The Lions of al-Rassan is a sweeping historical epic that examines the price of war, the deadly toll on lives that can occur when religion and politicThe Lions of al-Rassan is a sweeping historical epic that examines the price of war, the deadly toll on lives that can occur when religion and politics meet and clash, the seemingly endless give and take between Christians & Muslims & Jews, the power that certain charismatic individuals can exert during times of tumult and change, and - just as important as everything i've mentioned - the nature of love and of friendship. its cast features El Cid and Ibn Ammar; it is set during Moorish Spain.
actually, no it isn't set there and those characters are nowhere to be found in this novel. and yet Moorish Spain, Ibn Ammar and El Cid, the history of conflict between Jews and Muslims and Christians are exactly what Kay is using as his templates. it is a rather ingenious idea: instead of having to worry about getting everything just right, each historical detail and each character's deeds and traits, why not just use them all as inspiration and recreate a world anew? and so the novel is considered a "fantasy" because it takes place in an alternate reality that has two moons (as well as a boy with psychic powers - but hey, that can happen right here in this dimension).
i have a GR bookshelf called "Into the Past" in which i place books that are some sort of historical fiction. The Lions of al-Rassan is on that shelf, mainly due to how this novel perfectly (and beautifully - Kay is a gorgeous writer) evokes its time period. but recreating Moorish Spain and paying homage to fascinating historical figures are not the novel's goals. this is a romantic saga that illustrates the best and the worst of mankind; the details of a past milieu are really not its overriding concern. those details are all backdrop. what it is is wonderful wish fulfillment at its purest - heroes who are wise & witty & brave & kind, a heroine who is strong & empowered & brave & kind, a story full of battles big and small, complicated political machinations and complicated villains, vivid supporting characters, a richness that is rich because in many ways it is timeless. its narrative is thrilling and melancholy and brutally clear-eyed and sweetly sentimental in equal parts. its prose is elegant and has such a lovely flowing feel to it. its themes are genuinely adult themes. it sees the need for change and yet mourns all the beautiful things buried by time. it is full of anger and gentleness.
at the heart of its story is the idea that people can actually come together, respect and love each other, move past their differences while respecting those differences - how people can truly see each other as brothers and sisters. they can come together in romantic love, they can come together as teachers and students, they can come together as a family. and most of all they can come together in friendship, as equals. the novel features one of the most heartfelt and tragic bromances i've read in a while. but it is not just about the boys - it also features a very real and very independent woman at its core. all three characters are splendid creations. for me, the best thing about their complicated relationship is how necessary each of them is to the other. at different points in the novel, each of the three characters will save the life of somone dear to another of those three characters. this was a beautiful thing, a resonant thing, a timeless thing. humans can rise above their baser instincts, they can be more than just pawns or animals or people who keep their heads down while others fall. we can save each other's lives. we can, i know we can. if not, then why even be alive?...more
oh Tigana! 20 years ago, the warring lands of the peninsula known as The Palm were invaded and conquered by two opposing Tyrants, and split into two. oh Tigana! 20 years ago, the warring lands of the peninsula known as The Palm were invaded and conquered by two opposing Tyrants, and split into two. during this time of war and magic, one land was punished, transformed, forgotten.
20 years later, a band of men and women fight to reclaim that land, its history, their memories. oh Tigana!
SPOILERS FOLLOW
memories of a distant life can be a strange and beautiful and sorrowful thing. i can remember places, scenes, people in the land where i was born, far away from here, long ago. a dilapidated mansion in the fields. muddy streets, the smell of cooking meat and the sound of laughter, the sour tang of the food, mangos. a great-grandmother in front of a cookpot in a dark house, a grandmother drunk and curled up in a corner, an uncle holding my hand. do these things define me, are they a part of what make me who i am today? it is hard to say. at times, they feel like stories i've read, scenes from a forgotten movie. gone, all gone. but yet they live still, in their way.
