Douglas Barbour for The Toronto Star
N.R. Alexander of The Speculative Scotsman

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.

Review by N.R. Alexander of The Speculative Scotsman

"Set in a beleaguered land caught in a web of tyranny, Tigana is the deeply moving story of a people struggling to be free. A people so cursed by the dark sorceries of the tyrant King Brandin that even the very name of their once beautiful land cannot be spoken or remembered.

"But not everyone has forgotten. A handful of men and women, driven by love, hope and pride set in motion the dangerous quest for freedom and bring back to the world the lost brightness of an obliterated name."

***

It is not deceptive to say that Tigana begins with a lie. But then, many of the best tales do. There is plenty to be said for straight-forward narrative progression, of course; stories told from beginning to middle to end with nary a word wasted on anything so distracting as a character arc. The best such novels can achieve a breathless pace that carries the reader from beat to headlong beat unmindful of such oversight. If that appeals, Richard Morgan will be waiting to take your names after class. Thoughtful, tragic Tigana, however, strikes an ideal balance between that frenetic sense of momentum and the distinctly slower motion of more considered fantasy sequences.

From the first, Guy Gavriel Kay is a masterful pacemaker. We are plunged into a world most assuredly in motion with tell of the death of the Duke of Astibar. In one of that province's public houses, a painter and a poet debate the chances that their former lord will be a given a proper burial by the brutal Barbadian oppressor who has ruled over their people since the bloody invasion he staged decades ago. Initially, it seems an overwhelming task to grasp the broad spectrum of political, religious and moral machinations already underway at the outset of Tigana, but Sandre's passing tenders to the reader a timely insight into the nine divided states that make up the peninsula of the Palm, a nation after renaissance-era Italy's own oft-divided heart; it sets the scene for a chain of events that will transform the provinces forever after.

The disgraced Duke's death also serves to introduce the reader - surely already entranced - to the motley fellowship of nobles and nobodies whose inexorable forward motion effects this shift. Chief amongst them, in prominence and in power, is Alessan, the single surviving Prince of Tigana, the only province of the Palm to hold at bay the invading Ygrathan armies more than momentarily. Tigana's brief resistance managed to claim the only son of Brandin, King of that powerful force, but in his heartbreak, in his anger, the arrogant overlord dwarfed the small victory won by Alessan's people with a tragedy so crushing that the young Prince has grown up in a world in which his nation's very name has been removed from the memories of all those who knew it.

Alessan remembers, however, and in tribute to his most treasured memory he has sworn to rid the forcibly forgotten province of Tigana and indeed the entire Palm of spiteful Brandin of Ygrath, as well as the mercenary Barbadian aggressor who rules in the East - the blunt edge of the sword in every sense. Only by uniting the divided people of the peninsula can Alessan hope to overcome the deck that has been stacked against him, and with a fierce rallying cry, he gathers to arms an assortment of unique individuals, each with their own stake in the intertwined fates of Tigana and the greater Palm.

In Devin d'Asoli, a naive young singer with the voice of an age, the reader is given an appropriate surrogate; in Baerd, brother to Alessan - if not in blood - Kay shows us firsthand the torturous horrors of the blight Brandin and Alberico have wrought upon the Palm. Erlein, a troubadour bound unwillingly to Alessan's cause, is an exploration of choice and obligation; and the women of Tigana, too - Catriana, Dianora, Alais and others - are as strong as any of the men that might be said to drive the narrative, as pivotal, and as more than the lustful objects of affection so many fantasies are content to suggest. With few exceptions, each of Kay's expansive cast are drawn and developed with a flair rarely matched elsewhere in the genre. Suffice it to say that the Palm would not be such an extraordinary peninsula were it not for the flawed characters that bring its struggles to bear.

Only Alberico is given short shrift in the narrative. Certainly he is left wanting some more comprehensive character arc when set against Brandin, a sly, sensuous King who tempers his arrogance with charm. We come to know him through Baerd's long-lost sister, Dianora, whose perspective as the preeminent prostitute in Brandin's so-called 'saishan' offers the reader brief glimpses of a character who stands in stark relief against the terrible force Alessan tends to remember.

Dianora's occasional chapters give depth and texture to the inescapable sense of tragedy that pervades Tigana, complicating, deviating and alleviating. They beg the question: Is the inevitable cost of Alessan's epic endeavor - the price in blood - truly a just toll to pay? When the game changes, when assumptions are not merely unmet but utterly undermined, must not the rules of play alter with it? In the end, can the reality of Tigana possibly match the recollection of it?

Tigana is a tale of identity above all else, of the fallibility of memory, and from the telling truthfulness of its very first words, Kay explores these powerful themes with a characteristically subtle touch. His prose is poetic, protracted and powerful; his touch and tone deft without dumbfounding or ever dulling the impact of the text. He weaves the complex fabric of his heartfelt tale with enough attention to detail that the reader must maintain such an exquisite awareness of the world of Tigana that its narrative punches that much deeper. Kay is a lyrical author indeed, even musical: so powerful is the ebb and flow of the song he sings, from brutality to beauty in the blink of an eye. His mastery of the language is perhaps unparalleled in the entirety of speculative fiction.

When Kay calls into question subjects such as politics, religion and morality - as he is wont to do - his only answer is a resounding rebuff. Tigana is a novel to make of what you will. Bring nothing to the table and nothing is precisely what you will receive. Come with some sense of self, on the other hand, some notion of the importance of the past to the present, and a tale unlike any other will unfold before you.

Although it begins as an historical adventure of apparently humble proportions, Tigana ultimately reveals itself as a touching romantic tragedy that belies the relative brevity of the experience. What Kay accomplishes in this slim single volume is staggering. They call him the heir to Tolkein's tradition, and though he is an equally methodical author, Kay's incredible way with words often quite eclipses the rather pedestrian lord of the Lord of the Rings with whom he is so often compared. Tigana is an endlessly exciting and always emotional epic for the ages.