Under Heaven

Did you ever have a craving for something? Something you know is going to be good, something that has never let you down, something that will scratch an itch that's been pestering you for a while? And then, when you finally get that want fulfilled, it's something of a letdown?

Wow, that's subtle, isn't it?

Guy Gavriel Kay is one of my favorite living writers, and one of the few that I will by hardback versions of as they come out. And for a couple of months, I have been craving some really strong writing, not just stuff that was "okay" or "it'll do." I wanted to be swept up in a book and consider skipping work in order to finish it, breathless until the last word went by. Usually Kay does that for me. And I'll admit right up front that such a load of expectations may easily have swayed my final opinion of his latest novel, Under Heaven. This newest book has all the right pieces and parts (flavors and spices) but it just does not come together as well as others of Kay's novels. This is not to say, by any means, that this is a bad book—heavens, no; Kay still takes his readers on a roller coaster of pseudo-historical fiction, with strong characters, tremendous interplay, and some of the most deft plotting I have ever read. Something was lacking this time around, and I find my craving not quite subsiding. The Pizza Rule—there's two kinds of pizza: good pizza and pizza that is still better than most any other food out there—may be in effect.

If you'll recall from previous reviews of Kay's work, Kay generally writes about historic periods in world history, transmuting them slightly to give them a light fantasy touch and then runs with them. In the past he has written about Medieval Italy, Moorish Spain, and the Byzantine Empire; this time around, Under Heaven takes us to the Tang Dynasty in China. As I think about it, it really isn't necessary to know the correlation between Kay's fictional worlds and their real-world counterparts; everything you need to know is somewhere within the Kay's storytelling. However, in a larger sense, it's fascinating how Kay can bring these vibrant and exciting periods, now dead in most of the minds of current readers, brilliantly to life.

The general movement of Kay's "historic" novels goes like this: introduce a character, then move along the web of that character's association with other characters, then begin to fill them all out with back story and interaction with each other, while at the same time, begin to build the setting for the crisis of the novel. It may sound formulaic, but Kay is fine craftsman in his development of characters and plot, such that the formula isn't really visible until you sit back and compare the progression with other of his works. Kay often introduces his main character in the middle of a smaller crisis, thus quickly revealing to the reader not just how this character appears, but also how he/she truly is. The effect is an almost instantaneous rapport and interest in what happens in the character's life. Under Heaven is no different: we meet Shen Tai, the second son of a powerful general of the Kitai Empire, in the midst of performing ritual mourning duties after the death of his father. Tai has chosen to go to a battlefield where his father had perhaps his greatest victory, over barbarians intent on invasion, and to live a fairly monastic life burying the remains of both his fallen countrymen and those of their enemy. Tai generally works alone on this task, accompanied only by the nightly voices of the ghosts of those he buried, angry and sad at the disposition of their remains.

But Tai's tremendous memorial service has not gone unrecognized in the two years he has been serving; the local garrison of the Kitai brings him supplies, as does the local garrison of the Tagurans, the foes of his father. And as the end of the period of mourning approaches, the Tagurans, led by a commander that Tai has begun to consider a friend, bring him news of the tremendous gift a princess of the Tagurans offers him in gratefulness for his actions: 250 of the greatest horses alive. While the Kitai have horses, mostly they are small and weak compared to the great Sardian horses that are prized throughout the continent, whose only analog on Earth would be Arabians. Not only is Tai immediately wealthy beyond his every imagining, such a gift makes him an immediate political power, one to invoke jealousy or admiration among the officials of Kitai. Which, in turn, makes him an immediate target, as that very night he has to thwart an attempt on his own life.

The rest of Under Heaven sets about describing the political and cultural climate that Tai must now enter into with his ridiculous gift, a process Kay accomplishes by introducing the reader to more and more individuals throughout the empire, making them real to the reader by making them full, and then offering their opinions and judgments on the world that Tai is returning to. And even as Kay describes it, that very world is trembling under various shifts going on around it, not the least of which is the potential arrival of 250 horses. The reader's attention is torn between what is happening to the empire whose rulers Tai is suddenly thrust among and the development of Tai, as he realizes his two years have dramatically changed him and the world he thought he wanted to be a part of.

