaefer’s decision to go to the Tree, about halfway through.
What else to say? Yes, the final 150 pages or so moved me in pretty much the same way it always does. Darien’s final choice between Light and Dark, a moment when Diarmuid takes up an unexpected battle cry, a resolution to the sorrow in the tale of King Arthur, a realization by Paul of feelings he didn’t know he had…few books make me feel the way Fionavar does, even now, after four re-reads and uncounted references to favorite passages over twelve years since the first time I read it.
I have a couple of other points to make, but they’re kind of spoiler-ish, so I’ll change the font color to conceal the text a bit:
:: It’s amazing what you pick up on re-reads. I never recognized the passage where Lancelot comes to Daniloth for what it is: a reflection of, and resolution to, the tale of Elaine, the Fairy Made of Astolat, who falls in love with Lancelot and, being denied by him, dies in order that her body may be placed on a boat and set to be carried on the river past Camelot. Here, Leyse of the Lios Alfar loves Lancelot, but this is barely remarked — and after his departure from Daniloth, Leyse gets into a boat like Elaine did. Only, Leyse isn’t dead, and her boat thus becomes the first Lios Alfar boat to reach the world the Wevaer shaped for them alone. I didn’t catch this on any of my previous re-reads.
:: GGK’s final resolution to the tragic love triangle of the Arthurian legend is one of the moments that moves me to tears, each time I read it. I didn’t pick up before, though, on the sheer number of love triangles that resonate through this story. The big one is, of course, the Amairgen-Lisen-Galadan tale — but this one sort of mirrors one we only know of in passing, the Paul-Rachel-Mark triangle. Both Paul and Galadan are incapable of expressing their grief for their lost loves who first spurned them for another (Lisen turned to Amairgen, and Rachel to Mark) before dying tragically; the first major act of resolution in The Fionavar Tapestry involves Paul’s coming to grief for Rachel, and the story pretty much ends with Galadan finally coming to grief for Lisen.
There are other triangles, too: in a way, Ailell-Aileron-Diarmuid can be seen as another type of triangle, this one about fathers and sons. There is Raederth-Ysanne-Dana, which has more potency because Dana is a Goddess. The fates of Finn, Darien, and Leila are bound together as well, as are those of Matt, Kaen, and Blod. Triangles abound in Fionavar.
:: As much as I love this series, at the end I always envision Kim and Dave returning to the real world to be confronted, some time later, by some Toronto cops: “We’re looking for three missing people: Kevin Laine, Jennifer Lowell, and Paul Schaefer. They were last seen with you two….”
And now, I face the problem that I confront every time I finish a GGK novel: what to read next….
So cries one of the central characters in Guy Gavriel Kay’s magnificent novel The Lions of Al-Rassan, which I re-read for the first time in four years while on my trip out west for the sister-in-law’s wedding. (When you travel with your family across the country so that the two women in your family can be in a wedding, while you yourself are not in the wedding, you end up with a lot of free time in the days running up until said wedding. Good thing I packed a bunch of books.)
I note in my post about GGK’s novels that Lions is my favorite of his works, which is saying quite a lot considering the man has yet to write a book I don’t love dearly. This is the story of a number of lives intersecting in a fantastic realm called Al-Rassan, modeled on the Iberian peninsula during the Moorish retreat. As has been GGK’s wont ever since he completed The Fionavar Tapestry, the role of magic in his tale is so limited that the book might be an actual historical novel if not for the fact that his geography and religions, while analogous to real ones, do not exist.
While Lions is now my favorite of GGK’s books by quite a margin, it wasn’t always so. This is because Lions is similar to the film Casablanca in one major respect: it is actually better upon a second reading (or viewing), when the foreknowledge of how the story comes out in the end casts an elegaic light over the events leading up to that end that isn’t present when one doesn’t know how it all ends. This was my third complete reading of Lions, and even though I knew how that final duel turns out and even though I knew how that final duel came to happen, I still found myself actively wishing for it to not come out that way, and for a world to be forged from the ashes of the one dying in which Rodrigo Belmonte and Ammar ibn’Khairan could both live.
On this reading, I noted much more of the erotic undercurrents within GGK’s tale; this is a very sensual book, to a degree I didn’t appreciate as much the first two times I read it. And I did pick up on one more thing, which constitutes a spoiler of sorts: parts of the book turn on Diego Belmonte’s ability to see future events, or events from far away to which he cannot possibly be privy. What I didn’t pick up on until now is that Rodrigo Belmonte, Diego’s father, has a similar such moment when he has a vision of his wife, Miranda, and his company physician, Jehane, standing on a hilltop against a deep sunset. I never caught that before now.
