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primeideal) wrote2024-01-24 07:28 pm
primeideal) wrote2024-01-24 07:28 pm
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Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay
I tried a different Kay book a while ago and bounced off it pretty quickly because it was too much of an expy world--like, here's fantasy!Spain, there's fantasy!Turkey, that's fantasy!Italy. I'd prefer either more clearly this world ("Uprooted" does this well) or more clearly a secondary world than the uncanny valley in between. This one is better in this regard, it's kinda sorta not really fantasy!Italy (...in the southern hemisphere). And the first section, well, it really grabbed me. The highs are very high, but the lows are also pretty low. So this will be a long (and spoilery) ramble.
The highs:
-very strong prose and wry humor. In the first few chapters, we meet a young bard whose age everyone underestimates (I can sympathize), and the POV is very clever.
-Outsider POV. Devin gradually comes to overhear a plot against the tyrant Alberico, who rules half of the peninsula, and gets dragged into the proceedings. Seeing other minor characters' POV on the main protagonists, we slowly get a sense of how the same person can wear different guises and indirectly act to stir up tumult.
-The depictions of what music means to several characters are compelling without being overly cheesy or sentimental.
-The magical worldbuilding is good. Wizards have to mutilate their hands so that their shape mimics the land itself, it's a little similar to "Elantris" but with more body horror. Kay ropes in everything from Marriage to the Sea to speculative studies of magical? folklore to the mythological trope of the death-and-rebirth god, and at times it almost feels like it's too much and won't necessarily hold together, but it does.
-Funny tropes like the "uhhh we're just...sneaking around in a secret passage...let's be very very quiet by...having sex. Yes, sex," and deliciously iddy dark tropes.
Okay, so that's all great, where does it go wrong.
-The primary motivation for the main characters is avenging their fallen homeland. In the dim and forgotten days of memory (...18 years ago), two tyrants came from overseas and chopped up the provinces of the peninsula between them. They now have an uneasy balance of power, to the point where if one of them were to be assassinated, the other would probably just become dictator of the other half; the rebels are plotting to weaken and then depose both at once, because that seems like the best way to a long-term peace. One of the provinces, now known as Lower Corte, suffered a more brutal oppression than the rest; it used to be named "Tigana," but the dictator (Brandin) on that half was so furious with that province that he wiped their name from memory. No one who isn't originally from Tigana can hear that name, it just sounds like nonsense. So they're fighting to avenge their Worse Than Dead Homeland.
Okay. For the purposes of a fantasy novel, I'll allow the suspension of disbelief of "these tyrants are bad, our prince will be a good and noble prince, we have to overthrow the bad kingdom to put in the good kingdom." But I can't buy that the effacement of Tigana is so uniquely bad, so horrifically bad, that the need for vengeance is so deep and urgent. Kay points out in an afterword that non-magical versions of this cultural displacement happen IRL, which is definitely true! Whether with language policy or just the violent aftermath of colonization in general. Colonization is bad. But is the response "our national identity is so good and true that we must restore it?" Maybe I'm biased, but I don't really think anybody's national identity is that great. Certainly, mine isn't--I'm the descendant/beneficiary of colonizers. Maybe it would be good if someone blotted any sense of connection I had to my homeland and gave me a clean slate! Or maybe the descendants of people my ancestors oppressed would love to get their vengeance on me, but they can't because magic isn't real. What kind of a monster does that make me? Worse than Brandin?
(To Kay's credit, there is a character who calls the protagonists out on this, and by the end both he and the other protagonists have altered their views somewhat, in a way which I thought was realistic. But still, this "annihilated homeland" is the impetus of the entire plot, so it's worth pointing out that my suspension of disbelief failed there.)
