Guy Gavriel Kay's YSABEL

Guy Gavriel Kay's trilogy, the Fionavar Tapestry, ended very satisfyingly and completely, wrapping up pretty much for good that realm's big story. But I'd heard there was a sequel of sorts anyway and my skeptical eyebrow shot up. Stupid eyebrow.

Ysabel is and isn't that sequel; its being a sequel only in that we get to see what became of the two Toronto characters who were the only ones of the Five that chose to return to our world after the Tapestry trilogy's events concluded. They're not super important to the plot of Ysabel, so I'm not going to name them and just avoid any chance of spoilers; I'll just say it was nice to see them again and get a bit more of what their lives had been like before and were like after those other books took place.

Ysabel takes place entirely in our own world, in the actual south of France that inspired Kay's other creation that I've loved, Arbonne, but very much in the 21st century. Which is to say that, yes, Ysabel is kind of Kay's foray into "urban fantasy" except it takes place mostly in the gorgeous French countryside and its many fine examples of Celtic and Greco-Roman ruins and holy sites. And yes, the gorgeous comes through in this book; this is Guy Gavriel Kay.

The story concerns a Canadian teenager, Ned, who is spending the spring in Provence while his world-famous photographer father and his retinue work on gathering images for the next great coffee table book. Left to his own devices, he has the amusing (but even he admits to himself not terribly original) idea to listen to Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy while exploring an actual French cathedral. Before you can say "Over the Hills and Far Away" though, Ned has met two people who are going to completely mess up his plans: a cute and geeky teenage girl from New York named Kate (hooray!) and a weird sinister stranger who says weird sinister things and leaves both of the kids way more curious than he meant to -- or than is good for them.

And thus our teens get dragged into the re-enactment of the city of Marseilles' founding myth. And I'm not talking about a LARP. It's almost Beltane, see, and every once in a while the old unquiet spirits of the region take advantage of the power such nights kick up to come back and have another go at each other. Two such are bitter lives-long enemies from the original clash of Celtic and Greek cultures that kicked off a great deal of European civilization; another such is the woman they both love, who loves them both, and over whom they fought centuries ago. All very well and good, and who wouldn't want to meet such legendary people, even if they're a bit dangerous.

Ah but there's a catch. The men can just drag themselves back by their mythical/spiritual bootstraps, but because of REASONS the woman has to possess a living woman. And a living woman, the young and spritely and very well organized Melanie, is the brains behind Ned's dad's traveling photographic circus. Oops.

The rest of the story proceeds more or less as one might expect, a bit of a disappointment after all of the surprises and turns I've come to expect from Kay after visiting Arbonne and Fionavar. I'm not sure if Ysabel was intended as young adult fiction (but no parent should be troubled to let his or her young adult read this, and hey, the kids are at the center of the story at all times), but perhaps it was and Kay pulled some punches? At any rate, it's still a good book, better than a lot of the fantasy that's out there, and still elegantly written and emotionally powerful. It's just less so. But that's all right.

I'm excited to try his sort-of-Byzantine and sort-of-Spain and sort-of-China books in the near future. Especially the former. I loves me some Byzantium.

Mark Lawrence's KING OF THORNS

When I wrote earlier this month about the first volume in Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire series, Prince of Thorns, I made some comparison to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, but said that Lawrence's grimly unlikeable antihero was a much more reliable narrator than Severian.

As I've finished the second novel in the series, King of Thorns, I find I need to retract that statement somewhat. Jorg isn't always telling the truth as he leads us through the layers of his story, but I'm not sure his intent is to deceive anyone so much as to discover himself what is true, of what he is actually guilty, whose motivations he has actually acted upon, what manner of character he really possesses. It's really, really complicated. Deliciously so.

As the novel opens, Jorg has been king of the little nation he wrested from his uncle (the guy who had Jorg's mother and little brother killed. Or probably the guy) for several years and is getting married to a slip of a girl who seems like a bit of a simp but turns out to be anything but. Meanwhile, his little kingdom is under an enormous assault, being attacked and invaded by something along the order of 20,000 men under the command of a destiny-driven knight in shining armor, the Prince of Arrow, who is an almost perfect foil to Jorg in that everybody loves him and for good reason -- he is everything a royal should be, accomplished, daring, fair, kind, good, noble, handsome, trustworthy. And prophesied to unite again the Broken Empire of 100 Kingdoms that once dominated Europe in the years between the nuclear apocalypse that turned our world into Jorg's and Jorg's own time.