With GGK’s novels, I tend to avoid full re-reads for several years, so as to allow certain inner details of the stories to recede into my memory that they might delight me anew each time. This practice works well, except that for it to work again, I can’t re-read Lions again until 2009.
I was asked in comments the other day about Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy and how it compares to his latter works. I gave a short response, but it occurs to me that I might not have ever actually delved into my opinions of each of GGK’s books (eight so far, with a ninth coming out next April). So I wrote this post in Word, saved it, and then in my sinusitis-induced stupor of the last couple of days forgot about it altogether. Here it is. In short, if you enjoy fantasy and you haven’t read GGK, then you are a charlatan who should be thwacked with a big salmon!
(All of GGK’s books, to my knowledge, are in print. The first five novels were recently reprinted in trade paperback editions with new artwork. As always, your first stop for GGK info should be Bright Weavings, the “official” home of GGK on the Web.)
:: The Fionavar Tapestry. This is a trilogy consisting of The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road. This trilogy if GGK’s first published work, and it does show in some ways. On first reading I found it hard to get into. This isn’t a series that really “grabs” the reader. I wasn’t engrossed until about halfway through the first book, when one of the characters engages an act of self-sacrifice that was very moving. After that point I could not put the series down. The other big flaw is that I found it very easy to miss key details in the story that end up playing a huge role in the tale later on.
The Tapestry is a Tolkien-style epic fantasy, complete with dwarves and elves (here called the “lios alfar”) as well as orc-like creatures (“svart alfar”). The action takes place in Fionavar, which is actually the first of all worlds. Five college students are recruited from our own world to go to Fionavar basically as visitors, but they are soon drawn into the elemental struggle between good and the Dark Lord Rakoth Maugrim, who has recently been freed from his supposedly-eternal prison. Maugrim threatens nothing less than the destruction of all worlds.
In reading this trilogy, the experienced reader of epic fantasy will note the appearance of just about every epic fantasy trope that has ever existed in the genre: Elves leaving forever for the West, Dark elves on wolves, and dwarves in their mountain halls are mixed with Celtic Myth, and King Arthur and Lancelot even show up. This, according to GGK, is purely intentional. GGK pulls out all the stops on this series, crafting a story of epic scale that he doesn’t match again in any of his later books (which, to be fair, have a different focus). There are twists, though: characters are not unremittingly “good”; many of the villains are “misguided” as opposed to “purely evil” (although there is quite a bit of the latter as well); and most importantly, there isn’t the standard “single quest” upon whose success everything hinges. No “Destroy the Ring to defeat the villain” here; instead, everything hinges on the choices people make and how those choices resonate. I’ve noted that self-sacrifice is a major theme in all of GGK’s books, but in the Tapestry it is the major theme.
The “everything but the kitchen sink” nature of the story might put off some, and readers familiar with the restraint and subtlety of GGK’s later works will likely be surprised (to say the least) with the way his heart is on his sleeve here. But even with the rough patches in the Tapestry, the trilogy is still the GGK work that I re-read most often.
:: Tigana. With this book, GGK started his progression away from standard epic fantasy into the use of fantasy to explore historical themes. There is still a great deal of magic here, but the focus on magic starts to lessen. Tigana seems to be, by consensus, GGK’s finest novel; it is also, strangely enough, my least favorite of his novels. Go figure. (I hasten to add that for me to claim a least-favorite GGK book is rather like if I were to claim a least-favorite 1990s Super Bowl run-era Buffalo Bills player.)
Tigana is set in a land called “The Peninsula of the Palm”, which is so-named because it is roughly hand-shaped. The Palm is divided into a number of small, petty kingdoms that have difficulty ever coming together for any length of time. The amalgam here is Renaissance-era Italy. (All of GGK’s post-Tapestry novels are fantasy analogues to real historical locales.) A musician named Devin ends up joining a band of troubadours, who it turns out are actually revolutionaries led by Prince Alessan of Tigana, a kingdom of the Palm whose last ruler so angered a wizard named Brandin that the wizard worked a spell that erased the very memory of Tigana from the entire world, so much so that the very name “Tigana” cannot even be heard by the people of the Palm. Alessan’s struggle is to restore his kingdom.
What makes the book so good is its moral ambiguity. Brandin is clearly the villain, but he comes off very sympathetically; likewise, Alessan the hero commits acts that are morally questionable (most notably, when he “binds” a wizard to his service). A question that constantly arises in GGK novels is the degree to which evil can be worked in service to good and vice versa, and he really brings that home here.