-There is another plotline that also features its own mix of intriguing POVs and prose. Dianora, a young woman from Tigana who lost her family when the tyrants came, had the same dream that all the other protagonists shared--avenging her homeland, even if it costs her her life. She spent the first six-ish years of the occupation slowly maneuvering to put herself into a position to get close enough to Brandin; then serendipitously happens to get kidnapped to join his harem. Great! Problem solved! After a few pages worth of eunuchs and other descriptions of things that happen in harems...at some point...she should...get an opportunity, right? Nope. She agonizes over her attraction to Brandin and her conflicting duties for twelve years, then saves his life from an independent assassination attempt. Then steels herself again (hold that thought too) to try and destroy his imperial ambitions. Fails again. There are hundreds of pages of Stockholm Syndrome that could be cut with no actual difference to the plot. (Dianora is not in on the "we need to take them both at once or we'll just trade one dictator for another" calculation, so by preventing Brandin from dying earlier, she arguably helps the cause for balance-of-power reasons, but that's in spite of and not because she's trying to.)
-The two plotlines almost come together at the end, and it looks as if, hey, they might actually combine and people will maybe get closure/family reunions? There's a very cool twist that I did not see coming and that part stuck the landing very well. Okay, maybe that will also lead into...Nope, nope, the characters have an opportunity to reconnect and get closure and Kay is like "no closure for you, lol." Then he throws in some ominous foreshadowing/cliffhanger in the very last sentence. Do not want!
-Okay, how does Dianora steel herself to try again? She remembers her darkest and worst secret from the early months of the occupation, which is...that when she and her brother were teenagers...they had sex. Because political oppression leads to incest (and uncomfortable kinky sex in general). I??? What??? Did this come out of the worst "Cards Against Humanity" game ever played??
-On the subject of sexuality in general; some people are gay, that's how they are, and some other people are playing up the stereotypes of being over-the-top effeminate gay men in order to make them appear nonthreatening. It's a little stereotypical for a secondary world that doesn't need to have our stereotypes, but okay, it was 1990, gay rights have come a long way in 34 years.
Spoilers, again: I was giving Kay a lot of credit for complicated, subtle depictions of sexuality, based on this paragraph:
tl;dr I will definitely try Kay again because the prose and first act really were that compelling, but it did not follow through.
The highs:
-very strong prose and wry humor. In the first few chapters, we meet a young bard whose age everyone underestimates (I can sympathize), and the POV is very clever.
What, Devin d'Asoli asked himself grimly, did a person have to do to get a drink in Astibar? And on the eve of the festival, no less!
...Morosely he filled his glass again. Looking up at the blackened crossbeams of the ceiling he briefly contemplated hanging himself from one of them: by the heels of course. For old time's sake.
Devin also knew, by the smoldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morian's fat-fingered priest--why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!--that though they may have just won the Sandreni contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.
(The last being a very indirect way of saying "why are all the gay men trying to flirt with me," hold that thought.)...Morosely he filled his glass again. Looking up at the blackened crossbeams of the ceiling he briefly contemplated hanging himself from one of them: by the heels of course. For old time's sake.
Devin also knew, by the smoldering look the Sandreni scion gave him from within the smeared dark rings around his eyes, and the scarcely less transparent glance from Morian's fat-fingered priest--why in the name of the Triad were the Triad so ill-served!--that though they may have just won the Sandreni contract he was going to have to be careful in this palace tomorrow. He made a mental note to bring his knife.
-Outsider POV. Devin gradually comes to overhear a plot against the tyrant Alberico, who rules half of the peninsula, and gets dragged into the proceedings. Seeing other minor characters' POV on the main protagonists, we slowly get a sense of how the same person can wear different guises and indirectly act to stir up tumult.
-The depictions of what music means to several characters are compelling without being overly cheesy or sentimental.
-The magical worldbuilding is good. Wizards have to mutilate their hands so that their shape mimics the land itself, it's a little similar to "Elantris" but with more body horror. Kay ropes in everything from Marriage to the Sea to speculative studies of magical? folklore to the mythological trope of the death-and-rebirth god, and at times it almost feels like it's too much and won't necessarily hold together, but it does.
-Funny tropes like the "uhhh we're just...sneaking around in a secret passage...let's be very very quiet by...having sex. Yes, sex," and deliciously iddy dark tropes.
Okay, so that's all great, where does it go wrong.
-The primary motivation for the main characters is avenging their fallen homeland. In the dim and forgotten days of memory (...18 years ago), two tyrants came from overseas and chopped up the provinces of the peninsula between them. They now have an uneasy balance of power, to the point where if one of them were to be assassinated, the other would probably just become dictator of the other half; the rebels are plotting to weaken and then depose both at once, because that seems like the best way to a long-term peace. One of the provinces, now known as Lower Corte, suffered a more brutal oppression than the rest; it used to be named "Tigana," but the dictator (Brandin) on that half was so furious with that province that he wiped their name from memory. No one who isn't originally from Tigana can hear that name, it just sounds like nonsense. So they're fighting to avenge their Worse Than Dead Homeland.
Okay. For the purposes of a fantasy novel, I'll allow the suspension of disbelief of "these tyrants are bad, our prince will be a good and noble prince, we have to overthrow the bad kingdom to put in the good kingdom." But I can't buy that the effacement of Tigana is so uniquely bad, so horrifically bad, that the need for vengeance is so deep and urgent. Kay points out in an afterword that non-magical versions of this cultural displacement happen IRL, which is definitely true! Whether with language policy or just the violent aftermath of colonization in general. Colonization is bad. But is the response "our national identity is so good and true that we must restore it?" Maybe I'm biased, but I don't really think anybody's national identity is that great. Certainly, mine isn't--I'm the descendant/beneficiary of colonizers. Maybe it would be good if someone blotted any sense of connection I had to my homeland and gave me a clean slate! Or maybe the descendants of people my ancestors oppressed would love to get their vengeance on me, but they can't because magic isn't real. What kind of a monster does that make me? Worse than Brandin?
(To Kay's credit, there is a character who calls the protagonists out on this, and by the end both he and the other protagonists have altered their views somewhat, in a way which I thought was realistic. But still, this "annihilated homeland" is the impetus of the entire plot, so it's worth pointing out that my suspension of disbelief failed there.)
-There is another plotline that also features its own mix of intriguing POVs and prose. Dianora, a young woman from Tigana who lost her family when the tyrants came, had the same dream that all the other protagonists shared--avenging her homeland, even if it costs her her life. She spent the first six-ish years of the occupation slowly maneuvering to put herself into a position to get close enough to Brandin; then serendipitously happens to get kidnapped to join his harem. Great! Problem solved! After a few pages worth of eunuchs and other descriptions of things that happen in harems...at some point...she should...get an opportunity, right? Nope. She agonizes over her attraction to Brandin and her conflicting duties for twelve years, then saves his life from an independent assassination attempt. Then steels herself again (hold that thought too) to try and destroy his imperial ambitions. Fails again. There are hundreds of pages of Stockholm Syndrome that could be cut with no actual difference to the plot. (Dianora is not in on the "we need to take them both at once or we'll just trade one dictator for another" calculation, so by preventing Brandin from dying earlier, she arguably helps the cause for balance-of-power reasons, but that's in spite of and not because she's trying to.)
-The two plotlines almost come together at the end, and it looks as if, hey, they might actually combine and people will maybe get closure/family reunions? There's a very cool twist that I did not see coming and that part stuck the landing very well. Okay, maybe that will also lead into...Nope, nope, the characters have an opportunity to reconnect and get closure and Kay is like "no closure for you, lol." Then he throws in some ominous foreshadowing/cliffhanger in the very last sentence. Do not want!
-Okay, how does Dianora steel herself to try again? She remembers her darkest and worst secret from the early months of the occupation, which is...that when she and her brother were teenagers...they had sex. Because political oppression leads to incest (and uncomfortable kinky sex in general). I??? What??? Did this come out of the worst "Cards Against Humanity" game ever played??
-On the subject of sexuality in general; some people are gay, that's how they are, and some other people are playing up the stereotypes of being over-the-top effeminate gay men in order to make them appear nonthreatening. It's a little stereotypical for a secondary world that doesn't need to have our stereotypes, but okay, it was 1990, gay rights have come a long way in 34 years.
