Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven (Roc Books, 2010)
Full moon is falling through the sky.
Cranes fly through the clouds.
Wolves howl. I cannot find rest
Because I am powerless
To amend a broken world.So recites a poet in Guy Gavriel Kay's newest novel, Under Heaven.
As a reviewer of this new book, I feel somewhat honor-bound to acknowledge the high esteem in which I hold the works of Guy Gavriel Kay. He is, simply, my favorite living author, and few writers, living or dead, have so consistent an effect upon me. This is so much so that there is a certain degree to which I have worried, upon the release of his last few books, if he is becoming a comfort to me, an author to whom I return because I know what I'm going to get.
Luckily, that unsettled feeling is always proven foolish by the actual books themselves, even the one that preceded this one, Ysabel, which marked a distinct shift in Kay's approach to the fantastic. And the same worry was pushed aside once again by Under Heaven, which is, simply, a great book.
After the present-day tale told in Ysabel, Under Heaven returns us to the storytelling approach that has dominated Kay's output: fantasy based on historical themes, set in lands deeply similar -- and yet vitally different -- from countries and realms of our own world. But where his previous efforts in this vein have all taken place in one medieval Europe analogue or another, Under Heaven takes us to the Far East, to Kitai in the time of its Ninth Dynasty under the Emperor Taizu ("May he rule a thousand years"). The historical analogue is medieval China of the Tang Dynasty, a time of amazing civilization in Far East Asia when Europe was in the depths of the Dark Ages. The Tang Dynasty was a time of trade, of poetry and culture, of beauty, and sadly, of impenetrable court politics and brutal rebellion and war.
Impenetrable court politics and brutal war are staples in Kay's novels, and one of his favored devices is to cast our sympathies upon a low-level character who gradually finds him or herself enmeshed in the forces that are changing history. So it is here, when we meet Shen Tai, the second son of the deceased war hero Shen Gao. When we first encounter Tai, he is passing his mandated two-year mourning period by his father at a lake in the mountains far to the west, mountains which form the natural border between Kitai and its rival nation Tagur. The lake is called Kuala Nor, and it was the scene of a great battle, many years ago. The bones of the dead from that battle still litter the fields around the lake, and in tribute to his deceased father, Tai has taken it upon himself to bury all of the bones. This he does in order to bring peace to the dead whose cries and screams haunt him every night; when a dead soldier's bones are finally all buried, his tortured spectral voice finally falls silent.
Tai's actions, in which he is burying not just Kitai soldiers but Taguran ones as well, come to the attention of the White Jade Princess in Tagur, who decides to honor Tai with a gift of horses. The Heavenly Horses from the distant kingdom of Sardia are the most highly valued of all horses, and this gift is truly staggering:
You gave a man one of the Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You gave him four or five of those glories to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank -- and earn him the jealousy, possibly mortal, of those who rode the smaller horses of the steppes.
The Princess Cheng-wan, a royal consort of Tagur now through twenty years of peace, had just bestowed upon him, with permission, two hundred and fifty of the dragon horses.
So it is that Tai, having received a staggering gift, leaves behind his self-imposed exile in the distant mountains and sets out for Xinan, the Imperial City of Kitai, where we must decide what to do with his gift. He is accompanied by Wei Song, a Kanlin warrior whose services have been retained for him as a bodyguard by an unknown benefactor, Before he even leaves his tiny cottage beside the mountain lake, he learns that someone in the Imperial city has marked him for death and dispatched assassins to ensure that it happens.
As Tai journeys back to Xinan, we gradually learn more and more about the world of Under Heaven: the history of Tai and his family (especially his beloved sister and his not-so-beloved older brother, who now holds a very high position at court); the politics of a dynasty of a vast empire; the mistakes that the people in power make that come, many years later, to bring about wars and disasters no one had ever foreseen. Kay spends much, if not all, of the entire first half of the book showing us this world and the people in it. The first half of the book is more episodic in construction than the latter half, but anyone familiar with Kay will recognize this device, because it is in the second half of the book that the momentum builds, the pacing increases, and all of the disparate pieces from the first half begin to fall into place, sometimes with awful results for characters we've come to care about.
That last is, of course, Guy Gavriel Kay's great strength in all of his books, and it shines again here. His characters are people who elicit emotion. Some, we care deeply about what happens to them; others, we hope they meet a terrible end. And some who do meet that hoped-for terrible end earn our sympathies in doing so. Under Heaven abounds with the triumphs and tragedies that mark all of Kay's novels, and I must admit that one character's fate, unforeseen and therefore more impactful, caused me a bit of distress while I read it.That emotional involvement with the characters Kay is able to evoke also makes possible one the most deeply satisfying endings to a novel Kay has written yet. For fear of giving away too much, I won't say more than that, except to note that in all particulars, the way Under Heaven concludes is vintage Kay.
One thing I found interesting about the book is the relative lack of spiritual elements within it. There is magic of a typically muted nature for a Kay novel, but there was not a great deal of discussion of gods or powers beyond. Religion has always been at least a minor theme in Kay's books, and I was surprised to see it not much in evidence in Under Heaven at all, aside from occasional brief mention here and there. Tang Dynasty China was a realm in which numerous religions existed, but this doesn't really enter much into the narrative here. It is more suggested in terms of mood than anything else.
While the religious aspects of Kitai civilization aren't explored in any great depth, the artistic efforts of the society are -- particularly the poetry. There is a large amount of verse in this book, possibly the most in a Kay novel since A Song for Arbonne. The verse is inspired by, and pays homage to, the great poets of Tang Dynasty China, chief among them Li Bei (some of whose work I've read in translation). I've always appreciated Kay's gift for verse, and the gift shines here. Poetry lies at the very heart of Kitai, and at the very heart of Under Heaven. Long-time Kay readers will probably be on the lookout for references to Fionavar, the "first of all worlds" from his Fionavar Tapestry; such references have existed in each of his books prior to this. This time, however, there were no such overt references to be found; or if there were, I managed to miss them completely. I wonder if Kay isn't leaving Fionavar behind, after he most directly referenced it in Ysabel.
Long-time readers will also look for clues as to whether this stand-in China exists in the same world as his earlier stand-in Europe of The Lions of Al-Rassan, The Sarantine Mosaic, and The Last Light of the Sun. None of those realms are mentioned at all in Under Heaven, and there is one detail in the book that suggests to me that Xinan is a place of its own. I was glad to see that the book does, indeed, have a map; I continue to see the lack of a map in Last Light of the Sun as one of that book's few faults. There is a helpful list of characters, as well; however, a pronunciation guide might have been helpful for those not entirely familiar with Anglicized forms of Chinese.
As a Kay fan of many years (I first read him in 1993), I'm not ready to make any attempt to assign Under Heaven a place of ranking within Kay's overall output. But I can say this: Kay's abilities to portray a fictional world, populate it with characters who engage the emotions, and depict the forces of history that both shape and are shaped by those characters, has shown no diminishment at all.
Now begins the long wait for Kay's next book. He has said in numerous interviews that he never knows what the next book will be when he finishes writing one. That being the case, I would dearly love to see Kitai again.
