★★★★☆ GGK in transition

Tigana

Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay writes historical fantasy. He doesn't like to be categorized, but he has borrowed the phrase "a quarter turn to the fantastic" to describe his work, so I think we're allowed to use it. I am a fan. I first discovered his Under Heaven series, which is about China, called Kitai in the novels. Under Heaven is brilliant.

His first novel was, I believe, The Summer Tree, which is the first book of the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. It is not historical fantasy; rather, it is straight high fantasy, and I did not like it. His next book after the Fionavar Tapestry was this one, Tigana, and here we begin to see the turn away from the fantastic. I might call this one a half-turn to the fantastic. Although he has not, In Tigana, yet reached that level of historical verisimilitude that his latest works display, and although magic is an explicit and key part of the story, it is less fantastic than Fionavar Tapestry and more fantastic than, for instance, Under Heaven.

Tigana takes place on a peninsula that is politically much like Renaissance Italy. In his acknowledgements GGK is clear that this was intentional. The peninsula is called the Palm, and geographically it is more like the Peloponnese than the Italian boot. None of the major characters can be explicitly identified with any particular real historical figure.

It's a novel about memory. Tigana's name is being erased by sorcery. People not from Tigana cannot hear the name. As GGK points out, the erasure of memory is indeed a thing real-world conquerors and oppressors do, although by more mundane means than sorcery. Thus the story has a realistic feel. The world in which Tigana takes place has two moons, a white one and a blue one. The two moons are a sort of a trademark of GGK's later quarter-turn novels. Thus when he wrote Tigana, GGK was clearly on the path towards his quarter-turn. Tigana is not as good as the later novels, but it is still pretty good.

GGK writes beautifully. But the truth is that, while I enjoy his prose, I often wish there was less of it. Tigana is a long novel, and it certainly felt too long to me by the time I got to the end.

Tigana on Amazon

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