The Last Light of the Sun

Rating:
Summary: Fresh historical fantasy from one of the masters
Review: The talent of fantasy writing can be a tricky thing. When it works, the reader effortlessly suspends disbelief, joyously transported to worlds of magic and power. Seasoned travelers through these realms include C.S. Lewis, Charles de Lint, Clive Barker, and, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien.

When it doesn't work, as is far too often the case, it is all so many water nymphs and ogres trudging through the ink, making a cheap buck though series such as Forgotten Realms and Dungeons & Dragons, the over-praised work of Robert Jordan, and others too tawdry to mention.

Guy Gavriel Kay knows how to make it work. Highly regarded in the field as a master of fanciful storytelling with a deep interest in historical accuracy, the Canadian author has earned comparisons with both Lewis and Tolkien, even collaborating with Christopher Tolkien on the posthumous publication of his father's The Silmarillion.

Now, decades after the release of his seminal work The Fionavar Tapestry (recently released in a 20th anniversary edition), Kay has decided to depart slightly from his oeuvre, concentrating instead on a historical fiction with muted elements of the fantastic. The change does him good; The Last Light of the Sun ranks as one of his finest.

Last Light is set firmly in the Norse and Celtic traditions of the north, in a time where "axe and sword were perfectly good responses to treachery." In a land balanced on the razor's edge of change, the peoples of the Anglcyn and the Cyngael live in a precarious form of peace, each struggling to prosper under the constant threat of murderous raids by the Erlings.

Into this rich world Kay introduces a host of fascinating characters. Bern Einarson is a man new to the fraternity of mercenaries, while his absent father Thorkell has been taken prisoner. King Aeldred of the Anglcyn fights to keep his people free and thriving, while Ceinion, high cleric of the Cyngael, yearns to bring stability to a universe of fairy worship and an apocalyptic religious faith of giant serpents and world trees.

With all due respect to J.R.R. Tolkien, Kay is by far the better writer. His atmospheric worlds equal Tolkien's Middle-Earth in complexity and wonderment, while his grasp of character development and dialogue far outpace the master's.

Part of the gratification of well-designed fantasy is searching for significant parallels in the world beyond the page. Like the best of fantasy, analogous elements to Last Light's feudal world can be found in today's uneven mixture of political instability, religious factionalism, and cultural intolerance. Yet Kay is wise enough never to write his fables as polemic; they function equally as amusement and as social criticism, content to let the readers unwrap as many layers and motifs as they deem fit.

The Last Light of the Sun is exhilarating entertainment, a bold trek to a land where one's finest wish is to die on one's feet. Kay, now a fantasy veteran, is a maestro of "the dance, the thrust and twist of words, of meanings half-shown and then hidden, that underlay all the great songs and deeds of courts." The Last Light of the Sun, a taut and gripping novel, is a first-rate work, by any standard.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Read
Review: This book by any other author would be rated 5 stars. It is a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Nordic events based on the Viking raids on the English and Welsh during the dark ages, told on both sides of the water. There's an English King with a strong resemblance to Alfred the Great. However, the point of view is not the ruler's but of a Viking whose father was stripped of his noble rank. The faeries were done well with some good twists and there are some classic Kay dark wood spirits. I gobbled the book up in one day (or to 1:30 am in the next morning). Anyone who likes Kay's previous books will love this one, I guarantee you.

Rating:
Summary: GGK's Run is Over
Review: Where to begin? Maybe with how I discovered Kay, after having read just about every schlock fantasy book on the [..] bookshelf, over a decade ago. Since then, I've read TIGANA more than five times, A SONG FOR ARBONNE at least three, LIONS OF AL-RASSAN and THE FIONAVAR TAPESTRY a pair each. And, THE SARANTINE MOSAIC, an undeserved once.

Kay has been going down-hill since TIGANA, though the difference in quality between TIGANA and ARBONNE was sufficiently subtle that I think the two are comparable novels. LIONS was still very good, but the SARANTINE MOSAIC was weak. Sadly, THE LAST LIGHT OF THE SUN is the worst of the lot, worse by large measure than Kay's first, unabashedly Tolkien-imitating foray into fantasy.