Oh, and Jorg is going to have to fight off -- or bend the knee to -- the Prince of Arrow on his very wedding day. And if he fights, he only has 300 men or so. Yes, he addresses the whole Thermopylae thing. A very well-read young man is our narrator Jorg.

But don't worry! He has a plan! Only, sort of Doctor Who style, he doesn't know it! Because like in the last novel, Jorg is still beset by subtle, sneaky, nasty wizards who can manipulate men's minds as well as reading them. But he found a way to beat that nasty subtle wizardry, oh yes! He found a wizard of his own who could cherry pick and remove Jorg's memories and seal them in a little metal box that is impervious to the workings of Jorg's magical foes! Jorg can judiciously access these a little at a time, but only a little. This results in a lot of Bill and Ted type shenanigans in which Jorg and his men are constantly stumbling across amazingly helpful things by surprise as Jorg's deliciously complex and devious defense scheme plays out. Joy!

So see, much of the time we've been reading Jorg, we've only been reading bits of Jorg, because he's hidden so much even from himself, and thus from us. He's working from a heavily redacted script, and drawing many false conclusions about his role thereby. It's absolutely fascinating.

So after two novels, I'm no longer sure exactly how detestable Jorg really is. Oh, he's still plenty brutal and spends lives like Napoleon and is still hell-bent on revenge and is an amazing killing machine, but it seems that some of his most heinous deeds might not really be layable at his door. Then again, they yet may.

This all unfolds again in multiple time frames and multiple layers. In addition to the wedding day battle plot, we again follow a parallel narrative from four years before, when King Jorg hit the road with what's left of his brothers and toured his world, gathering allies here, re-encountering old foes there, losing brothers, gaining powers, and exploring in greater detail the origins of this strange semi-fantastic semi-science-fictional world of his. The careful reader will pick up lots of hints as to Jorg's deliberately-forgotten battle plans as well as develop a more complex picture of what Jorg's all about.

And then there's a scene between Jorg and his step-aunt, Katherine, with whom he has an obsession that is almost romantic but definitely sexual, most of which is part and parcel of the memories he had removed from his head and stored in his box to unfold piece by piece along with his strategy. Thus the relationship between Jorg and Katherine is also subject to reinterpretation. Deliciously so.

And then there is a narrative from Katherine's point of view, told in snippets from her diaries. For much of the book, these feel kind of unnecessary and unsuccessful, but they lend tremendous weight to the novel's final revelations as the stage is set for Jorg's run for the imperial thorne, to be detailed in the last book of the trilogy, Emperor of Thorns, which of course I'll be reading very, very soon. Deliciously so, I am sure.

Guy Gavriel Kay's FIONAVAR TAPESTRY

This post is going to concern itself with not one but three books, because once I'd finished the first volume of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, The Summer Tree, I immediately plunged into its sequel, The Wandering Fire, and when I finished that (in a little over a day and a sleepless night), I plunged immediately into the concluding The Darkest Road and then I had a good cry but did not wish for more because everything wrapped up so satisfyingly that I did not need more.

This pretty much never happens. Especially with epic/high fantasy, a genre for which my lack of love is pretty well known.* Hey, I'm as surprised as you are (though my love for Kay's A Song for Arbonne should have given us all a clue, I do suppose). And yet right now, I'm happily also in the middle of that Broken Empire stuff, too. It pays sometimes to ignore your prejudices, eh wot?

Anyway, I started off, a week or so ago, prepared not to like this one so much. Alarm bells started ringing right away as I settled down to read the first book, which starts off with a lengthy and detailed dramatis personae, a thing that always makes me roll my eyes because it so often suggests to me that either someone doesn't trust me enough to keep track of all the characters contained in the story such a list precedes, or someone's publishers don't think the author did a good enough job making said characters vivid and distinct enough for anyone to be able to keep track without a handy guide. Either way, my hackles go up, and yes, I had the same eyebrow raising experience the first time I cracked open Dorothy Dunnett, but her books are so damned intricate and complex that those lists turn out to be (occasionally) necessary even for an attentive reader because hundreds of pages sometimes go by between encounters with some characters in Dunnett, oh yes. But Dunnett has been an exception for me in this, as in so many regards.

