The Real Thing: High Fantasy for True Fans

Reviewed by Douglas Barbour for The Toronto Star

I find it hard to imagine that any other high fantasy published this year – or for the next few if it comes to that – will come close to matching Guy Gavriel Kay’s massive and massively satisfying new novel, Tigana.

While the ever more poorly cloned versions of Tolkien’s original great vision pour out of the publishing houses to offer ever less satisfaction to a growing mass of readers, Kay’s work provides the real thing: a powerfully imagined, marvellously invented Other World in which great tales naturally occur.

Kay leaped to the front ranks of fantasy during the ’80s with his complex and powerfully realized trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry.

Tigana proves that the trilogy was no fluke: It is both a wonderful work in the fantasy tradition yet full of touches that mark it as something startlingly new. Its mixture of the conventional and the unexpected provides some of its most telling satisfactions, but its depth of feeling and profundity of spirit offers rich rewards to its readers.

World-building is one of the most important processes in creating high fantasy. Kay has done a superb job in Tigana. While an intriguing aside very late in the novel suggests that Tigana’s world is part of the larger universe of the Fionavar trilogy, Kay has used all his inventive powers in shaping it. Although the narratives of Tigana all occur in the peninsula of “the Palm,” the other continents and empires of the world are accounted for (indeed, eight of the nine provinces of the Palm are ruled by tyrants from the two major empires, Ygrath and Barbadior) and provide some of the solid foundations that such world-building demands.

Not only are there the various provinces of the Palm, with their varied cultures and histories, but there is a specific religion, made up of a triad of one god and two goddesses which the whole Palm worships, as well as the other gods and goddesses of other parts of the world. Kay has created a world that feels lived in, and for a good long while. And he has done this without cluttering up the landscape with stretches of ugly exposition.

It is, of course, the story that must finally make or mar an epic, and Kay has invented a marvellous variation on the familiar tale of revolt by a small underground against a tyranny. Twenty years before the novel begins, Brandin, King of Ygrath, invaded the Palm in order to secure a realm for his beloved younger son Stevan to rule.

But the Prince of Tigana, the proudest of all the proud provinces of the Palm, killed Stevan in battle, and Brandin, perhaps the most powerful sorcerer in the world, turned upon that province with utter hatred in his heart. Not only did he conquer it and destroy every material vestige of its culture and history, but he placed a monstrous curse upon it to remove all memory of it and even its name from human knowledge. Only those born in Tigana can hear its name and know how great their loss is: no one else, except sorcerers and wizards on whom the curse has no effect, can even remember that Tigana once existed.

This is a powerful trope indeed in this century of loss, and Kay plays it for all its worth as he weaves two strangely entwined narratives into one large tapestry of love, loyalty and betrayal. In the one, the last Prince of Tigana slowly plots his revolt, travelling the length and breadth of the peninsula looking for like-minded people who will comprehend, as he has slowly come to, that all the provinces must learn to transcend their petty rivalries and act together to rid themselves of both tyrants. In the other, in this subtle and moving study of nobility and suffering, a woman from Tigana who has lived only to kill Brandin, learns to love him despite his single-minded, grief-directed pursuit of her homeland’s extinction. One sign of how fine a fantasy novel this is is its refusal of easy black-and-white, good-vs.-evil confrontations.

Kay demonstrates his craft in many ways, but one is in his choice of point-of-view characters. Devin, the young singer who discovers he’s a Tiganan, is both emotionally youthful and intellectually mature; he is also a man haunted and fulfilled by memory. When he learns of the curse, it seems the cruelest punishment possible. He provides an energetic and entertaining view of the slowly building conspiracy. Dianora, the woman of Tigana who was brought to the King’s saishan to, as she then thought, fulfill her vow to assassinate him, is both intellectually and emotionally mature, and her knowledge of Brandin, compounded of love and fear, has finally divided her from herself. But her insight, coming as it does from a slight distance, helps to make Brandin a believable tragic figure.

It would be unfair to reveal more about what actually happens in both narratives, but there are moments of high intrigues, moments of love and loss, moments of ordinary joy, in family or among friends. Indeed, one of the things that sets Tigana apart from most such fantasies is the way it marries the domestic to the epic.

Tigana is a novel and a world to lose yourself in. Kay is perhaps untrendy in his choice of themes, for there is finally no cynicism in this novel. Love and loyalty are the ground bass of this symphonic tale. Tigana is a powerful and moving meditation on the difficulties and joys involved in trying to live by their demands.

