Fantasy Review: 'A Song For Arbonne' by Guy Gavriel Kay

I really wanted to give this five stars. In many ways it was a perfect book - a great story of a country fighting for its very survival, some truly compelling and heroic characters, emotional resonance and an ending that was true to all of those elements and entirely fitting. And to start with, yes, I got swept up in it and in Kay’s wonderful writing. But somewhere around the midpoint it got sticky for me. It was just too over-the-top melodramatic in the worst kind of eye-rolling way. I did my best, but maybe I was just in the wrong mood for it, because it was all a bit much.

I’ve only read two of Kay’s other books, ‘Tigana’ and ‘The Lions of al-Rassan’, but that’s enough to put him up there with my favourite authors. However, they’re not light reading, with their nuanced world building, deeply compelling characters and emotional intensity, so I tend to keep them for a time when I have the leisure to savour them. Kay favours settings which are only lightly disguised real-world historical places, and this is no exception, being analogous to medieval southern Europe. Arbonne is a place of troubadours singing of courtly love for unattainable married women, and is ruled by a woman, in contrast to northern Gorhaut, a deeply unpleasant patriarchal society.Although this is clearly a fantasy world, and the real world inspiration never intruded, there isn’t much magic involved; it’s there, and very obviously so, but it’s added to the mixture with a very light hand. One plus point: the author’s somewhat overwrought writing style can be a bit much in some contexts, but it actually works well in this setting, and enhances the atmosphere.

Of the characters, I loved both Blaise and Bertran, and Valery too. They don’t feel like particularly original characters, but they worked for me. In fact, there were a surprising number of these complicated, deep-thinking men - macho warriors who are also in touch with their feminine side. The women have their good points, and they are all strong, independent-minded and sensible, if teetering a little on the edge of fearsome, sometimes, especially the goddess’s high priestess, who can be seriously spooky. But really, these families are so dysfunctional, they make the average soap characters look like paragons of normality. I found it quite hard to believe that Blaise would turn out so rational and honourable, given the father and brother he was blessed with. But then Ademar, the northern king, is the opposite - the weak, foolish and dissolute son of an honourable father.

The plot is one of those teetering-on-the-cusp-of-war affairs. You know it’s going to happen and all the moves are laid out well ahead of time, so it isn’t a surprise, although there are lots of twists and turns along the way. Many of the twists are excellent - dramatic, exciting, unpredictable and not at all contrived. And some of them just fall off a cliff into grandiose melodrama, and become almost eye-rollingly bad. Kay’s writing rescues things from complete idiocy, but really, sometimes I just despair of him. The story’s got a driving pace of its own, there’s no need for the totally over-the-top flourishes. [View spoiler below for details]

Some minor quibbles. Firstly, all the main characters are beautiful, intelligent, witty and talented, not to mention expert lovers. And heroic and honourable and politically astute. Real life isn’t devoid of such striking people, of course, but living, as I do, in a country which still has a hereditary monarchy, I can vouch for the fact that centuries of aristocratic inbreeding is no guarantee of beauty, intelligence or even sanity. Quite the reverse. You might get the odd example, but an entire bookful is stretching credibility. But this is fantasy, so the incredible is (just about) allowed. And in contrast, the villains are stupid or evil or incompetent or all of the above.

Secondly, much of the book hinges on the two very different cultures of Arbonne and Gorhaut. Trouble is, even though Arbonne has a female ruler, worships a goddess alongside a male god and appears to treat women in a deeply respectful, not to say adoring, way, it’s still fundamentally patriarchal. The countess rules only because the count, her husband, has died. There’s still the burning desire for a son and heir. Women are still married off for pragmatic reasons, that is, to produce said son and heir. Men still drive many of the political decisions. Setting women on a romantic pedestal serves only to keep them in their place (in bed, mostly). Yes, they have more freedom and a certain amount of real power, but it’s not exactly an equal society. It’s almost as if, even when he’s trying his damnedest to describe a society where women are equal, yet still different from men, somehow the author can’t quite leave behind the inherent inequalities of our own society. Maybe he thinks that’s really the natural order of the world, or he simply can’t imagine anything different, I don’t know. And the end result is that, in order to make a strong contrast, Gorhaut has to be a deeply unpleasant society which keeps women subservient both by law and by brutality. A more subtle contrast would have been more effective, I think. Or maybe I’m just wearing my grumpy feminist hat today.