Spoilers, again: I was giving Kay a lot of credit for complicated, subtle depictions of sexuality, based on this paragraph:
"Intercepting the look that passed between them [two main characters, both male] then, Devin learned something new and sudden and unexpected--on a night when he'd already learned more things than he could easily handle--about the nature of bonding and about love."
I'm not always the best at picking up on subtext or seeing why other people ship characters that I read as platonic. But given the fact that Kay uses the word "love" when many authors are squeamish about it, and given the way the prose is handled, oftentimes with wry distance--this seemed to me like a pretty unambiguous communication that They Are Life Partners In Every Way. In the context of the "political repression leads to screwed-up sex lives" assumption, I could even interpret it as "just a phase"--maybe one or both will choose to sleep with a woman and have children specifically for the purpose of renewing the nation/monarchy/fertility rites idk. But the book swerves to "nah, at least one and probably both have women they like even when it's not ~special magical fertility rite~ season." That kind of...surprised me. IDK, I guess I'm more used to reading with 2020s sensibilities.
Neither good nor bad but just kinda noteworthy:
-The depiction of religion is interesting, like I said; there are two goddesses and one god; the clergy for each deity are always the opposite sex. The narration points out that, while the tyrants were very intent on crushing out patriotic opposition (especially in Tigana's case), their relationship towards the clergy is like "meh, do whatever, carry on as you always have, we don't want to get on your bad side." This seems to be portrayed as a bad thing--like, the clergy are so corrupt, they'll compromise with tyrants. Couldn't it be a case of "even tyrants fear the power of faith because people really do believe it?" IDK, it seems kind of glib "religion bad, patriotism good," but I was already reading with bias by then.
-One of the epigraph quotes is from Dante's Paradiso, when one of his ancestors is prophesying Dante's exile from Florence. Serendipitous timing because I just got there in the readalong :)
-Brandin's homeland is named "Ygrath." Fine, whatever. The other tyrant comes from "Barbadior," land of the "Barbadians." This seems...unnecessarily similar both to "barbarians" and RL "Barbados"/"Barbadians" (that's their real demonym!) Like, Barbados is definitely not a colonizer society. Quite the opposite, in fact! That threw me out of the story a little.
-"And somewhere in his mind and heart--fruits of a long winter of thought, and of listening in silence as older and wiser men spoke--Devin knew that he was not the first and would not be the last person to find in a single man the defining shape and lineaments for the so much harder love of an abstraction of a dream." The character Devin is admiring here is indeed a good and admirable man who could easily command his loyalty, and the conclusion--it's easier to give your loyalty to a person than an abstraction--could easily be the thesis of a different story. But this one? I think this line works against the themes of the rest of the book, which is that giving your love to an abstraction or dream (if that dream is your memory-wiped homeland) is pretty darn easy, actually.Neither good nor bad but just kinda noteworthy:
-The depiction of religion is interesting, like I said; there are two goddesses and one god; the clergy for each deity are always the opposite sex. The narration points out that, while the tyrants were very intent on crushing out patriotic opposition (especially in Tigana's case), their relationship towards the clergy is like "meh, do whatever, carry on as you always have, we don't want to get on your bad side." This seems to be portrayed as a bad thing--like, the clergy are so corrupt, they'll compromise with tyrants. Couldn't it be a case of "even tyrants fear the power of faith because people really do believe it?" IDK, it seems kind of glib "religion bad, patriotism good," but I was already reading with bias by then.
-One of the epigraph quotes is from Dante's Paradiso, when one of his ancestors is prophesying Dante's exile from Florence. Serendipitous timing because I just got there in the readalong :)
-Brandin's homeland is named "Ygrath." Fine, whatever. The other tyrant comes from "Barbadior," land of the "Barbadians." This seems...unnecessarily similar both to "barbarians" and RL "Barbados"/"Barbadians" (that's their real demonym!) Like, Barbados is definitely not a colonizer society. Quite the opposite, in fact! That threw me out of the story a little.
tl;dr I will definitely try Kay again because the prose and first act really were that compelling, but it did not follow through.