the tragedy at the heart of Tigana is the erasure of history, the stealing away of memory. the transformed and forgotten land of Tigana lives still in the hearts of its former citizens, in the minds of those who work to see it reclaimed, to see themselves made whole. the idea of Tigana drives them forward. the reclaiming of Tigana is a slow-moving battle, one that costs many lives, innocent and otherwise. the towns burned, the children tortured to death, the battle costing so many lives... is it all worth it? of course it is, of course. but one of the many wonderful things that Kay accomplishes in this novel is to show the ambiguity at the core of this quest. it is not a black & white matter and Kay deals only in shades of grey. memory is a place that defines us; it is a place that we recreate to give our lives meaning. but clinging to memory, using the past as the sole thing that defines who we are, holding past misdeeds in our hearts to give us a kind of furious purpose - that is also a sad place, and a place fraught with peril. the entirety of the novel is a narrative about reclamation, about making a memory and a place whole. but at the very end of the tale, a minor character decides against revealing a key secret, in which the history told would shatter those who heard it. he purposely decides to leave a story un-whole, to allow Tigana's protagonists a kind of peace in their ignorance, to stop the past from continuing to rule the present. it is a brave, quiet, humane decision. sometimes the past should not rule us. that both ideas - dueling conceptions of how to see the past - are able to live in one novel, and so empathetically, is a sublime accomplishment.
one of many such accomplishments. where do i even start?
props for creating a world that is an alternate version of the city-states of warring old Italy, and yet is entirely its own place. props for balancing heavy themes and brisk adventure. props for Dianora, who whores herself out to her oppressor, no matter her original intent for vengeance... Kay does not reinvent this familiar type - he breathes new life into it, he makes her intentions and her actions understandable, her love real, her death a tragic one - but also a death full of tenderness and meaning. props for his sympathetic and clever gay character, one who uses simpering stereotype as shield and decoy. props for his inclusion of Alienor and her sadomasochism... i've read a score of tales that supposedly explore s&m, and few that so clearly open the heart of this kind of sexuality with such honesty - and brevity. props for Kay's ability to understand sexuality as central to experience, his skill at writing a love scene, his unwillingness to dwell on sex in a way that drools - that makes the experience a stroke fantasy. Kay illustrates sex as somehow both ambiguously mythic and prosaically real; how often does that occur in a fantasy novel? props for centralizing magic in this tale and yet making that magic just one part of the whole. this is not a novel of magic misadventure; it is a novel of people and politics and memory and longing. props for the portrait of one of Tigana's villains - the Tyrant Brandin. the character is larger than life, remote, inaccessible - and so tragic, so understandable. he commits terrible crimes; one of the worst is revealed in the closing pages. and yet this is a father who acts from grief, who destroys out of love for his slain son, who commits unforgiveable atrocities in the name of the most relatable of emotions - the love of a parent for their child, the rage of that parent towards those who have destroyed that child.
and BIG PROPS for the writing itself. my gosh, the man can write. his prose is often stunning: impressionistic, delicate and airy, blunt and earthy, real. he is what many writers aspire towards: a poet who writes in narrative prose. he can depict the colors of a sunset and the chill of night without cliché; he can describe a royal garden reshaped to reflect nature's chaos with language that brings you right there, that make a place both real and unreal. he can create mystery and wonder with words that are blade sharp; with sentences that are full of sad and terrible honesty; with paragraphs whose substance and meaning feel ephemeral at first, like the sound of wind through trees, but that can be read again, and again, and gain meaning with each re-reading. he can shape a reader's experience by putting them briefly in a character's life, sharing their perspective, and then smoothly moving the reader along as one voice fades and another one comes into focus - in a flow of prose that is never jarring or abrupt, that feels natural, organic. scenes are viewed from multiple angles, in a way that illustrates the defintion of even-handed.
have you heard of the director Otto Preminger? he was a favorite of the French New Wave, a hollywood director reconstructed as a genuine auteur. his defining hallmark: a very specific even-handedness in his storytelling, a visual manner that links all characters in a scene as equals, each having their own personal and equally important perspective and meaning, each potentially key to the narrative. Kay has the same kind of widespread focus. there are heroes and there are villains, and yet they are all recognizably human. and they are linked - by their past, by their goals, in ways that they are often slow to understand, in their shared humanity. each has their own perspective, their own fears and hopes and dreams. one hero enslaves a man. one villain makes the roads safe. another hero callously rejects his son and executes that son's boyhood lover. another villain is a man whose heart nearly died with his son, only to be born again, in love, in an effort to change himself and his ill-gotten world.
the novel has a central sequence that details a stark conflict taking place on another world, perhaps another reality. it is in many ways a timeless passage: the story of a fertility rite, a harvest war, a struggle in an alien yet familiar place - a place where actions resonate throughout all of the worlds. this was my special favorite part of many favorite parts in the novel. the timelessness, the simplicity, the sense of many lives, many worlds, linked together so that one skirmish, one win or one loss, has profound impact on all other worlds.
