Oh boy! This is part of my "please read my favorite book exchange" with N at bb&b -- I'm reading a bunch of Kays and she's reading the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. I have an advantage, though; I already know I like Kay a lot. I have vivid childhood memories of reading Sailing to Sarantium and The Lions of Al-Rassan (which made me cryyyyyyyyyyy, oh man, inevitable noble self-sacrifice is my favorite).
This book is... kind of hard to describe? It's more of a book ABOUT stories than a story, and it feels like it's taking place almost between stories. Half the characters are fathers who've already lived and survived their own adventures; the other half of the characters are young men and women who are just going out into the world to start making their names and futures. This book is very much about the passing of the torch from one generation to the other, but it ended just about the point where the story I really really wanted to read was starting.
It's haunting and lovely and slightly hard to describe because Kay doesn't write history, he writes alternate history, even though all the characters are really clear people. (Carloman, for example, is a not-very-subtle Charlemagne.) I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who people were and substituting Kay's made-up places and names for the real ones in my head. At the end, Kay thanks all the people who helped him with research on early England and Vikings, and... if you're going to do that, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just write about the real places. You could easily add fairies to a story about Aeldred (clearly Alfred the Great). And since I'm just going to read Anglycn as "Anglican" (as in Anglo-saxons) why not just write it? I don't know. It felt like I spent energy connecting those dots that I could have spent enjoying the book instead.
Anyway, it's about a not-Viking who has to make his own life since his father was exiled; it's about a not-Welsh prince who has to decide what to do with his grief and rage after he loses someone he loves; it's about the first King of not-England who successfully held off the Vikings. It has a couple of characters dealing with grief that felt incredibly real to me, and their anger at religion when it doesn't have answers to questions. There are some DELIGHTFUL women, although I wish they'd had more to do.
The book ends with something sad, and then something truly, truly delightful, and I wish this book were the prequel to the next book about Alun and Kendra and their whole generation. The book stops several times to tell us that stories turn on tiny changes, and fate is determined by tiny moments in time and coincidences. It's a really lovely read, but it's more of a meditation on what makes stories than it actually IS a story, if you see what I mean.
Grade: A
#28 in 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment