received courtesy of NetGalley
This book is set twentyfive years after the fall of Byzantium, that is, Sarantium, The veneer is pretty thin in places: the Ottoman Empire has become the Osmanli Empire, the Venetia Republic is now the Republic of Seressa, Dubrovnik is now Dubrava, and the other major players in Europe have their analogs, but Kay plays around with history in boosting the fascinating and problematical Hapsburger Emperor Rudolph II back a hundred years and turning him into Rodolfo II, and bringing in sixteenthcentury Eastern European politics as a counterbalance.
Kay makes it work, especially if you can enrich your perceptions with images of the various settings, Take some time to Google the Rectors Palace in Dubrovnik if youre unfamiliar with it,
Pero Villani, who seems to be based on Giovanni and Gentile Bellini the latters trip to Istanbul, where it is said he painted Mehmet II, recent conqueror of Constantinople the former being, by historical reputation, a far better painter, mastering the new oil techniques as he shed the restraints of the Quattrocento style has only completed one piece of art, which was so revealing it was destroyed.
Hes living over a tannery, working for pennies, when hes summarily brought to the palace of the Duke of Seressa the Doge, and given a choice between going to paint the Khalif of the Osmanlisand attempting to assassinate himor death.
He sets out on board a merchants trip for the dangerous crossing, with him more spies from Seressia in the guise of a merchant and his wife.
The inevitable pirate attack brings Senjans, people whose lives hardened by constant invasions from various armies, especially the Osmanlis, had turned them all into guerillas and pirates,
They are led by eighteenyearold Danica, a talented archer and knife fighter, who lost her family to Osmanli attack, Most died, except her fouryearold brother Neven, who had been carried off by the Osmanlis, they assumed to be gelded like the rest and sold at the slave market.
I say "they" because unaccountably, she hears the voice of her grandfather, also dead, Danica is accompanied by her faithful dog Tico .
These characters, and a few others introduced through the action including a number of fascinating female characters, are at the heart of this tale about the clash of cultures and trade, shadowed by a century of plague attacks during summer.
Kay uses
an omniscient narrator whose voice evokes storytellers in long winter evenings by the fireplace, the pacing leisurely until action is sudden and shocking,
Kays characters are complex, their personalities and motivations and passions keeping them from being overwhelmed by the larger picture, a difficult achievement given the vast scope here.
There is just enough of a fantastical element to evoke a shimmer of the numinous over the colorful indeed, sanguinary tapestry of interactions and consequences, some of them real whiteknuckle moments.
My only complaint is that an omni voice gives one the chance to keep the flow linear, unlike limited third epics, which have to jolt and jerk back and forth in time, sometimes repeating whole conversations as one POV then another gets its airing.
There are several of these jolts here, including repeated exchanges, which could have been worked seamlessly by the allseeing narrator, but that is a small problem given the scope, the imagination, the elegiac observations about the fragility of human life under the inexorable threat of war, pestilence, and time.
Kay brings the story to a poignantly triumphant and satisfying close, as the narrator slowly weaves inward and then outward again for the long view, then ends gently, and perceptively, with characters we have come to love.
Chance and change are the way of the world, and more so for those living on disputed borders, or venturing to sea,
The struggle between holding on to a piece of land for shelter and survival and raising our eyes to the in search of the meaning of life was never more poignant and bittersweet as in this latest offering from Guy Gavriel Kay, a master of the lyrical prose and of the heroic evocation of lost civilizations.
After a couple of novels set in ancient China, Kay returns to his alternate universe based on European history and focuses on the turbulent decades following the fall of Constantinople, known in this setting as Sarantium.
"Sailing to Sarantium" is my all time favorite in a long list of Kay novels that I read in the past, and I was looking forward to a return to the city's magical and history infused streets, especially after a couple of recent visits to present day Istanbul, still a fascinating and colourful metropolis.
Children of Earth and Sky hits all the right notes and recalls everything I love about Guy Gavriel Kay's style, yet I cannot honestly place it among my favorites.
It may be a case of being distracted by work or of the action being placed too close to my own home the Balkans, but I couldn't get immersed in the story to the same degree I did with previous books by the author.
