In Canadian fantasy, I look to Charles de Lint and Guy Gavriel Kay as “the big two”, both producing an immense amount of often beautiful and highly influential work in decidedly different modes. Charles de Lint takes the low fantasy route: faerie in Ottawa, urban fantasy, magic realism, concerned with relatively small-scale events and individual characters. Guy Gavriel Kay is decidedly “high fantasy”: expansive narratives steeped in myth, language, history, often using archetypal figures, a cast of thousands, and sometimes using grandiose language to convey a very large story. I don’t prefer either mode, both authors are just fabulous by me. However, I’ve read more Kay, and a recent read of The Fionavar Tapestry and its semi-sequel Ysabel has put me in a talking-about-Guy-Gavriel-Kay mood. So, let’s talk about Guy Gavriel Kay, shall we?
Kay’s best-known work, and the majority of his output, are his historical fantasies. He takes known periods of history and changes the names, a bit, rearranges the timeline, a bit, and adds a bit of magic. If this sounds rather trite, I’ll hasten to add that this method works remarkably well in producing fantasy that engages on a deeper level with history than most historical novels ever achieve. The Lions of Al-Rassan replays the Reconquista, but it’s a Reconquista divorced from real-world prejudices and historical memory by remapping the three major religions in Islamic Andalusia from Jews, Muslims and Christians to, respectively, Moon-worshippers (the Kindath), star-worshippers (the Asharites), and sun-worshippers (the Jaddites) in the Kaliphate of Al-Rassan. As Kay put it, he “wanted to see what would happen to people’s preconceptions and prejudices about cultures…if the names were changed and if the religious beliefs were rendered virtually banal” (Interview with Solaris, 1995). It’s not so much allegory as re-examination, and allows for insights that might otherwise have remained hidden by the narratives surrounding the Christian conquest of Spain and the eventual demise of the Caliphate of Cordova. I don’t think Kay quite succeeded with The Lions of Al-Rassan due to some stylistic disagreements, but the same idea gets expanded upon (to much greater effect) in The Sarantine Mosaic and The Last of the Sun. Both novels take place in the same two-mooned world, but in different times and places: one in the Byzantine Empire in late antiquity and the other in England during the Viking conquest.
Kay’s earlier novel Tigana is less specific about history and place—it’s set in a vague reproduction of renaissance Italy (with the quite clever conceit of foot-shaped Italy now bearing the form of a hand), but the issues are more far-ranging and less bound to a specific historical moment; “[i]n Tigana and A Song for Arbonne, Kay still appears to treat history as merely a convenient source of narrative suitable for eucatastrophic revision” wrote Christopher Cobb (“Guy Gavriel Kay and the Psychology of History”). You can quite clearly see a move from more vague, universal applications of history towards the particular in Kay’s work over the years; Ysabel forgoes the secondary world altogether and deals with the interplay between myth and history in our own world.
Compared to Kay’s later work, The Fionavar Tapestry is something of an anomaly. First off, all of Kay’s output post-Fionavar has been stand-alone novels (and one duology); Fionavar is a trilogy. Not only a trilogy, but a rather traditional Tolkienic trilogy at that, featuring slightly-renamed elves (the lios alfar), slightly-renamed orcs (the svart alfar), dwarves, a Dark Lord (Rakoth Maugrim, the Unraveller) in his terrible fastness in the shadow of a giant mountain—though not, fortunately, a volcano. Elves even travel west across the sea to pass into paradise. The Fionavar Tapestry bears to The Lord of the Rings the same relationship Kay’s later novels bear to human history. The same elements renamed, re-shuffled, re-deployed. On the other hand, despite starting off stilted and hackneyed (five students at the University of Toronto meet a wizard who takes them to Fionavar for a summer festival, and the students are a little too nonchalant about the whole thing), Kay’s trilogy ends up eliciting an emotional response far greater than anything produced by the usual Tolkien imitator. There is, of course, a reason for all this, since Kay’s lifting elements from The Lord of the Rings was quite deliberate. As Kay himself explains (and repeated many times in other interviews):
Fionavar was planned as a trilogy because it was a self-conscious, self-aware attempt to make a statement. In retrospect it’s amusing. But back then I was “shocked and appalled” at the barbarians in the temple — the post-Tolkien trivialization of fantasy that I saw happening. And the serious writers of fantasy — the people I respected — were it seemed to me turning away from epic fantasy to other kinds of smaller scale work. Urban fantasy was born around that time — people like Megan Lindholm, Charles de Lint. Small, precise, nicely done books. But they were almost a kind of abandoning of the field of the epic scale to the hacks. And it ticked me off a bit. It seemed to me a premature abandonment. I really felt that the elements of high fantasy — the elements that Tolkien had taken from myth and legend — not the elements he invented, the elements he took from primary sources — were still there to be taken and worked with. And they could be recombined in different ways — you could work with those same core elements and come to a different destination. And so Fionovar was very consciously a statement that I’m going to do a tremendous number of the formulaic things — it’s going to even be a trilogy. Back then a trilogy was standard, now it’s as far as you want to go. A trilogy was almost synonymous with big fantasy. I’m going to address the middle book problem — a specific creative dilemma you have when you’re doing a trilogy. I’m going to work with figures such as elves and dwarves and magic and prophecy. I’m going to consciously take these elements and try to add to them characterization, complexity of motivation, ambiguity of morality — and see if it’s possible to marry these things and produce something that can at least lay claim to having merit. (Interview with Challenging Destiny)
The reference to Charles de Lint and Megan Lindholm is also amusing, in retrospect, as the kind-of-but-not-really sequel to The Fionavar Tapestry, Ysabel, resembles the work of those authors far more than it resembles the work of Tolkien. In essence, however, Kay wrote a response to The Sword of Shannarah, The Iron Tower trilogy, and The Wheel of Time whatever-you-call-a-series-of-that-many-books*. The first element in which this is noticeable is Kay’s chosen writing style. Rather than the fat volumes favoured by epic fantasy, each of the component books of The Fionavar Tapestry (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road) is quite short and precise. While it has its clunky bits, Kay’s foray into Fionavar contains some of his best writing, moving effortlessly between high and low diction to produce some truly dazzling passages. It’s also rather sparse compared to Kay’s later novels; the rather unfortunate tendency for Kay to explain the deep significance of some situation or another actually feels genuine here if it appears at all. Tigana, Kay’s first novel post-Fionavar, isn’t nearly as compact. It might be that I’m just a little more sympathetic towards rougher, terser prose, which we don’t really see from Kay again until The Last Light of the Sun.
Kay’s trilogy succeeds because, like his historical fantasies engage with history, he engages with Tolkien on a much deeper level than most of his contemporaries. Part of the reason was Kay’s work editing The Silmarillion, I’m sure. Yet, unlike so many fantasy authors, I think he truly understands the idea of the eucatastrophe. The central lynchpin of The Fionavar Tapestry is not the defeat of the Dark Lord by a motley band of unlikely heroes, but, rather, a eucatastrophe involving a well-known tragedy:
The Fionavar Tapestry was a deliberate attempt to work within the traditions of high fantasy, which incorporates the idea, in Tolkien’s word, of the eucatastrophe, the reverse of the catastrophe. The resolution of the Arthurian love triangle, the unbinding of that curse, would be central to the eucatastrophe at the end of the book. (Interview with Raymond H. Thompson, 1998)
Which explains a great deal of why The Fionavar Tapestry works even with the admittedly hokey introduction of King Arthur into the narrative. In other interviews, Kay noted his general annoyance that writers of epic fantasy were simply stripping elements from The Lord of the Rings and copying them without any knowledge of the myths and legends from with Tolkien drew. The vast bulk of fantasy novels since 1977 were simulacra, in a sense, reproducing elements from a reproduction, disconnected from the sources that made earlier fantasies such as Tolkien, E.R. Eddison and William Morris’s works so powerful in the first place. The Fionavar Tapestry goes right back to the wellspring, as it were, directly drawing from Norse, Celtic and Arthurian myth and legend, before twisting them slightly to Kay’s own ends. Despite being formulaic, Kay’s work still elicits an emotional reaction because Kay actually understood the formula on a deep level, instead of just skimming the surface.
The conscientiously mythic nature of the text makes The Fionavar Tapestry somewhat more distant than his other works. The land of Fionavar feels strangely empty, if expansive. Characters are often archetypes. Yet, thanks to Kay’s understanding and his skill, it works. At it’s best, The Fionavar Tapestry achieves an emotional resonance and mythic dimension that I don’t think Kay has ever quite matched since. At it’s worst, it reads like The Lord of the Rings – The Once and Future King crossover fan fiction—but still, really good The Lord of the Rings – The Once and Future King crossover fan fiction. On that note, I think Kay largely succeeded in what he set out to do, which is the best way to judge a book or series.