I think Kay just about gets away with this, by showing towards the end the real power of women, in both the political and personal spheres, and also their strength of character. So although the ending is, inevitably, a mega-battle between large numbers of men with swords, Kay shows how the women work behind the scenes in more subtle but equally important ways. The ending was heavy on the symbolism and the grand gestures and the clever twists, but in this kind of book, that’s par for the course and entirely proper. So overall a great book that was just a little too melodramatic for me, so four stars. A very, very good four stars.

SPOILER ALERT:

The over-the-top moment that got up my nose: I’m thinking here of Blaise being tied to the bed by Lucianna, about to be gutted by the Arimondan, and one by one major characters leap out from behind the arras to say ‘wait a moment...!’. And then Blaise challenges the guy to a duel, for heaven’s sake! Talk about stupidly contrived plot twists. As if the hero’s going to die at this point anyway... grumble, grumble. Pah!

Review: 'Red Dust Road' by Jackie Kay

I knew nothing about Jackie Kay before opening this book, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark. She writes poetry, it turns out, and has obviously attracted some attention with it because she has an MBE. But this book is not about her writing, it's about how she was adopted and came to find her natural parents. Not that there's much to say about that - they never really become three dimensional, glimpsed in rather fraught occasional meetings in their old age. But if the central focus of the book is a little hazy, the decorative curlicues around the edges, the snippets of life with her adoptive parents, are what bring the story to vivid life, rich with humour and deep affection.

To be honest, I often wonder with a book of this type just why the author decided to write it. Fiction and poetry I can understand - there's a desire to tell a story, to create something new and original, to say something. But a memoir? Why would an author think these little vignettes from an ordinary life, however well written, would be interesting? Is it catharsis? It's clear that meeting her birth parents was a traumatic experience, on both sides, so maybe Kay felt the need for some kind of release, a kind of blood-letting, or perhaps a way of packaging it all up neatly into something small and manageable like a book, so it can be tidily shelved away. But what exactly do all her friends and relations (long-standing or newly discovered) feel to be written about in this tell-all way - the family's secrets spread out in the open for people like me to maul and comment on and make judgments about.

Maybe the author intended it partly as a celebration of her adoptive parents. Certainly the contrast with her birth parents could hardly be more stark, and makes their own eccentricities (they were active socialists and atheists) seem trivial and positively benign by comparison. It is also clear that, whatever the emotional ups and downs and physical difficulties involved in meeting her birth family, and however great her euphoria when things went well, it was always her adoptive parents who grounded her, and formed the solid bedrock of her life.

This is not a particularly original book, in many ways. There are many other works written by people tracing their roots and finding out surprising things about themselves and their families. There are many other works about the experience of being black or lesbian or adopted. Some of them are far more profound or moving than this one. Kay had, after all, a fairly sheltered upbringing in a loving family. Nevertheless, however lightweight the subject matter, Kay's writing skills shine through, and there's enough humour and charm here to make the book an interesting, if not compelling, read. Three stars.

Review: 'The Lions of al-Rassan' by Guy Gavriel Kay

Well, this was a three Kleenex book and no mistake. That's three boxes of Kleenex, of course. Not a book to read on public transport, unless you have no embarrassment gene. No one does grand tragedy quite like Kay. But I'm not totally sure what genre this is. It's more fantasy than anything else, but the world-building is lifted more or less wholesale from the real world, and to say the magic is minimal would be to overstate the case. One individual with sporadic visions does not a magic system make. Not that it makes the book any better or worse to have a neat pigeon-hole for it, of course, but still....

I regard myself as a Kay fan, but I was surprisingly reluctant to start reading this. My only previous encounter with the author was 'Tigana' which I consider a brilliant book, but deeply flawed. Unfortunately, the problems with that book - an over-wrought writing style, too much introspection, a few plot holes, unconvincing last-minute romances - are quite likely to be repeated here. This book is problematic in another way for me, too - it is apparently based on medieval Spain, and the religions are closely modelled on those of the era, only thinly disguised. I find it very disconnecting in a fantasy world to come across anything that reminds me directly of real-world matters. But happily I know nothing at all about that time and place, and 'Tigana' was modelled on medieval Italy and that didn't impinge at all. Altogether, Kay's writing is (mostly) so good that I absolutely have to read this, albeit with concerns.

