Kay, Guy Gavriel: Under Heaven
Under Heaven (2010)
Written by: Guy Gavriel Kay
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Pages: 569 (Hardcover)
Despite all my bitching about the length of this book, I'm really glad you all voted this as the December challenge, because otherwise, this was the kind of title I'd want to read but would avoid reading due to its length. Who knows how long it would've sat on my shelf without your intervention? Seriously! I've had this sucker since its April release, and lord only knows it would've waited a long time if it hadn't been voted in. After all, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and The Mists of Avalon are still waiting for me to get over their length, so there's no reason to think that Under Heaven would've avoided a similar fate otherwise!
The premise: ganked from BN.com (I think): In his latest innovative novel, the award-winning author evokes the dazzling Tang Dynasty of 8th-century China in a story of honor and power. Inspired by the glory and power of Tang dynasty China, Guy Gavriel Kay has created a masterpiece. It begins simply. Shen Tai, son of an illustrious general serving the Emperor of Kitai, has spent two years honoring the memory of his late father by burying the bones of the dead from both armies at the site of one of his father's last great battles. In recognition of his labors and his filial piety, an unlikely source has sent him a dangerous gift: 250 Sardian horses. You give a man one of the famed Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You give him four or five to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank, and earn him jealousy, possibly mortal jealousy. Two hundred and fifty is an unthinkable gift, a gift to overwhelm an emperor. Wisely, the gift comes with the stipulation that Tai must claim the horses in person. Otherwise he would probably be dead already...
Review style: There will be spoilers. I want to talk some about Kay's style and about how this book compares to the two others I've read and what kind of impression his work leaves on me; I want to talk about story structure and how this book does and does not fit in with your standard fantasy quest storytelling; we'll also look at the term "fake historical fantasy" and see how it applies to this book. It's a long book, and there's a lot to talk about. So yes, again, SPOILERS. Skip to "My Rating" if you want to remain surprised. Everyone else, onward!
Prior to Under Heaven, I've read two Guy Gavriel Kay titles. The first, and still my favorite, is Ysabel, which almost made the "Keeper Shelf" and definitely made the 2008 Top Ten list. I was so excited by this book that I bought four more titles. Tigana, which I've yet to read (THICK BOOK) but have heard wonderful things about, and the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, which featured the origins of some supporting characters from Ysabel whose story I couldn't wait to get.
So the second book of Kay's that I read was his debut, the first of the trilogy, The Summer Tree. I was not impressed. I had a lot of issues with the story, and I couldn't get over how different Kay's style was from this book (his debut) to Ysabel, which at the time was his latest release. Maybe I shouldn't have been so hard on his debut, given the sheer number of years between the titles (obviously, Kay's writing has matured over the years), but the book has gotten worse in my mind since reading, to the point where even though I own the second and third books of the trilogy, I don't want to read them. That's sad. :(
Yet while I had no compunctions about reading this latest (because obviously, TIME HAS PASSED since his debut and he wowed me with Ysabel), I found yet another COMPLETELY different reading experience ahead of me. And I'll be honest, I'm going to steal another reviewer's words, because she described exactly how I felt reading this book:
There were times when I couldn't put it down, and others when I dreaded picking it up.
Thank you, temporaryworlds. Because that's exactly how I felt reading this book.
It's an immersive world, there's no question. And once I got over that wandering hiccup of a first chapter where I had such a hard time getting my bearings because the narrator refuses to stay in a linear time and place and seems to contradict himself before he shows you what the world is like, I was fine with the style. Mostly. I have some nitpicks I want to discuss, but later. I found myself particularly engaged when I learned we'd be getting more than just the men's POV, but also some scenes from the women. I am sorry we didn't get Wei Song's POV, and yet we got some random courtesan, but I was glad from Summer Rain's story, a woman who proved quite capable, and then Shen Tai's sister, Li-Mei, whose story -- in hindsight -- seems to have NOTHING to do with the overall tale at all, though I liked her chapters. I was reminded, in a good way, of Danys' story in A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Maybe it's the whole sold-to-a-barbaric-culture-that's-not-as-barbaric-as-it-seems similarity, but whatever it is, I enjoyed the familiarity.
And here's some irony for you: despite this being based in Chinese history, this book has quite the familiar epic fantasy feel to it. Oh, yes, it's VERY light on magic. The ghosts are the primary thing, though there's the question of the wolf. That's about it for magic. But it's still a quest, it's still a huge ensemble cast, even within the quest, and that's kind of fun. Yet it's the world-building, so centered on Chinese culture, that makes the book different, that and Kay's style of storytelling. This is both good and bad.