An assessment of quality is always a comparison; there are no objective measures. Judged by the standard of pulp fantasy (and here, I'm talking about the real dregs, the fifteen book series, the licensed universe novels), LAST LIGHT is a pretty good yarn. Kay's writing is still fairly strong, his characters are attractive, and his setting is modestly more original than, say, the Forgotten Realms.'

But what a sorry damnation by false praise, to be forced to compare Kay to Salvatore if one is to praise him. LAST LIGHT should be judged relative to Kay's overall corpus, or, if not that, then to the other masters of well-written fantasy (and here, I'm think McKillip, Wolfe, Hobb, Peake, and the like). By that comparison, particularly by comparison to its sister works, LAST LIGHT is not only a failure, but an insult.

TIGANA is beautiful. It is sensuous, it is rich with both fantasy and history, its characters are unique and irresistible, and its setting lives, breathes, and exists beyond the pages of the book. TIGANA has sex, it has violence, it has romance, it has over-the-top sacrifices, overly witty heroes, overly complex schemes. But these were *original* and strikingly so, and, moreover, consistent with the setting: Renaissance Italy.

LAST LIGHT, by comparison, is embarrassing in its pandering raunches, full of cheap and cheapening thrills like a horror movie -- now the "perfect breasted" woman baring herself to the all-conquering priapic hero, now the deformed villain splaying his enemy before the voyeuristic camera's eye. One reads LAST LIGHT and wonders if it was written not by Kay, but rather by Wes Craven.

The litany of sins continues. Kay's prose itself is worse, its purple pretensions all too apparent when his poetry isn't working. Here we have page long asides, where Kay the author (should we at least give him the grace of being Kay the narrator?) turns directly to the reader, puts on his patronizing cap, and declares, "There are times in our lives that we think . . ."

His characters are wispy shadows of his old protagonists. Everyone has a Weakness, but aside from these contrivances, each character is uncommonly handsome, charming, intelligent, tolerant, and curious, from the humblest Viking raider to the most elevated cleric or king. There is no one like Erlein di Senzio, skeptical of the cause, hateful of its leader, no Duke Sandre, scheming, selfish, trapped in a past he can only try to relive. There is no mother damning the protagonist, nor any complexities to the albino, deformed villain who shoots (curse his black heart!) poisoned arrows, rather than fighting man to man. No, this is a villain who declares -- in one of Kay's tell-don't-show narrations -- that the motivation for his actions is simply that he likes to kill.

Structurally, the story is a ramble, divided -- mostly out of convention, I suppose -- into three rather similar, rather tedious parts. Kay indulges in the cheapest of structural tricks (frequent cliff-hanger character jumping) to such a ridiculous extent that one is tempted not to engage in Kay's game, and skip his five page long digressions from the perspective of millers and washerwomen. The book has no clear beginning, middle, or end; its climax is artificial and is climactic only insofar as it is the last battle of the book. This disastrous structure is explained away by other reviewers as a "Celtic knot" or a "Nordic saga." But Celtic knots are not literature, and transposing the plot structure of a Nordic saga into a novel, while leaving behind its poetic structure, is like saying that a movie's superficiality and jarring direction is okay, because it's just like a music video, only without the music.

And what of Kay's "meticulous research" of which he and his sycophants have become so proud? Wasted. The point of history in a story is not to teach history but rather to better tell that story. Kay has lost sight of this. Dark Age Anglo-Saxony gives us a wealth of unpronounceable names, uninteresting cultural artifacts, and tedious show-off details -- nothing more. TIGANA, ARBONNE, AL-RASSAN, even the mediocre SARANTINE MOSAIC all offered settings into which one fell helplessly, if only to imagine walking among the cool shadows of Cortada, or drinking the blue wine, or listening to a troubadour, or staring up at a mosaic ceiling. There is nothing to fall into in this Conan redux, save waist-deep viscera, battle roars, and the occasional T&A.

THE LAST LIGHT OF THE SUN is an appropriate metaphor for this book only insofar as I am confident that there is nothing illuminating left to come from Kay. It is certainly not a beautiful sunset on his impressive corpus, nor a brilliant flaring before the end. The book is not necessarily as bad as others you can find, but there are many other novels far more worthy of your time. For example, one could pick up TIGANA for the sixth time. . .