My own problem with Tigana is mainly in its pacing. The book suffers a bit because GGK has to resort to “infodumps” on occasion — there’s a big one early on, centering on Dianora, whose personal story is compelling in the end but takes forever to get going, in my eyes. Many of these infodumps follow a shift in scenery after a previous plotline is really getting engrossing. But this is still a great book.
:: A Song for Arbonne. This is the book that introduced me to GGK, and purely by random chance, too: I spotted it in the “New Books” section of the library when it came out, and I thought, “What a cool cover!” (That cover can be seen here.) What luck, eh? Generally, this tends to be the least favored of his books when I see rankings online, but as my first GGK book I have a soft spot for it. I definitely think it’s the most “satisfying”. There is less of the moral ambiguity of Tigana, and the magic recedes even farther into the background. This could almost be a historical novel, if not for the fact that Arbonne does not exist.
Arbonne is, basically, Provence in disguise, and the whole book is an exploration of the horrible Albigensian Crusade, in which French Lords took a break from crusading for the Holy Land to stamp out the infidels in their own lands. It was in the Albigensian Crusade that one of the most infamous utterances of war ever was spoken: when asked how the soldiers were to differentiate between the faithful and the heretics in a certain city, the commanding Lord is reported to have said: “Kill them all; God will recognize his own.” (Given the brutality of the Albigensian Crusade, I am a bit surprised that GGK did not write a more brutal novel.)
The conflicts in A Song for Arbonne aren’t as deep as those in Tigana, but they are more “romantic” in nature; love lost and love wronged are the main themes here. This is the GGK book most likely to please fans of romance novels, I think. (I do not share the common prejudice against romance novels.)
:: The Lions of Al-Rassan. Hands-down, this is my favorite GGK novel. There is romance that exists on a more tragic and desperate level than in Arbonne; the setting – a fantastic analogue of Medieval Spain during the time when the Moors were being pushed out – is exotic and evocative; and the religious themes are fascinating. GGK creates three religions to mirror the three real-world monotheistic faiths: the Jaddites (Christians), the Asharites (the Muslims), and the Kindath (the Jews). With this book I really started to understand what GGK was doing in using fantasy to explore themes from our own history. It’s quite a tour-de-force.
What’s most impressive is that there is no real “plot”. Instead, GGK presents a set of lives that intersect in surprising ways in a period of immense turbulence when one nation is passing and another is forming. As such, nearly every development in the book is surprising, including the climax which seemed to me both inevitable and surprising.
I’ve made the analogy before that Lions is similar to Casablanca in that its greatness really becomes apparent upon a second reading (or viewing, in the case of the film), when early events can be interpreted in the light of what we know is to come.
I dearly love this book. Were I given only a single GGK book for that desert island, this is the one I’d take.
:: The Sarantine Mosaic. This is a duology comprising Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. Here is another of the “transplanted European history” novels GGK has been doing; now we’re in his version of Byzantium. (The fact of this book’s setting played a small part in the naming of a certain weblog!) There are more religious themes, here focusing primarily on the Jaddites and a smaller sect within them called “Heladikeans”, who are largely viewed as heretics. A major sub-theme is how art properly reflects faith, and the big theme is the universal human desire to leave something of worth behind when we have died. Most of the major characters are striving to leave their mark on the world, and in a lot of different ways. There is an Emperor who wishes to build the greatest temple to Jad in the world; there is a chariot-racer who wishes to be the greatest in memory; there is a cook who wants to leave behind a boy who cooks as well as he does; and the main character, a mosaicist named Crispin, is obsessed with ideas about color and light.
The Sarantine Mosaic is, like The Lions of Al-Rassan, a book without a single plotline. Instead, it is about a handful of lives and how they interact with the backdrop of history and become part of that backdrop. This focus on a number of different lives provides GGK with his literary equivalent of a mosaic, in which tiny squares of colored glass add up to an entire picture.
The Mosaic is set in the same world as Lions, although its action happens five hundred or so years prior to the earlier book. The attentive reader will spot ways in which the action of the Mosaic anticipates that of Lions. I also found this book’s prologue very hard to follow, but here again GGK has hinted that this effect is intentional, another literary rumination on the nature of a mosaic. I also found this work to be the least “overtly” emotional of GGK’s books. Not that there is less emotion, but it is of a more meditative nature. I have heard other readers refer to earlier GGK books reducing them to tears (I’ll admit it, there are scenes in the Tapestry, especially in the third volume, that have me blubbering every time I read them), but I haven’t encountered anyone saying this of The Sarantine Mosaic. This is not a fault, though – just a difference.
:: The Last Light of the Sun. No, I haven’t read it yet. Apparently Mr. Kay thought I was kidding when I dropped all those hints on the message boards over at Bright Weavings about wanting a signed copy of his manuscript. Tsk.