Little personal annoyances in the transcription of local dialect and some liberties taken with the historical facts kept coming back to put me in a more critical frame of mind than usual.
Another aspect of the novel that sets it apart from the bulk of Kay's oeuvre is what I perceive as a shift of focus from the personal journey of an artist still the backbone of the tale here in the quest of Pero Villani to a much more complex and ambitious weave that takes in politics, economics, warfare and religion from six or seven separate kingdoms/ settlements.
I might go so far as to claim the present novel, in its epic scope, it Kay's own attempt to emulate the Game of Thrones, On the playing board we go from the court of the Holy Emperor of Jad in Obravic Prague to the Duke Palace in Seressa Venice by way of the High Patriarch in Rhodias Rome.
Crossing the sea we fight with the pirate/heroes of Senjan the Uskoks of Senj, trade with the merchants from Dubrava Dubrovnik and fight against the Asharites Ottomans alongside the rebel leader Skandir Skanderbeg before reaching the triple walls of Sarantium, now renamed Asharias by its new ruler, Khalif Gurcu Great Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror.
Against this dark background of the demise of an ancient culture, the rise of ambitious new kingdoms and the destruction of large swaths of land by mercenary armies, Kay places a small group of ordinary people who will rise to the challenge of their times and pass on the torch of civilization art, commerce, love, kindness to future generations.
Leading the cast, at least in my opinion, is the young painter from Seressa named Pero Villani based on Gentile Bellini, who is sent by his duke to the court of Gurcu the Conqueror to paint his portrait in the Western style.
Pero is the latest incarnation of a recurrent type of hero in Kay's universe: the artist who must reconcile living in the present with living in the more rarefied air of spiritual enlightenment.
On the road, Pero will come across some of the mosaics left behind by Crispin from an earlier novel, reinforcing this sense of continuity of purpose through the centuries:
'Sailing to Sarantium' was the ancient phrase.
One of his friends had quoted it last night, raising a cup, There was a new sorrow that came with the words, since there was no Sarantium any more, It used to mean that someone was changing his life, embarking on something new, transforming like a figure in a classical painting or mosaic, becoming something else,
On his journey, both geographical and emotional, Pero Vilanni crosses paths with the other key characters in the epic: a young girl from the fortress town of Senjan named Danica Gradek, a mysterious woman sent by Seressa to spy on the town of Dubrava named Leonora Valeri and the younger son of a merchant family from Dubrava named Marin Djivo.
Without spoiling the dramatic events of the journey and the final destination of each of the major players, these people will experience their own spiritual emancipation on the road to Sarantium, chance and change ruling their fate as they do for all of us under heaven, to paraphrase some more from the other works of the author.
I am in awe at the way Kay managed to bring together all these separate threads and to flesh out numerous side characters that play a crucial part in the developing conflict, yet I cannot help making a couple of critical observations, notes that are highly subjective and probably will get toned down on an eventual reread.
Firstly, I would say that it's not always good when an author gets overenthusiastic about some of his subjects, I'm referring here to the treatment of the Senjani pirates, who are referred to right from the start as 'heroes', It got so heavy handed by the end that I actually cheered for the other side when .
Secondly, I normally enjoy Kay's treatment of magic as a subtle and mysterious force originating in the wildness of places untouched by modern civilization, I'm not sure how we got from this original stance to the current incarnation of ghostly presences acting like guardian angels out of a biblical parable, And lastly, I am familiar with the way Kay changes a couple of letters in a name to create his alternate universe, but every time I came across the word 'hadjuk' I wanted to put a spellchecker on and change it to 'hajduk'.
The reaction was aggravated by also changing the original meaning of the term from a local guerilla fighter in the Balkans to a member of a Turkish marauder band.
As a conclusion, I was thrilled to get my hands on the new Guy Gavriel Kay novel, Despite these minor grumblings, I believe "Children of Earth and Sky" is a great addition to his alternate history universe and reinforces some of the recurring themes dear to the author.
The portrait of Gurcu the Destroyer, who had conquered Sarantium, remained in the palace complex, It survived upheavals and changes, a treasure of the Osmanli people and the world for centuries,
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Unlock Now Children Of Earth And Sky Constructed By Guy Gavriel Kay Released Through Publication
Guy Gavriel Kay