If I scored my nerd tendencies I’d fall much closer on the scale to comic books and Star Trek than to Lord of the Rings and other swords-n-sorcery kinIf I scored my nerd tendencies I’d fall much closer on the scale to comic books and Star Trek than to Lord of the Rings and other swords-n-sorcery kind of fantasy which is weird because I do enjoy the kind of world building and political intrigue that is often a big part of the genre.
My hesitation about reading more of this kind of stuff is due in no small part to how it seems like common practice for fantasy authors of turning those stories into multi-book epics, but then stalling out in the middle of a series and leaving fans hanging for years while they work on other projects. That’s why I watch Game of Thrones but will not read GRRM’s books until he finishes what he started. Years of frustration waiting during Stephen King’s glacial pace on Dark Tower left me a broken and bitter shell of a man who refuses to put up with that nonsense ever again.*
*Any rabid fan boy comments trying to shout me down for daring to offer a criticism that could be applied to their particular lord and master will be deleted. Life’s too short.
I haven’t read all of Guy Gavriel Kay’s work, but not only does he do the kind of intrigue I enjoy, one of the big selling points to me is that the guy finishes a story. He says he’s writing a fantasy trilogy? BOOM! There’s The Fionavar Tapestry. All three books were published from 1984 to 1986. He’s doing a two-parter called The Sarantine Mosaic? BAM! Started in 1998 and finished in 2000. Sorry that the second one wasn’t out in ’99. He’s creating a historical fantasy based on Moorish Spain that requires elaborate world building involving political and religious intrigue? Easy. The Lions of Al-Rassan. One and done. You’re welcome.
This fictional land has three religions with a bloody history, but an era of uneasy peace is in place among various factions split among them. The Asharites worship the stars and their prophet Ashar while their northern neighbors the Jaddites believe in a sun god. The Kindath worship the two moons, but they have no land or power of their own and exist in both territories as second class citizens who are routinely discriminated against. Prominent people in both the Asharite and Jaddite religions often find it a convenient distraction to blame the Kindath for any problems going on and let their citizens take out their frustrations on them rather than the actual leaders.
A female Kindath physician named Jehane bet Ishak has a very long and eventful day in which she meets two legendary men. Ammar ibn Khairan is an Asharite warrior and poet who is famous for having murdered the last caliph which turned formerly united Al-Rassan into independent city states. Rodrigo Belmonte is a Jaddite who leads a lethal company of horseman charged with keeping the peace and protecting the border cities who pay protection to his king.
A series of events begin to change the political landscape of Al-Rassan and ambitious leaders begin plotting while the dour clerics of Jad try to promote a holy war and some of the fanatical desert Asharites see opportunities to sweep away the decadence they believe has infiltrated their society. Rodrigo, Ammar and Jehane wind up in the same city and forge a bond despite their differences, but they soon find that it’s hard to be loyal to your friends when duty comes calling.
Kay does a superior job of laying out all the complex political and religious alliances so that you have a clear understanding but aren’t overwhelmed by it. His religions are obviously based on the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths, and he mines the history of them to make a lot of points about bigotry, hypocrisy and the use of faith to manipulate people. It’s also an exciting tale featuring all kinds of hacking and slashing in tense action scenes. I also liked that this has a lot of the trappings of a fantasy novel and a fictional world, but there’s no magical or supernatural elements other than one character having some very limited telepathic and precognitive abilities.
The best thing is the relationship between the three main characters. Rodrigo and Ammar are done as the kind of bigger-than-life people that emerge during times of great historical conflict whose actions have huge consequences, but he never makes them seem outrageously heroic or unrealistic. Jehane is as strong and independent female character as you can reasonably have in a story set in a society where guys with swords are still in charge. Her being one of the Kindath could have made her seem like a likely candidate to be victimized, but instead, Kay uses her as the voice of sanity caught in the middle of events completely outside of her control.
It’s not perfect though. Kay gets a little too cute sometimes in drawing out suspense like withholding the names of characters who have been killed and trying to fake the reader out. Also, while I’ve praised this as being a single self-contained story, most of the book is spent setting up a conflict that plays out in an incredibly rushed final act in which we see almost none of the action and learn about the deaths of important supporting characters as single lines reporting larger events. I suspect that Kay wanted to keep his focus on his three main players and that the point of the book was the impact on them, not so much a blow-by-blow account of it happening. However, he went to a lot of effort to suck a reader into this world so it seems odd that he was in such a hurry to finish it up.
Still, it’s a highly entertaining and engrossing read that combines the best of fantasy world building with historical fiction....more
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