The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay

[lightreads]

The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sequel to The Summer Tree. More epic fantasy. It's the middle of a trilogy, so the evil becomes eviler and everyone maneuvers for the coming war.

Okay, I finally put my finger on something here.

What could he do though? What was in him to deny what had been laid down? These were dark times, maybe the very darkest times of all. He had been marked. His legs would walk even if his heart and courage stayed behind. It was better, he knew, to have the heart and soul go too, to make the offering run deeper and go true.

That's a really difficult idea of agency, right there. These books are all about people acting out pieces of stories – arthurian, most prominently – and how patterns repeat and how sometimes they break. And that's something you can only look at straight on in epic fantasy, you know? Where it's literally a question of being the vessel moved through a course by various wild magics. And that's awkward for me, psychologically, and also complicated on a narrative level, because you still have to maintain . . . tension. Uncertainty. Strain on the fabric. Internal character friction that isn't just 'woe is me, I am chosen by the gods.'

Which Kay does. Very much so. But in ways that make me go hmm because they are about the edged difficulty of choosing to be doing – choosing to be sacrificing – when you already have to be. Does that make sense?

Um. I liked the book, I should maybe mention?

View all my reviews >>

Comments

[readerjane]

It makes a very intriguing kind of sense. Will have to try this series.

I liked Kay's Tigana and A Song for Arbonne, and very much his Sarantine Mosaic. Was completely put off by the Fionavar tapestry, and couldn't figure out why.

Oh, wait. This IS the Fionavar tapestry, isn't it? Hm. I didn't get very far when I tried it years ago, but I remember feeling that the contemporary characters were leeching the reality out of the high-fantasy setting. The two worlds weren't seamless enough, or... something.

Might have to try again.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

You're not the first person to say that to me. This is my first Kay, so I don't have comparisons. I can see where people are coming from -- these are books I keep wanting to recommend with a lot of caveats like 'you have to go in knowing,' and 'just keep going until.'

Funny you should talk about the our world characters. I've been thinking about them, and how the way they react to various high fantasy elements is just completely wrong. Like they don't even blink at the first crossing over into the other world. And it's weird to read and feels awkward, but I'm starting to see the purpose in the bigger structure. Which I think is what I'm going to work through in reviewing the final book.

[readerjane]

I'll be interested to see what you think; whether their purpose in the structure works out the way you suspect.

Tigana, Arbonne and Sarantine were all firmly land-locked in their fantasy worlds, so there wasn't any divide between that and our world to be bridged.

I think, when I started reading The Summer Tree, that I subconsciously expected the divide to feel like Narnia. But ST's our-world environment is much closer to our contemporary one than world-war England. In a way, both the English and the Narnian environments were fantasy to me. Maybe that contributed to smoothing the awkward edge between them.

[splonders.livejournal.com]

A willing sacrifice has more power? To defeat the evil?

[readerjane]

Like Joy Chant's Red Moon, Black Mountain?

[tattercoats.livejournal.com]

Oh! Yes. I adored the Fionavar tapestry for years - read it first in my teens, what can I say, wrote songs about it, yada yada... just a few years ago I came across a copy of Red Moon Black Mountain, and remebered the name Joy Chant from early childhod, and a book read once from the library and never refound.

Let's just say there are uncomfortably many paralells between the two. I read Joy Chant's RMBM with a bizarre sense of 'I read this already... in Fionavar' and I've not quite been able to revisit the whole GGK set again since, which is a shame, and maybe I should.

As a writer, I try to watch the origins and predecessors of my work, and if they are too obvious, I don't release them into the wild. Hmm.

[readerjane]

Hub and I were talking about Kay yesterday. He'd just finished The Lions of al-Rassan.

I came back here hunting for a half-remembered snippet of Kay review. What I was trying to remember didn't happen to be here, but this bit struck me: "the edged difficulty of choosing to be doing – choosing to be sacrificing – when you already have to be." I'd seen Cabin in the Woods since you reviewed The Wandering Fire, and that phrase made me remember a scene near the end, where Sigourney Weaver tells the two remaining sacrifices, "You can die with the world, or for it."

In CitW, the two young victims choose NOT to die for the world, even though they're going to die anyway. And putting those two things together, CitW and Kay, I can see the value of stories like CitW. Because the Yes response is only meaningful when No was a real possibility. So there need to be stories where No happens.

[lightreads]

nodding that makes sense. More pedestrianly, the older I get, the more I can focus on choosing happiness in the things that are not optional. I can do the thing angrily, or I can do the thing joyfully, but the thing's gotta be done so which would I rather? Not a hard call most of the time, but sometimes I'm mad anyway.