Guy Garviel Kay, turns out, is another. Except I didn't need, ever, to refer to the dramatis personae, because as in Arbonne, so in Fionavar (to which I'd seen a reference in Arbonne as "Fionvarre" and had been wondering about since, to my happiness): Kay's characters, both his own creations and those he borrows from mythology and legend, are alive and distinct and unforgettable and captivating. As is their world, their struggle, their story.

The trilogy's focus is on five of them, more or less, young university students who come from our world (and from Toronto, my very favorite city), who attend together a lecture on Celtic myth by a world-famous expert and then find themselves whisked into said expert's company after the lecture under the guise of showing him a much better time than would all those dreary academics who are expecting him at their post-lecture do. But it is the lecturer, who turns out to be a powerful mage from another world named Loren Silvercloak (and yes, that name gagged me at first, as so many names in the d.p. gagged me, because I hate epic fantasy, remember?), who whisks them away -- to another world, where they are "needed" as ceremonial guests for a king's golden jubilee. By magic, he and his "source"**, a dwarf named Matt Soren, transport the five to Fionavar, the first of all worlds, kind of like C.S. Lewis' Aslan's Country, the world of which all other worlds are just sort of imperfect copies echoing its motifs and patterns.***

And then it turns out, of course, that the Five -- handsome, playful, emotional Kevin; helpful, kind, wise Kimberly; wounded, stand-offish, moody Paul; beautiful, proud Jennifer; and big, strong oddball Dave -- aren't just there for a party. There are roles and very important work for all of them to fulfill in Fionavar, if they're willing, or maybe even if they're not.

And those roles are deeply archetypal, a Jungian parade of quests and tasks and ritual enactments and sacrifices that could all get so hokey, so in-your-ribs and on-the-nose, but don't because Guy Gavriel Kay is some kind of wizard. Even someone who knows the archetypes he's playing with very, very well has surprises in store for her, reading these novels. They might not be plot surprises per se, for such a reader; the surprise is how deeply felt and emotional these developments can be, how necessary they are to make the overall story work, and how they raise lumps in the throat, make tears sting in the eyes such that one could all but short out her ebook reader. Excuse me for a moment.

And yes, the girls' stories matter just as much as, sometimes more than, they boys', and no, it's not because the girls strap on boobplates and are suddenly strong enough to wield giant claymores or because they develop preternatural skills at archery or in any way, really, do anything remotely like what the boys do. Kay laughs at the Bechdel test. Kay understands women and men and honors them both. Kay writes people. Extraordinarily.

And he writes extraordinary fight scenes, including one single battle between a larger-than-life hero and a giant unkillable demon that goes on for some ten pages and is riveting not just for the well-described action but for the scene's staggering emotional content, deft shifts of point of view, and barely-hinted at future importance. As I said over on Goodreads after finishing that scene, "Jesustitsfucksake, Lancelot!"

Yes, that Lancelot. Arthur and Cavall are in this, too, drawn in from their eternal twilight afterlife just as Kevin and Kim and Paul and Jennifer and Dave were from theirs, but not quite given their interiority. Kay knows well enough to leave his most archetypal characters as just that, archetypes, icons, who nonetheless are integral parts of this story and who interact with Kay's own characters in a myriad of ways without in any way ceasing to be icons to be regarded with awe and reverence. Neat trick, that.

 I'm still in awe myself from the experience of reading these books. And this is a trilogy with a flying unicorn in it, for Pete's sake.

Yes, boys and girls, a high fantasy trilogy with a flying unicorn made me cry. Go outside and check the skies for falling crabs and periwinkles.

And read these books, if you haven't.

*Nor are those detailed in that sonnet the only reasons I generally roll my eyes at the genre, as I'm sure my long-term readers figured out long ago, and as I'm sure I've made even more clear in this post.

**I'm not going to get into the details here, but magic in Fionavar is different, yo. As in it takes two, a mage and a second person who is the source of his energy, to do it. And the relationship between a mage and his source is a powerful one even when they are not already otherwise best friends or lovers or both or all of the above, i.e. it's quite fraught.

***Look, the trilogy is referred to as a tapestry. So much weaving/fibercraft metaphor in this. So much.