Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

[lightreads]

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Eighth –century…ish fantasy….ish novel set in China….ish about the second son spending the mourning years for his father burying the dead from an old battlefield, before his service draws him into the heart of imperial court politics.

Yeeeeah. This is the second Kay in a row I've bounced off of, and it's for exactly the same reason. This is the sort of book that words like "lush" and "gorgeous" and "poetical" get slapped on, and that's fair enough. But here's the thing. That lushness is so much less enjoyable when you realize that an inextricable part of it is sexual violence against women. Seriously – this book has multiple female narrators as well as a few female side characters, and there isn't a one of them – save arguably one, and it's definitely arguable – who isn't bought/stolen/sold/owned for sex. Which is one thing to write about, and it's another thing to make that part of the . . . the texture the book is rolling around in. Part of the cultural fabric that we're supposed to look at and say, "oh, how exquisite." Not uncomplicatedly, but we're definitely supposed to have that reaction on a basic level.

This really came home to me when I started wondering why no one was pregnant. Really remarkable, considering the number of courtesans sleeping with multiple men per night (generally somewhere on the wrong side of the spectrum of optionally) and the privately kept concubines whose function is to play exquisite music and be beautiful objects and to get fucked nightly. But not a single oops in mumble hundred pages, with no explanation. I mean, you could explain that away if you wanted to – though not plausibly – but Kay didn't want to. That would have destroyed, like, the art.

Ugh, I just feel icky after that, and it's one of those things where the more beautiful the book tried to be, the worse the effect was because of how it was framing that beauty.

I'm really hoping I can get to Tigana before Kay sinks any lower in my estimations, since I'm told that really is worth the price of admission.




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