Typically, having laid out all these reservations, I was under Kay's spell again almost instantly. This is partly the old trick of dangling a mystery under the reader's nose - you have to read on to find out more. What happened to Jehane's father? Whatever catastrophe befell Alvar? But partly it was just the wonderful evocative prose that drew me in. The prologue couldn't quite match the tragedy of the 'Tigana' equivalent, but it was still hugely immersive. Then it was immediately into the middle of a whirlwind of names and places and sly references to events which the reader can't possibly understand (but this is standard fantasy strategy). Despite this, the opening chapters are very readable, with events and settings and characters all interesting in their different ways, culminating in the very moving disclosure of what happened to Jehane's father.

And then somehow, as things move on and the story gets into its stride, everything becomes inexplicably camp and joky and almost silly. Everyone is beautiful and clever and immaculately dressed and three steps ahead of the game. Enemies are easily out-manoeuvred and made to look stupid. The men are super-skilled warriors (or want to be) and/or terribly clever strategists, the women are feisty and opinionated, even the doctor of the low-ranking sect, who should be appropriately subservient, and instead of having her head chopped off for her insubordination, is treated with a chivalrous respect bordering on deference. And everyone has amazing sex, even the religious one who really feels she shouldn't but somehow just can't help herself. There's a certain amount of climbing around on balconies, and writing magnificent poetry, and masquerading unnoticed as a slave, and being tied up by your own wife (one of the feisty women, naturally) leading to more amazing sex. There's a moment where the two leading male protagonists' eyes meet across a crowded room which would be in slow motion if it were a film. It could almost be a parody. And for some completely unknown reason, every time one bloke's pearl ear-ring was mentioned, I had a sudden mental image of Captain Jack Sparrow. And the one with the moustache - Tom Selleck. Very disconcerting.

Fortunately, Kay is a skilled writer who never quite lets things slip out of his grasp into the ridiculous. There's a lot of introspection and people standing around analysing and explaining things to each other, but just at the point where you start thinking - that's enough, get on with it - things start happening again. And all that analysing does make it easy to follow the intricacies of the political situation. There's a lot of jumping about from one perspective to another, and some of the jumping is in time, too, so you hear about an event from one character and later (sometimes much later) see it happen from a different perspective. This is confusing at first, but quickly becomes easy to follow.

The characters are all larger than life, but then sometimes, even in real life, people really are that talented, that charismatic, that brilliant, that far-sighted. The story is about sweeping changes and epic battles and extraordinary times, and maybe that demands extraordinary characters to match. Kay's skill is in also making them human and believable, which he does much better here than in 'Tigana', although a few frailties wouldn't have gone amiss either. Sometimes one tires of perfection.

The various cities, or the parts we see, are created with a nice eye for detail, although the world beyond is only sketched in with a word or two here and there. The author brilliantly conveys the nuances of the different societies and religions in his world, and the uneasy tensions between them - the pious and unrefined Jaddites in the north, the relaxed and cultured Asharites in al-Rassan, and the fanatical desert-dwelling Muwardis to the south. And caught in the middle, the quiet and learned Kindath, despised by everyone.

Eventually, the story builds to the point where Our Heroes are no longer three steps ahead of everyone else, and start having to react to events, and this is where things really become tense. I do find it a little odd that, just as the continent-wide war is coming to the boil, some of the top warriors start careering all over the place on purely personal business, to rescue two specific individuals, the parents of a friend. I know that Kay is making a point about friendship and loyalty (regardless of faith) here, so I let it pass, but it still seems a little suspect for contracted warriors to just take off like that.