That being said, I still find Kay’s historical fantasies the better reads, and Kay’s tact since Fionavar an admirable one. Yet, even in Fionavar, I feel you can see the roots of the direction Kay would take later on. In a sense, Kay went in with the goal of engaging The Lord of the Rings and post-Tolkienic fantasy and had nothing left to say about it afterwards (he’d made his statement), but over the course of writing The Fionavar Tapestry, he started engaging with myth and history on a level beyond what he intended. If that’s the case, his move on to historical fantasy was only natural. And, perhaps, even necessary.
Kim was on her feet, her heart racing, and then she was suddenly very confused.
She could never have explained rationally why the presence of a Dwarf woman should surprise her so much, why she’d assumed without ever giving it a moment’s thought, that the females among dwarves should look like…oh, beardless, stocky equivalents of fighting men like Matt or Brock. After all, she herself didn’t resemble Coll of Taerlindel or Dave Martyniuk. At least on a good day she didn’t!
(Guy Gavriel Kay on dwarf women, The Fionavar Tapestry – omnimbus edition – pg. 630)
*I am aware that The Wheel of Time post-dates The Fionavar Tapestry. It’s still a fitting example.
Excellent analysis; I enjoyed reading it. I read and reviewed Tigana last year, and am interested in picking up some other of Kay’s novels. His approach seems to be a highly effective one. However, one thing that bugged me about Tigana–and nearly ruined an otherwise masterpiece for me–was his obsession with perverse and graphic sex. His sex scenes (none of them could be called “love” scenes) were embarrassingly gratuitous and really hurt my opinions of the characters involved, and of Kay’s judgment. So I’m curious–how is The Fionovar Tapestry in this regard? I’m a fan of Tolkien but not of most of his imitators, so I would be interested to see how Kay approaches that “Tolkienic” high fantasy; I’d just rather not have to suffer through a minutely-detailed sex scene to get to it, you know?
Thanks again for this analysis!
I assume you’re referring to “surprise bondage scene” in Tigana. There’s nothing quite like that in The Fionavar Tapestry; there is some sex, but described at a greater distance than in his other works. I personally didn’t find it gratuitous. Then again, I read through Gary Jennings’ “historical-pornographic” books when I was an adolescent, so take that for what it’s worth.
he “wanted to see what would happen to people’s preconceptions and prejudices about cultures…if the names were changed and if the religious beliefs were rendered virtually banal”
Well, my reaction was to hold it up as an example of Really Really Really Bad World-Building.
And you know what? I’m going to go on doing it, because it is indeed that bad.
I would debate whether you could call it “world-building”. The Lions of Al-Rassan has little difference from the actual Reconquista beyond some geographical rejuggling and a compressed time span; it’s too much a reflection of our world to really separate the novel’s setting from the history that inspired it. Sailing to Sarantium/Lord of Emperors and The Last Light of the Sun were much more effective deployments of the same idea, in part because the world is more clearly “off” from our own, and the magic much more present.
Michal,
Yes, that scene was the big one that really struck me as bad taste, but I also disliked the incest subplot and the pornographic description of the first sex scene, even if that one had a plot justification. But anyway, thanks for the reply. I might give Fionavar a try sometime, but at the moment I’ve got a pretty huge reading list to go through first. Thanks again for the informative article.
It has a major, enormous, and terrible difference: he didn’t succeed in making the beliefs banal;, he omitted them entirely. There are not three religions there; there are three labels, used to explain why characters are hateful.
It is Ghastly, Terrible, Unspeakably Bad World-Building.
I’ve never really been all that interested in Kay’s works, simply because, having an MA in history, I’m loathe to read something I might find incredibly problematic. But it kind of sounds like Kay dodged a few bullets about which I might be worried. I’m going to have to give him a try in the coming year.
@Michal: Any suggestions for which books in Kay’s oeuvre I should read first?
@Mary: I’ll keep your criticisms in mind when I finally get to reading Kay’s stuff.
Dave: I’d say start where I started; The Sarantine Mosaic, which is actually made up of two books: Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. Kay does immeasurably better with the religious aspect than in The Lions of Al-Rassan; I’ll agree with Mary there, the three faiths in Al-Rassan are criminally underdeveloped (but it’s at least gratifying to see it done as bald-faced fiction, when so much history these days explains away religious motivations as fronts for other desires, according to our dominant secularist narrative). I also greatly enjoyed The Last Light of the Sun (kay’s best novel, I think) and Ysabel. Tigana and Under Heaven…not so much.