i love how Kay is focused on this connectivity between all things. it is a holistic and genuinely spiritual perspective on life. i love how he connects Tigana to his Fionavar Tapestry - the idea of a central world that gives life to all others, one where we may be reborn. patterns of peace and war; myths that resonate beyond one world into many others; a tapestry of worlds. Prince Alessan's quest is a mosaic of small actions aiming themselves towards one great possibility. the Prince's quest parallels the meaning of the novel itself: many parts that compose one great whole; many memories of one great loss, histories forgotten and remembered anew; many voices and many lives, paths that cross and move apart and may or may not come together again, bodies and souls that live and die and may yet live again....more
The concluding volume of Fionavar Tapestry is a perfect fantasy novel. Happily stripped of the awkward, stilted ‘real SPOILERS AHEAD, SO MANY SPOILERS
The concluding volume of Fionavar Tapestry is a perfect fantasy novel. Happily stripped of the awkward, stilted ‘real world’ situations and dialogue that occasionally marred the preceding novels, The Darkest Road takes place entirely in Fionavar and is all the stronger because of it. The narrative is simple: the characters all engage in a series of final meetings, battles, and individual confrontations that were carefully set up in books 1 and 2. The world is saved, of course. And at such a high cost, of course. The writing is also straightforward. This is not a novel full of lush description; nevertheless, the carefully chosen words, the elegantly stripped-down prose, the overall precision and artistry of the writing should serve as a lesson to all would-be writers: sometimes lavish world-building is not necessary to create a world, or to create a work of art. Kay conveys everything he needs to convey in language that is as simple yet as poetic as a fable. The entire trilogy, rooted as it is in timeless myths, has all the resonance of genuine mythology, one that describes both the beginning and end of all such legends. Much like similar works of art (john crowley’s The Deep, for example), Kay boils down the tropes of fantasy literature until they are at their most iconic, and then breathes wonderful new life into them.
Who takes the Darkest Road? So many of Fionavar Tapestry’s characters must walk paths that end in death and darkness.
Finn takes a solitary path, riding with The Wild Hunt, slaughtering evil and good alike, becoming a thread of chaos in the tapestry. But in the end, he makes his choice, and chooses well, as all heroes must. All of the heroes in the series are faced with hard life choices, and all of them choose well in the end. It is a glorious thing, and it is a big part of what brings the trilogy to the level of myth. But the fate of brave, sweet Finn, turning from The Wild Hunt and then literally falling from the sky to his death – that is something even more. It felt like I was reading a fable’s first iteration, the story of a kind of Icarus, one who willingly chooses his tragic fate, in service of others.
Diarmud takes a deadly path at the end, to his own end. There is not much I can say about this sequence, other than that I shed some tears at the end of it. A character so full of life, yet so blithely willing to sacrifice that life for others, in an instant. An amazing thing.
Galadan’s whole existence is The Darkest Road. His transformation at the end, his ability to become something greater, something good, was carefully set up from the start of the tale. He is a man in love after all, and moved to his deeds because of that love’s rejection and the loneliness that followed. But despite the hints of what was to pass, when it did come to pass after all, it was still incredibly moving. Not all things from the dark are….all dark. Is there a more humanistic sentiment?
And Darien takes the Darkest Road, of course. His path is the path of the title: a road without friends, without a moral compass, one that leads to the heart of evil and one that ends in a sad and tragically lonely death. But such a death! He saves the world with his courage and his grace. Kay does not allow Darien’s final end to be easy for the reader…there is no one there at the boy's side, to protect him, to embrace him as he dies, to thank him for his sacrifice, to hold him as any child should be held when they are afraid and all alone. It is one of the saddest, bravest, most beautiful deaths I’ve ever read in fantasy literature.
Kay’s imagination is impressive, but even more impressive is his willingness to let tragedies be truly tragic, in the most real of ways. He does not try to balance the deaths out so that the reader is given a kind of easy comfort, a kind of well-they-may-have-lost-so & so but at least they have so & so. He does not make things easy. Some characters are not harmed and achieve a happy ending. Other characters are gone, forever. One set of parents sees both of their brave sons returned to them, and it is a joyous thing. Another set of parents have young sons who both die in the struggle, and in the end they are left alone with each other, and it is a terrible thing. A prince who is full of war, grim and unyielding, lives to rule; a prince that is full of light and a future full of love, is slain. A good seer’s soul remains forever exiled, outside of time. A student from our world remains dead, never to return to his own father. A child dies alone, with no one to tell him that he is loved. So many sad things. Such a beautiful tale, such a battle, and so hard-won, so resonant. ...more
the second book in the Fionavar Tapestry is not quite as impressive as the first, but hey it's still pretty damn good. two things in particular stick the second book in the Fionavar Tapestry is not quite as impressive as the first, but hey it's still pretty damn good. two things in particular stick out for me:
Sex. i love how this novel places sexuality at the center of much of its magic, both implicitly and explicitly. it is really refreshing. and not corny! i suppose that is the danger of including sex in fantasy - if its not done right, it is a trashy sex scene or, even worse, an eye-rolling tantric experience featuring new age nonsense that makes me gag. sexuality in this novel is mysterious, natural, unnatural, a profound part of some magic, a threatening form in other kinds of magic, and just a regular part of life as well, no big deal. it is taken seriously but it is also not turned into the whole point either - it is an important part of the tapestry, so to speak. it is a refreshingly adult perspective.
Rape. at the end of the last novel, a major character was captured, tormented, and raped repeatedly. it was a horrifying sequence and also exceedingly, surprisingly well-done. i have actually never read its like before in a fantasy novel - i was horrified while simultaneously impressed by the language, by the ability of the author to remove all traces of potential, repulsive "sexiness", by the way the author showed how the raped character retained her strength while never shying away from how truly negating the experience was, in every way imaginable. in the sequel, Jennifer does not just bounce back. it is not an easy journey for her and she doesn't try to make the people around feel better as they try to comfort her. in a way, reading about Jennifer took me to a sad place, as i recalled the couple friends i've known who were assaulted sexually, and the struggles they lived with for so long after, and probably still live with to this day. Jennifer's character and her struggles seemed so true, in particular her detachment. and when she at last is able to make a faltering step, then another, and another, on the road to recovery, and when she's finally able to even experience sex again, to experience a connection to another person that is both emotional and physical... it was like seeing something slowly coming through in an endless gray sky, some light at last appearing, after waiting for so long. that's a trite image, i know, but that's how it felt to me. i teared up a little bit reading that scene, and i think that's the first time tears have ever sprung to my eyes when reading something so basic as a love scene....more
this is a wonderful novel. it is hard to love at first. sometimes you get to know people who seem automatically awkward, whose social style is stiltedthis is a wonderful novel. it is hard to love at first. sometimes you get to know people who seem automatically awkward, whose social style is stilted, composed of quotes from movies or off-putting attempts to be clever, insisting on repeating tired tales, who seem eager to please yet incapable of easy connection. but you get to know them over time and those trappings fall away, the awkwardness fades and they become real, three-dimensional, a friend even. and so it is with The Summer Tree.
at first, it is pure template. The Lord of the Rings is more than an inspiration; tolkein's characters and themes and countries are all directly paralleled within. as such, it is often a very familiar novel and, just as often, that does not work in its favor. what becomes an equal problem is the staginess of the opening chapters and the awkwardness of the dialogue and characterization. both are rather off-putting and the novel starts out with a stumble.
but after that stumble...oh, the riches! what seemed to be trite characters soon flower into figures far more rich, fascinating, enigmatic, even iconic. their adventures moved quickly into the unexpected yet retained a richly mythic quality. the quality of the writing beyond the dialogue is striking: kay does not engage in lush description but rather chooses his words carefully, and the simplicity yet sophistication of word choice often made me pause, and read them again: a haiku of a tale, compared to tolkein's extravagant epic poem. the mythos itself remained entrenched in the familiar, but that becomes a virtue - at times it felt as if i was reading an original telling of these tales and a recounting of these myths, as if this were actually the original template, as if the tried-and-true depiction of celtic-flavored mysticism, the elves & dwarfs & trolls, the ancient powers and unending evils were being presented in their purest and most direct format. and its combination of modern (5 modern students cross dimensions) and classic (mythological kingdoms that are the true reality) becomes a delight - wit and sad wisdom doled out equally. i certainly was not expecting to read about one character's embarrassing hard-on; nor did i expect the tragic driving death of a loved one and the suicidal yearnings of that crash's survivor to become a touchstone drawn movingly upon during somber self-sacrifice. the two worlds become surprisingly and effectively intertwined.
the penultimate chapter is one of harrowing devastation and mortification. i'm not sure i've read such a terrible and horrifying episode of torment and despair, and one that wastes no time in excessive cataloguing of the indecent tortures visited upon a tragic character. the horrors depicted in this sequence are, again, mythic in scope and meaning, yet disturbingly modern in their ability to repulse and sadden. but at the finish, The Summer Tree ends on a hopeful note. just as i am hopeful that the remaining books in the Fionavar Tapestry will continue to impress and inspire. i can't to wait to read them!...more
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