And so the point arrives that has been unavoidable almost from the start, and the reason for all the Kleenex. And even though I guessed it had to come, I still wanted, deep inside, someone to see sense and call a halt to it all. There has to be a better way to settle differences than having the prime of your manhood slaughtering each other on the battlefield. Football, maybe. Going off to the pub and getting plastered and singing maudlin songs together. Pretty much anything, really. The ending actually feels slightly rushed - a quick summary of the war so far, leading to the inevitable confrontation, where Kay totally cheats - he doesn't tell us the outcome, moving instead to an epilogue twenty years later, with at least two clear pieces of deliberate misdirection before we finally find out what happened. Naughty.

This is one of those books that stays with you. Despite the sometimes overwrought writing style, despite the oddly camp moments, the story has both breadth and depth. The themes it touches on are timeless - duty and honour and the glory of war, as well as the personal tragedy of it. Friendship and loyalty and love and family. The nature of civilisation. Why good men who share love and trust and respect can still kill each other for abstractions like god and country. How honourable and pious people can do unspeakable things to their fellow humans. It's all very depressing, but then it's about war and religion so common sense doesn't come into it. I would have liked a more upbeat ending, but this is Kay's story and it certainly carries great emotional resonance.

My initial reservations were not entirely without foundation. The setting was too close to historical reality for my taste, and the three religions were too easily equated with Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Kay's writing style is still highly emotional, but, compared with 'Tigana', I felt it was under better control here, and the love affairs were much better integrated - entirely integral to the story and given some depth, instead of feeling like an afterthought. I enjoyed this one even more, and see it as a very worthy five stars.

Review: 'Tigana' by Guy Gavriel Kay

This is a stand-alone book, and thank goodness for a fantasy author who can tell a story in a single volume. The premise is wonderful - the Tigana of the title is a province which has been so comprehensively destroyed by its sorceror conqueror that even its name has been (magically) erased from the population's memories.

The book starts promisingly. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it has quite the finest opening chapter I have ever read, evocative, lyrical and very moving. And for a while the story burbles along very pleasantly, following the adventures of Devin, a talented singer with a travelling troupe, who unexpectedly finds himself drawn into a major political plot.

But as Devin begins to uncover the layers of conspiracy, the writing becomes bogged down. A disaster occurs, and the main group of characters escape to the woods, telling each other they have to leave the area at once. They then spend a great many pages sitting around talking. They remind each other that they have to leave - and then go back to the scene of the disaster, for many more pages of talking. And even as they set off, they are sidetracked again and - yes, more pages of talking. And Kay tells us at great length exactly what Devin is thinking and feeling during all of this, in mind-numbing detail. Some of this is useful exposition, but it soon begins to drag. I am not a big fan of all-action fantasy, but the plot has to move along a little quicker than this.

When we are introduced to Dianora (or Diorama, as I keep wanting to call her), things improve a little. There is still an inordinate amount of introspection, and a whole series of flashbacks, very out of sequence, and her dilemma seems a little contrived to me (having plotted for one single purpose for years, she finds herself unable to follow through? because of love? oh dear). But we do get to meet one of the two sorcerors keeping the population in subjection and he turns out to be a much more complex and interesting character than just a Big Bad, which is all to the good.

After this point, there is a better division of time between the two threads of the plot, and there are more action sequences and some intriguing magic interludes. There are also some less successful sections, which seem almost superfluous to the story. Kay is still far too wordy, however, and he has a bad habit of throwing in a lot of meaningful glances or cryptic remarks or 'suddenly, X understood' type lines, without actually explaining to the reader what is going on, which is totally infuriating.

But then the two main threads come together, and (almost magically) everything gels in a truly wonderful way. The final chapters are dramatic, beautifully written and have some wonderful twists, and, best of all, everything derives from what went before so that it all makes perfect sense and achieves a magnificent poetic justice.

Yes, the book is overwritten, the characters constantly over-analyse and over-emote, and the romantic interludes are sketchy, at best, and unconvincing. And although the characters are not entirely one-dimensional, neither do they have a totally believable realism. This is partly because many of them are introduced in disguise, so that we are unsure whose side they are on, and this creates a barrier to liking them wholeheartedly. Only Devin and Alais escape this fate, because we never see them as other than they are.

But despite all its flaws, the premise of the story, the world-building and the skillful way the author builds to the final confrontation all make this an unforgettable book. A good 4 stars. [First written April 2011]