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ramblings about my love/hate relationship with Guy Gavriel Kay
I'm trying to fumble my way towards an understanding of why I find his books so compelling but also so frustrating. I think I've posted about some of this before? But I just finished The Children of Earth and Sky so I have ~feelings~
Brief background: I was really into the Fionavar Tapestry in high school, but I don't feel the need to return to those. They seem like the kind of thing (honestly like Dune) that I can leave as fond memories of high school days and don't need to revisit. I doubt they would hold up well. They're portal fantasy about five Canadian undergrads stumbling into a vaguely Celtic-inspired world.
But as an adult, I've gotten into his post-FT books, which are history quarter-turned to the fantastic. Basically, you can read them and immediately go, "Ah, this place is based on Byzantium and this religion is based on Judaism and this character is based on Muhammad ibn Ammar, gotcha." But there's a touch of the fantastical and also he's not bound by what actually happened in history but can do whatever he wants. Which I unreservedly love.
However. I've now read the Sarantium duology and The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Children of Earth and Sky and goodness gracious this man is so frustrating! But I will keep reading his damn books! Because of reasons!
Here are the reasons: we have areas of overlapping interesting. He's as obsessed with the world of the Mediterranean and beyond (what I often think of as "the world of the Silk Roads") as I am. With the colorful cultures, with different kinds of people from different backgrounds crossing paths and taking paths together and understanding or failing to understand each other. Trade and war and art and people just trying to get by! That's my jam!!!! The jammest of jams!!! I want stories that make me feel like a classic Loreena McKennitt album does! (Always chasing that The Mask and the Mirror high! Greatest album of all time??? See icon!) History and human cultures and how they interact are so fascinating!!! Aren't you just sometimes overwhelmed by the gorgeous tapestry of the past??? Of all that people can create????
Anyway, Kay obviously feels the same way. This is why I keep going back to his books--he really evokes past cultures well, imo.
He also does a decent job of making his characters feel like they actually have historical perspectives--they aren't just contemporary people in period costumes. They sometimes have beliefs that are repugnant or just alien but he also doesn't take it so far that the books are alienating. It's a pretty good balance, I think.
I love how most of his books fit together in one world, just set at different times, and there are echoes of each other; it's really fun to read something in one book and go OH SHIT and know that it's a connection to the other books without that ever being explicitly stated.
He has such a sense of how history is change and nothing is eternal. There's a very elegiac quality to his work--like in CotEaS, how everything's haunted by the fall of Sarantium, which we learned to love in other books. It's now nine hundred years later, Sarantium has fallen, and Kay never lets you forget what is lost. There's just such a sense that nothing is permanent, that empires rise and fall and so much beauty is lost when they fall, but also...there's nothing we can do about it. That's just life. It makes everything very melancholy in a way that speaks to me (and is probably the only place I really see a Tolkienish influence on his work).
He's aware of the heaviness of history, and everything in his books is so...portentous. Sometimes to the point of being pretentious, but most of the time it really works for me, though I 10000% understand if it drives some people crazy.
So there's all that stuff that I love that's going on. And yet. And yet.
I don't think the guy is that good at characters. Maybe it's less characters than it is relationships? I think part of this is that all his books have so many pov characters that there's not a great deal of time to spend seeing people form bonds. So there's a lot of telling and not showing. Which I am not a fan of.
It's the worst with his romances--why did this man and woman fall in love? Because they are both attractive straight people (and one bi guy ilu Ammar!) in proximity to each other, that's all.
And his female characters...they bother me so much. For one thing, almost all of them are young, blonde, and sexy and all have sort of the same approach to sexuality. Dude, your id is showing. (I have know zero about Kay's personal life other than the fact that he's from Canada, but I suspect that if I did know, there would be a suspicious number of blondes in his past.) It isn't that they act unrealistically. It's just that all his women are the same woman!!! And it pisses me off so much!
The book where these problems show least is The Lions of Al-Rassan, which has fewer characters to juggle and focuses more closely on three of them. Enough that I kind of buy the romance! And the woman isn't a sexy blonde! Jehane's the closest he comes to having a convincing female character.
My priorities in fiction are always style, characters, and setting/worldbuilding. His style is fine, his worldbuilding is great, but his characters and especially his relationships are just so lackluster. It keeps his books with the exception of Lions from being favorites of mine. (And even that book I think could have been much stronger.) I just want him to do better!!! Write my favorite book, dude! Just do it!
But he does make me want to write myself. To evoke the Silk Roads world just with...actual characters and compelling relationships. I want to marry his worldbuilding to Barbara Hambly's Ben January series' focus on the way that very different people from different backgrounds form relationships and carve out lives for themselves in a world made up of systems that want to deny people agency. He makes me want to write and do it BETTER. I need to pick a damn novel and actually write it instead of starting a million different stories and then never finishing them....