The bad: there's repetition. And I don't mean the kind of repetition that's done for effect, but the kind that makes me go, "Yeah, I know, you told me already, using pretty much the same words." There was one chapter featuring Summer Rain where we basically got the same exactly story/emotional state from her, the same conflict (nobody knows her REAL name), but told in a different way, with the only payoff being we actually get the real name the second time. Then there was a moment at the end of the book where Tai's thinking about who he'll allocate his horses too, and we learn of certain recipients not once, but twice, and by twice, I don't mean we're told once and then shown, I mean we're told twice. Frustrating, and sloppy.
But Kay's style is very stream-of-conscious-y. Another commenter here described it like a wandering brook and you just go where it takes you, and that's an apt description, but not always flattering. Because the repetition doesn't flatter the book (in fact, this book could've been a mite bit shorter), and Kay slips into second person POV too often for my taste for this style of fantasy (you realize, you understand, etc), and I think that's a result of the fact that while we have third-person perspectives from Tai, Li-Mei, Summer Rain, and so on, we also get this distant, narrative, authoritative voice that hands information down from the future, telling us how things will be remembered before the events themselves happened.
This drove me BONKERS.
Author withholding of information is one of my pet peeves. Authors can get away with it when they use it lightly, but it's VERY heavily used here. Too often, characters would realize something but it wouldn't be revealed until a much later chapter (good example toward the end, when Tai laughs over learning the identity of Song's father, and when it wasn't revealed right then, I started wracking my brain for the answer, thinking maybe I missed some important clue, but no, when the answer was revealed later, it was like, "What? You withheld that from me why?" There's no payoff). This happened more than once, which is one of the things that fueled my lack of initiative to pick the book back up after I'd put it down.
Yet for the most part, I was immersed while reading. Certainly, there are beautiful moments in Kay's prose, and the characters are simply likable. It's not until after the book is over and you're reflecting on the story that you start to feeling a little less than satisfied, and it wasn't until I started reading other reviews on Amazon that I was able to articulate why.
Part of the problem is how, after five hundred pages, the ending sneaks up on you. After all that building, all that tension over Tai's fate and where the Sardian horses would go, the entire book wraps up in fifty pages. You might think that's enough, but for a novel this long, which this much care put into every decision Tai makes, it happens rather fast. And in the end, to what end? I mean that: after much reflection, Tai's story is nothing but a MacGuffin: something to get the ball rolling, to get a fictional character into the fictionalized true story of the Tang Dynasty. While the names are different, this story really happened: an Emperor fell in love with a young woman whose influence allowed her good-for-nothing brother (cousin, in Kay's tale) to take a prominent position in government he didn't deserve, which helped spark the rebellion by the minister's rival. THIS REALLY HAPPENED. Kay's fictionalized telling is compelling, no doubt, and before you start getting impressed with my clear knowledge of historical events, stop: I know this because reviewers on Amazon know this. However, I did know that Kay writes what a friend of mine calls "fake historical fantasy," and for the first time, that term makes sense.
Because Kay took a historical event, fictionalized it, and added a splash of magic. That's it. And I'm not trivializing this accomplishment, because writing this book could NOT have been easy. The sheer amount of research ALONE would've done me in personally, but the formula itself is rather simple to describe what this book functions as. It by no means explains the level of poetry that Kay infuses into his prose, nor does it describe the care and tenderness in which he treats his characters and makes them all human. Both Roshan and Wen Zhou had moments in which I empathized with them, and I appreciate Kay's skillful hand at creating these characters and situations, because in the hands of lesser authors, we would've had a book full of cardboard.
But in the overall scheme of things, in terms of what the book is really about (and since I didn't know my history while reading, I kept wondering why this book was getting so increasingly political and what on Earth it'd have to do with Tai), Tai's story isn't important. He's a gateway into the real story, the story of the Rebellion.
And with this in mind, one has to ask: if Tai's story was ultimately to put someone into place to witness the important events, what on Earth did Li-Mei's story serve to function, except to serve Tai's story? I honestly don't know. I liked her story, mind you, there was a lot that appealed to me, and it was the first moment where I was really able to relax and identify with a character in the book. But in hindsight, what was the point of her tale? That she witnessed the exchange in the Pass and, like her brother, had the ability to assassinate the Roshan and did not take it? Further complicating her storyline is the fact that she's able to come home without any repercussions, she even, if the coy epilogue can be believed, married the new Emperor! How was there not some kind of repercussion of her escaping the North? Again, I liked her story, I liked her character, and I'm tickled at the thought that she became the Emperor's favorite wife, but intellectually, I'm perplexed by her placement in the book.
