Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay

This is the kind of book that's so obviously good that most of what I want to talk about is poking holes and asking questions. I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but when I watch or read something that's GREAT, I want to deconstruct it and look at all the insides.

This is a classic fairytale; evil wizards have taken over the land, and there's a missing prince who has to figure out how to get rid of them, unite his people, and reclaim his country. This is difficult because the evil wizard has cast a spell so no one except people born there can even remember the name of his country. But Kay goes in for all the nitty-gritty. It isn't easy and it isn't particularly romantic.  It has a lot of classic tropes -- the young singer who gets swept up in the adventure, the prince and his best friend from childhood, the fiery young redheaded girl who's part of the team... these are people I've run into in lots of books, which probably borrowed them in part from this one. I wish I'd read this one when I was a teenager, when they would have been fresher for me. It's like when I finally watched Annie Hall in my late 20s. None of the jokes landed especially well, because I've seen them ripped off and redone (not always as well) so many times.

Anyway, there is adventuring and singing and traveling and romance and wizards and a couple of BIG surprise twists and some very sad backstory, and evil badguys, and romance. Sort of. Kay is kiiiind of part of the school of romance mixed hand-in-hand with tragedy. Which can be beautiful, and one of my clearest book memories is bawling my eyes out over the Lions of Al-Rassan. (Oh man, the end of that book.) I liked the mix of romance and tragedy here, and all the musings about how we'll be remembered, and what it means to make choices. Just a really lovely, thoughtful story. A fairytale with meditation.

Before I go into the other thing here, I want to make it clear -- I liked this book a lot. I enjoyed reading it. I love these tropes and I got VERY misty-eyed at the end. The epilogue is LOVELY and all I want is a thousand stories about after the epilogue. I'd read all of them.

Okay, but: if I had one noticing about this book (that's what we do at work, we "notice," we don't judge) it's that there is a very odd undercurrent with regards to women. None of it on its own would be much to talk about, but taken all together there's a pattern. Mild spoilers follow.

So many of the female characters are defined by their sexual availability. Our firey red-headed heroine, whom I like a lot, fucks Devin in a closet in a very early scene to stop him overhearing plans. Then in flashback we see that she's made a big deal of how she isn't going to sleep with anyone. One of our main characters, in order to get revenge on the evil wizard, has become a member of his harem, and one of his most favored ladies. She likes him (specifically sex with him) so much that she hasn't been able to bring herself to murder him (maybe). We meet a queen (kind of) who has clearly slept with everyone involved in our hero's group; she comes to Devin's door in the middle of the night and has crazy sex with him all night, including tying him to the bed when he's not sure he wants to continue. It's a real learning moment for him, we're told. There's a woman fighting midnight evil monsters, who brings one of our main characters into her fight, and then sleeps with him after they triumph. Oh, and there's a country that had a matriarchy, which is uniformly presented as a negative thing that has destroyed trade, but now a guy has murdered the high priestess and taken over, and everything is going to be better.

None of these female characters would bother me on their own, but as a group it seems like this book has a very specific view of women and power, and how women get and wield power. (In fairness, there is an elderly mother who isn't presented in terms of who she slept with, and there is a romantic interest, whom I liked a lot, who doesn't sleep with anyone. She is kind of a classic Good Girl, though, contrasted with all these sexy, powerful women, including her little sister who is desperate for sex and marriage.) Just... taken together, it all felt like a lot. This is one of those things that isn't going to bother or even ping most people. For me, it felt like a pattern that I'd like to talk about more. I haven't read enough Kay as an adult to know if it's pervasive or specific to this book.

So there are all my thoughts! This was a long, lovely book that honestly felt like it could have been even longer, and I would have enjoyed it. A three-book series, maybe, with a set of sequels that went on and on and on, and I'd read all of them.

Grade: .......value is undefined. Can't do it. Either a B or an A, depending on how you're looking at it.

#36 in 2016

The Last Light of the Sun, Guy Gavriel Kay

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