Third Time's the Charm

Guy Gavriel Kay is a great Canadian historical fantasy author. Since I love that aspect of the fantasy genre, one would expect me to be all over his books - not only historical fantasy but written by a Canadian too! However, it has not gone well with me and Guy Gavriel Kay. I've tried twice before to read one of his novels, and failed, both times. I was saddened - was this author not for me? Why didn't I like his work when everyone else loved it? I'm pleased to say that, finally, this third time I have succumbed to the charm of one of his novels and finished the entire thing in a matter of days.

The first Guy Gavriel Kay I tried was Sailing to Sarantium which is inspired by Byzantium. I am fascinated by the rich and varied history of the land known as Byzantium and thought I would love the book. Wrong! The book was okay, but I didn't particularly like the main character, the mosaicist Crispin. He was sad and depressed, seemingly uninterested in his own life or the role he was to play in the novel. Crispin is traveling to Sarantium - a city modeled on the ancient Constantinople. I was so bored by the book that I didn't even make it to Sarantium; I quit before Crispin even made it there.

However, I knew that Kay was an excellent author, and thought that maybe I just found real-life Byzantium so attractive that no historical fantasy could top the actual historical records of that strange and unique place. (For more about Byzantium, read A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich [it condenses his 3 volume epic into one delightful summary]. The Byzantine empire and the city of Constantinople come to life in this stunning history. You, too, will feel nothing but sadness at the end of the book as Constantinople falls to the Turks and her last Emperor tore off his imperial robes to fight and die with the common soldiers. A beautiful, wonderful, epic book.)

So, I decided to start at the beginning with The Summer Tree, the first in his Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. This is pure fantasy - no historical gracenotes here. Five young university students meet a mage and agree to go back with him to his world. However, during the transfer process one of the students changes his mind and tries to break the circle. The four students awake in Fionavar with no idea of the whereabouts of their companion. Various adventures and mythical happenings commence, but I became uninterested and quit at around the time to story shifted to what happened to the student who broke the circle.

I'm not entirely sure why I disliked the book. I don't think I really bonded to any of the students, and so much of it seemed so Tolkien-esque - which can be a real problem for fantasy. Dwarves and elves and mages, oh my! And all with these Celtic-type names that you don't really know how to pronounce and so stumble over as you read. There's nothing wrong with dwarves and Celtic mythology and the like, but sometimes it feels just a little overdone.

Frustrated now, I decided to try Kay one last time. So I picked A Song for Arbonne at random off the shelf and brought it home. This is one of Kay's historical fantasy books and involves the sunny southern land of Arbonne (thing southern France) and her greedy and cold northern neighbour, Gorhaut (think northern France). Arbonne is a land of singers and songwriters, presided over by a woman, under the authority of the goddess Rian, and following a courtly code of love. Gorhaut is cold, disdainful of women (very much so!), follows the male god Corannos and has just signed a terrible treaty with yet another northern neighbour resulting in the loss of a good portion of Gorhaut's land.

The main character is the young mercenary, Blaise of Gorhaut. He despises the soft and womanish Arbonnais, but is happy to take their money and work for them. But other characters pop in and out of the story too as their fates intertwine: Signe, the countess of Arbonne; Ariane, leader of the Court of Love; Lisseut, the singer and Rosala, Blaise's sister-in-law. Over and above it all runs the sad, tragic story of Urte de Miraval, his wife Aelis, and the trobadour noble Bertran de Talair. Even as Arbonne must confront the deadly threat from the north, it is threatened to be torn apart from within from the events surrounding Urte, Aelis, and Bertran.

Finally, a Guy Gavriel Kay book I liked! I liked all the main characters and really was pulled along with the story. By the end of the book I was just racing, page after page, wanting to get to the end, desperate to find out what happened - both in the past and what was going to happen in the present. I liked the subtle historical French overtones and found that it helped to picture the scenery of Arbonne. One slight difficulty - when Kay set the narrative in Gorhaut he used the present tense instead of the usual narrative past tense. For example, on page 219, the first sentence of Chapter 9 reads:

On the bright, mild morning in autumn when her life changes forever, Rosala de Garsenc is returning carefully from her favourite walk along the sloping, tree-lined path from the water mill back to the castle when she sees her father-in-law waiting for her astride his horse in the open space in front of the drawbridge.

For whatever reason, I find that tense, when used in fiction, jarring. Perhaps this is Kay's point - he overly-emphasizes that we are in Gorhaut and they do things differently here. But I already get that from the descriptions and the actions of the people of Gorhaut. I don't need the tense change as well to emphasize something I already understand.

Sadly, Kay has not written any other books about Arbonne (at least, not yet). But now that I've tried and actually liked one of his works, I may check out some of his other historical fantasies; avoiding carefully any about Byzantium.