For all of my perplexity, I was engaged by the characters of the book. I saw Tai and Song's conclusion a mile away, but enjoyed it all the same. The Kanlin were a favorite part of the book. I also Meshag's and Li-Mei's time together, particularly Meshag's weird state of being of half-alive, half-not. The friendship between Bystan and Tai was lovely, and I really appreciated the note in the epilogue of how every spring, they returned to Kuala Nor to continue to bury the dead. I'm so very glad Kuala Nor was not forgotten at the end. I kept wanting a main character to return there to take up Tai's mission, and while my wish wasn't fulfilled entirely, I'm so very glad it wasn't forgotten.
Then there's Sima Zian. How I loved that poet. :)
A favorite quote:
There was some sadness in how that could happen, Tai thought: falling out of love with something that had shaped you. Or even people who had? But if you didn't change at least a little, where were the passages of a life? Didn't learning, changing, sometimes mean letting go of what had once been seen as true? (10)
This just speaks to me on so many personal levels it's not even funny. :)
And I don't want to quote this, since it's the ENDING and all, but I rather loved the last section of the epilogue. That was quite moving.
My Rating
Buy the Paperback: I liked the book, don't get me wrong. The rating is based on two things: 1) this beast was difficult to carry around, let alone difficult for me to physically handle (I have small hands); 2) I also feel that this book deserved a stronger editing hand: cuts could've been made without sacrificing the beauty of the prose, and looking at the story in hindsight, I feel like Tai's and Li-Mei's stories amounted to nothing in comparison to what Kay really wanted to write about, which was the fictionalized version of the An Shi Rebellion.
But don't get me wrong: it's all very beautiful and an immersive book to read. I've not read many fantasies that are focused in Asian mythology or history, so this was a unique take for me (though I know other authors have utilized said mythology and history before). Some passages are pure poetry (and I'm not referring to the actual poetry of the book), and after reading this, other writing styles just look clumsy in comparison. Still, it's not my favorite read from Kay, but it's in second place (out of three books). It's a good read, and the characters are certainly likable, and there's no doubt you feel like you're a part of the world while reading. I'm just not sure hardcover's the best format to read this in, unless you're just a hardcore collector.
Cover Commentary: I absolutely ADORE this cover. The coloring, perfect. The Asian lettering, perfect (sorry, I don't know which TYPE of lettering this is, and don't want to assume and make an ass of myself). But the horse. How I love the horse! I think This artistic style of horse is my favorite in art. So I have much, much, love for this cover. Woot! That said, I'm not a fan of the UK cover, which is seen behind the cut. Part of it's because I tend to prefer symbols and design over actual people on my covers; the other reason is because the UK cover makes me worry the book's going to be some crazy martial-arts fighting story, and while some of those are good, a lot of those are cheesy. ;) I also don't care to have these characters depicted for me: Kay does too good a job describing his characters, and his descriptions allow the reader to see what the reader wants to see. We don't need an artist foisting a vision on us, not in this case.
Further Reading: For more books by Guy Gavriel Kay, just click here. As for more books that fit the theme of Stand-Alone Fantasies by Big Name Authors, try the following:
Neil Gaiman: American Gods, Neverwhere, Stardust
Guy Gavriel Kay: Ysabel
Charles de Lint: The Mystery of Grace
China Miéville: The City & the City, Kraken
And that's just a few! What are some other titles for other BIG NAME AUTHORS that count as stand-alones?
More Reviews: check out the reviews book club participants have posted! If you reviewed this book but are not featured here, please comment below with a link to your review and I'll add it below.
Dirty Sexy Books: Review Here
pling: Review Here
starmetal_oak: Review Here
shel99: Review Here
temporaryworlds: Review Here
valashain: Review Here
Book Club Poll: this is the only way I can really track participation, so if you follow this journal, answer, okay? :) If, however, you participated but do not have an LJ account (if you have an OpenID, just go to LJ's home page and sign in that way, then return to the poll), please simply leave a comment saying so. :)
PLEASE NOTE: The poll's a little different this go around, and there's two questions instead of just one! Don't answer the second if you haven't read the book.
Poll December Participation
If you started but couldn't finish it, please comment and talk about the reasons why. What turned you off from the book? How far did you go before throwing in the towel?
And as you already know, the January Book Club selection is Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion. Some of you may have started it already, but if need additional details on the title, just click here. Because we're starting a new year and a new way of running the book club, sign ups will be different than usual, so stay tuned!