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]

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.