I've said elsewhere that Kay is a masterful storyteller, tweaking the reader with humor and pathos with skill. Characters on whom Kay spends just a few pages are tragically killed, and the reader's heart breaks because we know them so very well in such a tiny space. And generally there is no predicting where the paths of the characters will end up, so the reader must hang on until the story is concluded. And so it goes in Under Heaven, as the novel rushes to moments of consequence to the Kital Empire. All the threads that Kay lays out so skillfully weave together in a tapestry, and the reader recognizes that even the trivial moments that Kay has described all lead to the crisis, and that as important as the crisis may be, it is made up of individuals who are people, with assets and faults that make them sometimes achingly human.

The weakness in Under Heaven is only noticeable by comparison. There is a crisis, and all the characters' lives are changed by it, but it doesn't carry nearly the emotional and dramatic force that similar crises in other novels have. Everything sets up for it, and Kay deploys the same strategies that have worked so effectively in other novels: foreshadowing and plot devices and turns of phrases that over his oeuvre have become laden with portent. And yet when the crisis happens here (and I apologize for clumsiness of trying not to give any spoilers away), the main character Tai, doesn't have nearly so much emotional resources tied into it and ends up being something more like a witness rather than a participant. Kay also talks about how future historians of the Kitai will view the crisis that we get to see firsthand, and all of their descriptions blunt the emotional effect of what we see, in part because the historians get it wrong. No doubt, however, that there is power in this crisis; the reader recognizes as the characters do that immense power and privilege do not excuse even emperors and their court from What Must Be. And therein lies something of the tragedy that undergirds Under Heaven. But through Kay's descriptions, it has become clear that a change must be made for the life of the Kitai Empire, so what happens is not nearly so much a shock, again, as other similar crises in other Kay novels.

It's still evocative, and again citing the Pizza Rule, it's still better than most of the fantasy published today. And I will more than likely read this book a number of times in my lifetime. It's just that, when asked, it will not be the first Kay book I would recommend. That said, I still do recommend it, especially to readers who want something more than the formulas that make up most of the current heroic fantasy. Some Kay is better than no Kay at all.

The Sarantine Mosaic

This is a selection I have read for my book group, so I will not go into a lot of detail, although I certainly could.

The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay is actually two books, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. In many ways, I think this story may be the epitome of Kay's writing; everything comes together in a powerful way. Sometimes when I am proselytizing Kay, I am asked what makes him such a remarkable writer. There are many aspects worth talking about, but it is his characterization that seems the strongest to me.

In this case, there is a putative main character, Crispin, with whom we spend more time than any other character. His history is given and his current position--his career, his outlook, his thoughts--are revealed through fairly standard means. But over the course of the two books, Crispin changes and grows, sometimes glacially slow and sometimes lightning fast. But Kay's artistry can be seen by recognizing that the changes are never forced or dramatically misdirected. Over the course of the novel, we get to know the characters so well, that the seeds of the changes they undergo are fairly apparent upon hindsight. Crispin goes from being a disaffected artist uncaring about anything but his family (and barely them) to one who is actually optimistic, though cynically so. His incredible intelligence is explicitly described by the narrator, but then we see it used repeatedly until it becomes a little bit of a trope. Because a person can't generally choose to turn their intelligence on and off, and so a character shouldn't be avle to either. And then Kay twists hard, causing Crispin to make a fairly simple mistake, yet having revealed the possibility of the mistake early on and thus not failing to keep Crispin's characterization stable. And a great part of that mistake is based on Crispin dealing with someone that he himself admits may be even smarter than he is.

In fact, Kay's characterizations stretch credibility with this point: all of the "main" characters in this novel are supremely gifted at what they choose to do, whether it be architecture, chariot-racing, or governance. All of the characters are lovingly crafted with tremendous depth revealed to the reader in stages, just as the facets of any personality surface cumulatively. And standing at the center of it is Crispin, bewildered and bewildering in his time. As I read, I admired the craft of all these brilliant people, feeling more and more removed from their world, given the improbability, in my mind, of their coming together. Then as I pondered real-life reflections of this powerful a web of acquaintances, I realized that it's true in the real world as well: smart people tend to come together into their own circles.

And while Crispin stands at the center of it all, he is the perfect representative of ourselves in the story. He has travelled to a city he has only heard of and has to learn how to deal with its citizens and its culture much as a reader of a new novel has to learn the nuamce of the place his reading takes him. And Crispin has to be smart, or else the plot's movements would remain mostly unrevealed to him and his readers. Unfortunately, Kay used "tapestry" as a title in an earlier series; otherwise it would be a better metaphor for the connective relationships that bind the characters. From an outside point of view it is a mosaic, but somehow "mosaic" feels static in comparison to "tapestry." The Sarantine world is anything but static.