Brief background: I was really into the Fionavar Tapestry in high school, but I don't feel the need to return to those. They seem like the kind of thing (honestly like Dune) that I can leave as fond memories of high school days and don't need to revisit. I doubt they would hold up well. They're portal fantasy about five Canadian undergrads stumbling into a vaguely Celtic-inspired world.
But as an adult, I've gotten into his post-FT books, which are history quarter-turned to the fantastic. Basically, you can read them and immediately go, "Ah, this place is based on Byzantium and this religion is based on Judaism and this character is based on Muhammad ibn Ammar, gotcha." But there's a touch of the fantastical and also he's not bound by what actually happened in history but can do whatever he wants. Which I unreservedly love.
However. I've now read the Sarantium duology and The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Children of Earth and Sky and goodness gracious this man is so frustrating! But I will keep reading his damn books! Because of reasons!
Here are the reasons: we have areas of overlapping interesting. He's as obsessed with the world of the Mediterranean and beyond (what I often think of as "the world of the Silk Roads") as I am. With the colorful cultures, with different kinds of people from different backgrounds crossing paths and taking paths together and understanding or failing to understand each other. Trade and war and art and people just trying to get by! That's my jam!!!! The jammest of jams!!! I want stories that make me feel like a classic Loreena McKennitt album does! (Always chasing that The Mask and the Mirror high! Greatest album of all time??? See icon!) History and human cultures and how they interact are so fascinating!!! Aren't you just sometimes overwhelmed by the gorgeous tapestry of the past??? Of all that people can create????
Anyway, Kay obviously feels the same way. This is why I keep going back to his books--he really evokes past cultures well, imo.
He also does a decent job of making his characters feel like they actually have historical perspectives--they aren't just contemporary people in period costumes. They sometimes have beliefs that are repugnant or just alien but he also doesn't take it so far that the books are alienating. It's a pretty good balance, I think.
I love how most of his books fit together in one world, just set at different times, and there are echoes of each other; it's really fun to read something in one book and go OH SHIT and know that it's a connection to the other books without that ever being explicitly stated.
He has such a sense of how history is change and nothing is eternal. There's a very elegiac quality to his work--like in CotEaS, how everything's haunted by the fall of Sarantium, which we learned to love in other books. It's now nine hundred years later, Sarantium has fallen, and Kay never lets you forget what is lost. There's just such a sense that nothing is permanent, that empires rise and fall and so much beauty is lost when they fall, but also...there's nothing we can do about it. That's just life. It makes everything very melancholy in a way that speaks to me (and is probably the only place I really see a Tolkienish influence on his work).
He's aware of the heaviness of history, and everything in his books is so...portentous. Sometimes to the point of being pretentious, but most of the time it really works for me, though I 10000% understand if it drives some people crazy.
So there's all that stuff that I love that's going on. And yet. And yet.
I don't think the guy is that good at characters. Maybe it's less characters than it is relationships? I think part of this is that all his books have so many pov characters that there's not a great deal of time to spend seeing people form bonds. So there's a lot of telling and not showing. Which I am not a fan of.
It's the worst with his romances--why did this man and woman fall in love? Because they are both attractive straight people (and one bi guy ilu Ammar!) in proximity to each other, that's all.
And his female characters...they bother me so much. For one thing, almost all of them are young, blonde, and sexy and all have sort of the same approach to sexuality. Dude, your id is showing. (I have know zero about Kay's personal life other than the fact that he's from Canada, but I suspect that if I did know, there would be a suspicious number of blondes in his past.) It isn't that they act unrealistically. It's just that all his women are the same woman!!! And it pisses me off so much!
The book where these problems show least is The Lions of Al-Rassan, which has fewer characters to juggle and focuses more closely on three of them. Enough that I kind of buy the romance! And the woman isn't a sexy blonde! Jehane's the closest he comes to having a convincing female character.
My priorities in fiction are always style, characters, and setting/worldbuilding. His style is fine, his worldbuilding is great, but his characters and especially his relationships are just so lackluster. It keeps his books with the exception of Lions from being favorites of mine. (And even that book I think could have been much stronger.) I just want him to do better!!! Write my favorite book, dude! Just do it!
But he does make me want to write myself. To evoke the Silk Roads world just with...actual characters and compelling relationships. I want to marry his worldbuilding to Barbara Hambly's Ben January series' focus on the way that very different people from different backgrounds form relationships and carve out lives for themselves in a world made up of systems that want to deny people agency. He makes me want to write and do it BETTER. I need to pick a damn novel and actually write it instead of starting a million different stories and then never finishing them....
no subject
the characters in his stories are much more archetypes than people.
Yup.