ŷ������

What more can be said other than everyone should read this book. At least once. Get a feel for the beauty of language and images in motion. You won't be disappointed. Guy Gavriel Kay is a great prose writer. It doesn't even matter if fantasy isn't your thing because this book does not read like fantasy. It reads like the sort of well-written historical fiction that weaves in myths to tell the tales of a lost time. A personal favorite combination, I must admit. Also, I'm coming off of a dramatic final battle confrontation scene that had me on the edge of my seat for the last three days... so this is a hugely biased review.

There isn't much that can be said about this book without giving the story away, but I'll try to sum up the foundation on which the story is built.

The Palm, where the story takes place, is a peninsula that Kay modeled after Renaissance Italy. Music plays a big part in the narration, and at times, you can almost hear music in the prose. There's a somber tone and a Mediterranean feel to the atmosphere that's hard to describe, but you feel it when you read.

The main players are:
Brandin of Ygrath, a sorcerer, king, and tyrant from the West
Alberico of Barbedior, a sorcerer, barbarian, tyrant from the East
Valentin, a prince of Tigana, a small corner of the Palm.

On the eve of the battle that would later wipe Tigana from existence, we learn that Brandin came with force and magic to take over the Palm. Prince Valentin, who had already foreseen his fate and knew he couldn't win, killed Brandin's son on the battlefield--he had no other choice. This led Brandin to unleash all of his wrath on Tigana, ultimately wiping it off the map and from the memory of everyone who wasn't born in the land. Only the people born in Tigana before the fall remember its name and history. Brandin renamed the land Lower Corte, as an insult to the people of Tigana because Corte was a former formidable enemy, and he enslaved the whole population.

That is just the prologue. The rest of the story is set twenty years after Tigana's fall with the rise of a quiet rebellion. Alessan, the only surviving son of Valentin, leads a small band of rebels across the Palm to do the impossible, overthrow both Brandin and Alberico at once to take back the land. It has to be both at once because, if one tyrant falls, the other would easily take his place and continue his reign of terror.

Somewhere on the other side of the Palm, on a similar path, Dianora, the daughter of Valentin's close friend and adviser who was also killed by Brandin, has plans for a quiet upheaval of her own that starts at the heart of Brandin's court, but she goes at it alone. I think it's because she's alone that she fails in executing her plans, and because she's alone, it's easy to fall for Brandin after having lived with him as a concubine for twelve years.

The plot is revealed gradually as you learn more about each character, their inner turmoil and redemption, and the history of the Palm. The tyrants get almost as much time on the page as the other main characters. There is a lot of grief, loss, and pain in this book. As a reader, a casual observer, you feel most, if not all, of it because the writing is just that good. It's poetic and lyrical, like Alessan's music. At times I could swear I can hear music playing in the background.

What Kay does extremely well is capture the loss of a homeland, history, culture, and the name of a group of people. Only they alone have memory of this piece of land that no one else remembers. When they try to speak of it, people born outside of the land can't even hear the name because it's been magically erased from the collective memory. In essence, this is a story of the side that lost the war and the consequences they suffer because they lost. This particular narrative transcends genres, I think, and we don't often see it told, or rather told well, not in fantasy. Because narrative belongs to those who win wars and capitalize on their success.

I'm certain there are a couple things I didn't like or had trouble imagining in the book. I just can't think of any right now.

A few memorable moments:

She would be near the water by now. She would not be coming back this time. He had not expected her to return on the morning of the Dive; she had tried to hide it, but he had seen something in her when she woke that day. He hadn't understood why, but he had known that she was readying herself to die.

She had been ready, he was certain of it; something had changed for her by the water's edge that day. It would not change again.

[...]

“She lifted her hands and closed them around his head... and it seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that newborn trialla in her soul began to sing. Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower.��

[...]

“And in that moment Dianora had a truth brought home to her with finality: how something can seem quite unchanged in all the small surface details of existence where things never really change, men and women being what they are, but how the core, the pulse, the kernel of everything can still have become utterly unlike what it had been before.��

[,,,]

“He could guess, analyze, play out scenarios in his mind, but he would never know. It was a night-time truth that became a queer, private sorrow for him amid all that came after. A symbol, a displacement of regret. A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once, until Morian called the soul away and Eanna’s lights were lost. We can never truly know the path we have not walked.��

Cross-posted at