As I have alluded to, The Sarantine Mosaic is incredibly powerful for many reasons, and well worth the time it takes to read it. And while Crispin's isn't the only point-of-view we have throughout, it is the most powerful, adn the one we both begin and end with. We feel his joy and the depths of his sadness, not just because Kay describes them but because his character is so well-developed that, like any for other friend, we can predict his emoption before events cause Crispin to feel them himself.

Ysabel

My speculative fiction book group has read a collection of fables and the Odyssey in order to talk about myths and legends as a sort of proto-speculative fiction, a forerunner of modern SF, or even the SF of its time. It's an interesting discussion to have, because as we surpass a century of "modern" SF, some of the earliest stories have a feel to them similar the ancient myths and legends. The speculative parts of the stories no longer hold up to any sort of examination and they remain as an artifact of the period they came from.

I don't know if Guy Gavriel Kay is any sort of mythographer, but the foundation on which his novels is built is the idea that myths and legends are manifestations of universal tropes--the important elements of individual myths are universal. It's very Campbellian, but Kay the novelist finds this to be fertile ground in which to work his art. And what he does, better than any writer I know, is take the awe-inspiring power of the mythological and legendary, and wrap up the thoroughly mundane in it. In most myths, any average person who gets in the way of the gods is usually made to regret their ill luck. But Kay tries to tell the legendary through the eyes of the generally powerless and point out how they are integral and key to the events of the myth and legend. Ordinary people touched by myth are not doomed in Kay's writing; they are, however, changed (usually physically and emotionally). This does not mean that Kay dumbs down his legends to where they are vapid--fortunately, Kay spends time working honestly through the complexities of the legends, and does it through the eyes of the mundane, so that the reader can see both the majesty of larger-than-life figures and their very humanity at the same time.

Kay's latest novel, Ysabel, is yet another example of the brilliance he employs in his craft. Ned Marriner, 15, is in Provence while his world-famous photographer father is working on an art book about the region. During a break, Ned meets a young girl named Kate in a cathedral in Aix, and she acts as an informal tour guide for him. Together they run into a strange, scarred man, who seems abnormally strong and, they eventually realize, some hundreds if not thousands of years old. Through their interaction with him, Ned and Kate find themselves drawn into the latest manifestation of a chain of events that has repeated itself for thousands of years. Because of the sheer lifetimes of the creatures involved and the magic that surrounds both their longevity and the circumstances that ensnare them, Ned and Kate find themselves trapped in a legend, whose horrible end they know and recognize may be their own ends as well.

But Kay does something different with Ysabel. At last, the novel takes place on the Earth think we know. And the magic which has such interesting properties in his other novels set in other places, is both weaker and more supernatural than the magic of the standard high fantasy. Instead, the force that moves the characters through the novel is equal parts fate and sheer human stubbornness. Ned and the characters that surround him are determined not to let the end they see coming actually arrive, though when they ask themselves what they think they might be able to do, they never know. Only when decision is required of Ned does he somehow know the right thing to do, because he has become part of the legend, the narrative that binds them all together. The two supernatural protagonists that Ned most often interacts with ask him repeatedly "Who are you?" and while he does not have an answer that suits him or them, he most often says "I'm in the story."

Kay is not a wonderful stylist; his words don't leap off the page. However, his skill does seem to lie in story-telling, creating a compelling narrative and populating it with three-dimensional characters. The pacing of his stories is immaculate--not a wasted word or effort--and the reader is simultaneously impatient to find out what happens next and breathless from the speed of the events in the narrative. In Ysabel, there is no real sense that any of the characters are evil, but they do have their dark sides. But this is not to say they are all boring either. They are individuals, wrapped up in events bigger than themselves and trying to win free. And because of Kay's art of building up the action and then setting it free, that we both want to linger with these people we like and also hurry them into whatever the narrative holds for them.

I admit it; I am a huge fan of Kay. I was elated to receive an early copy of this book, one I had been looking forward to since I turned the last page of his previous novel. I am predisposed to like what Kay writes, but I honestly believe in the power and art of his craft. I don't ever want to put down one of his books, and that surely reflects on his ability to tell a story.