Reviewed by Douglas Barbour for The Toronto Star

I find it hard to imagine that any other high fantasy published this year – or for the next few if it comes to that – will come close to matching Guy Gavriel Kay’s massive and massively satisfying new novel, Tigana.

While the ever more poorly cloned versions of Tolkien’s original great vision pour out of the publishing houses to offer ever less satisfaction to a growing mass of readers, Kay’s work provides the real thing: a powerfully imagined, marvellously invented Other World in which great tales naturally occur.

Kay leaped to the front ranks of fantasy during the ’80s with his complex and powerfully realized trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry.

Tigana proves that the trilogy was no fluke: It is both a wonderful work in the fantasy tradition yet full of touches that mark it as something startlingly new. Its mixture of the conventional and the unexpected provides some of its most telling satisfactions, but its depth of feeling and profundity of spirit offers rich rewards to its readers.

World-building is one of the most important processes in creating high fantasy. Kay has done a superb job in Tigana. While an intriguing aside very late in the novel suggests that Tigana’s world is part of the larger universe of the Fionavar trilogy, Kay has used all his inventive powers in shaping it. Although the narratives of Tigana all occur in the peninsula of “the Palm,” the other continents and empires of the world are accounted for (indeed, eight of the nine provinces of the Palm are ruled by tyrants from the two major empires, Ygrath and Barbadior) and provide some of the solid foundations that such world-building demands.

Not only are there the various provinces of the Palm, with their varied cultures and histories, but there is a specific religion, made up of a triad of one god and two goddesses which the whole Palm worships, as well as the other gods and goddesses of other parts of the world. Kay has created a world that feels lived in, and for a good long while. And he has done this without cluttering up the landscape with stretches of ugly exposition.

It is, of course, the story that must finally make or mar an epic, and Kay has invented a marvellous variation on the familiar tale of revolt by a small underground against a tyranny. Twenty years before the novel begins, Brandin, King of Ygrath, invaded the Palm in order to secure a realm for his beloved younger son Stevan to rule.

But the Prince of Tigana, the proudest of all the proud provinces of the Palm, killed Stevan in battle, and Brandin, perhaps the most powerful sorcerer in the world, turned upon that province with utter hatred in his heart. Not only did he conquer it and destroy every material vestige of its culture and history, but he placed a monstrous curse upon it to remove all memory of it and even its name from human knowledge. Only those born in Tigana can hear its name and know how great their loss is: no one else, except sorcerers and wizards on whom the curse has no effect, can even remember that Tigana once existed.

This is a powerful trope indeed in this century of loss, and Kay plays it for all its worth as he weaves two strangely entwined narratives into one large tapestry of love, loyalty and betrayal. In the one, the last Prince of Tigana slowly plots his revolt, travelling the length and breadth of the peninsula looking for like-minded people who will comprehend, as he has slowly come to, that all the provinces must learn to transcend their petty rivalries and act together to rid themselves of both tyrants. In the other, in this subtle and moving study of nobility and suffering, a woman from Tigana who has lived only to kill Brandin, learns to love him despite his single-minded, grief-directed pursuit of her homeland’s extinction. One sign of how fine a fantasy novel this is is its refusal of easy black-and-white, good-vs.-evil confrontations.

Kay demonstrates his craft in many ways, but one is in his choice of point-of-view characters. Devin, the young singer who discovers he’s a Tiganan, is both emotionally youthful and intellectually mature; he is also a man haunted and fulfilled by memory. When he learns of the curse, it seems the cruelest punishment possible. He provides an energetic and entertaining view of the slowly building conspiracy. Dianora, the woman of Tigana who was brought to the King’s saishan to, as she then thought, fulfill her vow to assassinate him, is both intellectually and emotionally mature, and her knowledge of Brandin, compounded of love and fear, has finally divided her from herself. But her insight, coming as it does from a slight distance, helps to make Brandin a believable tragic figure.

It would be unfair to reveal more about what actually happens in both narratives, but there are moments of high intrigues, moments of love and loss, moments of ordinary joy, in family or among friends. Indeed, one of the things that sets Tigana apart from most such fantasies is the way it marries the domestic to the epic.

Tigana is a novel and a world to lose yourself in. Kay is perhaps untrendy in his choice of themes, for there is finally no cynicism in this novel. Love and loyalty are the ground bass of this symphonic tale. Tigana is a powerful and moving meditation on the difficulties and joys involved in trying to live by their demands.

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