Guy Gavriel Kay weaves history into his novesl but writes at a slight remove, saying he doesn’t want to impose imaginary traits on real historical figures.Samantha Kidd Photography
A merchant's ship, only a day at sea, is boarded by pirates – among them is an archer out for her first raid, and she's brought her dog along. The merchant, a youngest son bristling against his status, tries to negotiate their safe passage, while a spy anxiously awaits her fate, and an artist, on his way to paint a portrait of the khalif, tries not to get involved.
In his first novel since receiving the Order of Canada, Guy Gavriel Kay revisits the fantastic version of Western Europe he created in Tigana and expanded in the two-volume Sarantine Mosaic, but pushes the events forward in time to just after the collapse of Sarantium (our Constantinople). The rising Osmanli empire presents a religious and cultural threat to the Jad-worshipping world, itself riven with economic jealousies and still reeling from plague, and the Duke of Seressa (our Venice) is keen to find and fill any power vacuums. Kay begins patiently, introducing us to each of the central characters separately and making clear their motivations, before they collide in this high-stakes, high-seas encounter.
There are no dragons and no spells – though some spirits seem to get caught inside of other characters' heads on their way up to heaven – but I think it would be relatively uncontroversial to call this a fantasy novel. Kay has an impeccable "fantastic" pedigree, having helped edit J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, but where Tolkien braided together myth and history from a number of cultural traditions, Kay's novels feel more like viewing history through sharkstooth scrim. Looking closely, you can trace the outlines of the Adriatic 15th century, but if you step back, they disappear behind images from Kay's own imagination. He's an outstanding researcher, and generously provides a list of recommended non-fiction sources so that interested readers can find out more.
In a recent essay, Kay describes writing at a remove from history because he "didn't want to set about giving real men invented personalities, relationships, desires and thoughts I imposed on them." This is framed as an ethical dilemma – as if it would be indecent to do so – but the biographies of these real men might have also contained some difficult contradictions, as if Kay has smoothed the edges of an arcane history to provide access to the heart of the matter.
His prose is another obstacle. Here is an excerpt from Kay's introduction of that archer: "It was what you did in Senjan. She had learned to kill with a thrown knife and a held one, to loose arrows from a boat, judging the movements of the sea. She was extremely good at that. It was why she had a chance to do what she was here to do tonight. She was not, Danica knew, an especially conventional young woman."
Kay is telling us about one of his central characters and the place she's from, but I would rather see her in action and in context, loosing arrows accurately and effectively while the conventional young women look on conventionally, than be simply told that that's the case. In fact, Kay doesn't spend very much time with any of these conventional women – outside of our principles, the rest seem to be either prostitutes or treacherous aristocrats – nor does he dwell on how it might feel, in this place and time, to be unconventional.
Elsewhere, lines clunk on wholly their own merits. In the first chapter, an ambassador receives an unexpected visit from an underdressed woman, seemingly a test from the hostile court. In the aftermath, Kay writes: "He had taken his pleasure with her, and it was pleasurable."
Before reading Children of Earth and Sky, I had assumed that fantasy denoted kinds of plots and characters – magic-users, quests, elves, blacksmiths – but had not realized that the genre has many of its own stylistic conventions as well. I had trouble getting past them, as I'm sure quirks of general fiction that are invisible to me would interrupt someone reading, say, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing after many years of reading fantasy. At this moment, Kay's novel is one of the most popular science fiction and fantasy books on Amazon.ca. It has received an average 4.23 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. It will sell thousands of copies, be translated into many languages and be enjoyed by a great many people. Yet I couldn't stop finding bothersome sentence structures similar to those in The Lord of the Rings and other contemporary fantasy novels. So I started thinking about taste.
In You May Also Like, his study of choice in the Internet age, journalist Tom Vanderbilt points out a surprising trend in the way readers respond to high-profile releases. "When a book, particularly a novel, wins a big prize, its reception by readers on the Amazon-owned user-generated review site Goodreads actually gets worse." There seem to be two reasons: Awards create higher expectations, and they attract more readers, many of whom would not have read the book otherwise. Their tastes are ill-suited to the book. Vanderbilt settles on the importance of familiarity for predicting appreciation – that liking other similar things is the best way to know if you will like something else, in part because you are attuned to the nuances of the genre. There were moments in Children of Earth and Sky when I thought I could feel the pull of convention. If I had been expecting this tone and pace as well as certain plot points, maybe they wouldn't have seemed so jarring.
If a work announces itself as a "fantasy," it seems reasonable to ask, "whose?" Not mine, but maybe yours.
David B. Hobbs is a Canadian writer and academic.