Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Light of the Sun (Roc Books, 2004)
I suppose that I should come clean right now: I am a huge fan of Guy Gavriel Kay. We're talking huge fan here: the man could write a Dick and Jane book, and I'd probably love it. I've read and loved all of Kay's books, except for the poetry collection In This Dark House. So if it might seem that I lack some level of "objectivity" here, I might also point out that I'm able to view this new novel in the continuing light of Kay's other novels.
The Last Light of the Sun is Kay's ninth novel, and the fourth novel set in the "pseudo-Europe" setting previously established in The Lions of Al-Rassan and the duology The Sarantine Mosaic. The book follows the actions of a fairly large cast of characters in a world inspired by the Northern Europe and Britain of the Viking age. There is Bern Thorkellson, an "Erling" who flees his island after committing a fairly brazen theft, and later seeks to become a mercenary of Jormsvik with the life of sea-raids and battle that entails; there is Aeldred, the King of the "Anglcyn", who is striving to almost literally forge a kingdom from a rugged and rocky isle; there is Alun ab Owyn of the "Cyngael", a society whose ways are slowly being supplanted by the Anglcyn.
All of these characters are drawn into battles and confrontations shaped by the deeds of their fathers, and the struggles are not merely physical or political in nature: there are even deeper spiritual struggles going on, as the ancient religions of the Erlings and the Cyngael are being pushed aside by the newer faith of the "Jaddites" and their sun-god, Jad.
After Kay broke into fantasy publishing with his Tolkien-esque epic The Fionavar Tapestry, he began exploring historical fantasy. In Tigana, for example, Kay took as his starting point the fractious nature of Renaissance Italy; in A Song for Arbonne, Kay drew inspiration from the history of Provence in general and the Albigensian Crusade in particular.
Starting with The Lions of Al-Rassan, Kay began drawing stricter parallels in his fiction to European history, with a world where the names have been changed but the geography remains quite similar, the religions reworked, and the historical events with obvious parallels to the history we all know. Lions was inspired by the seismic shifts in Iberia as the Moors retreated and the Christians filled the void; The Sarantine Mosaic focuses on an analogue of Byzantium at the height of its post-Roman glory. The Last Light of the Sun moves the focus to Kay's pseudo-European northlands, then, with villagers fleeing in terror when the dragon-prowed ships appear in the Anglcyn harbors, and with their fears of the ancient spirits said to dwell within the largest and deepest forests.
Even though Last Light of the Sun is set in that same world, it is a stand alone novel. One need not have read anything by Kay before in order to enjoy this, although there are plenty of what Kay calls "grace notes", but which I like to think of as "Easter Eggs", for the experienced readers: moments when the current book makes reference to the events depicted in earlier ones. These small references will delight the Kay fan, but you don't need to know about them to appreciate this novel. There are also references, as there are in every Kay book and not just the ones set in his pseudo-Europe, to the world of Fionavar of The Fionavar Tapestry. (The central conceit of that trilogy is that Fionavar is the "first of all worlds", a sort of Platonic ideal.) Kay has become very good at burying this particular set of references. There are two that I know of, and one of them I only learned of in the course of correspondence with the webmistress of Kay's official site.
If I haven't said much about the plot of Last Light of the Sun, this is because there really isn't any clear plot to this book, at least, not in the sense of "This task must be accomplished, and it's up to this bunch of plucky heroes to get this task done." This is not a weakness, however; what Kay likes to depict in much of his fiction is the idea that history isn't always formed by its would-be "shapers", but that it is at least in equal part something that naturally arises from the toils and troubles confronted by peoples living their lives. Thus we have one of the main themes of this book: the fact that children, in addition to having their own concerns and problems to deal with, must also contend with the allegiances and enmities forged by their parents. All through Last Light, the current generation is dealing with the resonances in history of their parents' actions, both for good and for ill. This is actually a fairly common theme of Kay's in general, but it really takes center stage in this novel; and if the last fifty pages or so meander a bit, well – that may be one of those "feature, not a bug" moments, since real lives seldom have moments when everything ties up nicely, just in time for the end credits or the turning of the last page.
Kay also has a reputation for writing very emotional novels; if you ask a Kay fan if they have ever cried while reading one of his books, you'll likely receive a list of such instances in response. (Yes, me too. There are at least four events in the last half of The Darkest Road that move me to tears.) I confess that I shed no tears at all while reading Last Light. The emotional tone here feels cooler, more distant – perhaps this is because of the setting being a part of the world where a matter-of-fact attitude toward love and death is a requirement of life. This is not a fault of the novel, but experienced Kay readers who come to this book expecting to be put through an emotional wringer on the level of, say, Lions of Al-Rassan will likely be disappointed.
The book's tone, then, stands in pretty sharp contrast to Kay's earlier books. In a setting where mere survival requires very hard work, things like art and poetry become luxuries and are therefore not as much in evidence here as in Kay's earlier books. Kay also experiments a bit more, stylistically; his language is a bit more lean, making extensive use of short, clipped sentences and even sentence fragments, like this:
"He took a deep breath. Looked up at the sky. Ghost moon, early spring stars. His hands were trembling, holding the horse's reins."
I do think that Kay overuses this kind of sentence structure in this book, but that's a tiny complaint. It's pretty clear why he does it.
Another thing he does often in this book is to step outside his main narrative. He does this in two ways. First, to return to my contention above that what he is doing here is showing a set of lives and how they intersect at a certain point in history (and how history is thus shaped by those intersecting lives), a number of times in Last Light of the Sun Kay will leave behind his main characters and instead show us something of the life of some character who just happens to wander into the novel's narrative at one point and then wanders right back out of it:
"At the margins of any tale there are lives that come into it only for a moment. Or, put another way, there are those who run quickly through a story and then out, along their paths. For these figures, living their own sagas, the tale they briefly intersect is the peripheral thing. A moment in the drama of their own living and dying."
Kay's other way of stepping outside the narrative is to stop the action and address the reader directly, drawing attention to some specific point about life:
"It happens this way. Small things, accidents of timing and congruence: and then all that flows in our lives from such moments owes its unfolding course, for good or ill, to them. We walk (or stumble) along paths laid down by people and events of which we remain forever ignorant."
I found these "asides" fascinating, and knowing as I do that Kay's method of story creation involves a great deal of immersion in source material, I now wonder if this type of "aside" can be found in the sagas and the Skaldic poetry of the Viking cultures.
The last big masterstroke of Last Light of the Sun is the way Kay sets up expectations and then flouts them continually. (I wonder if he's been taking lessons from George R. R. Martin in this regard.) I can't say much for fear of spoiling some pleasant surprises, but I can say that a handful of times when I thought I could see where he was heading with his characters, Kay ended up going somewhere else. (In one case, he literally took that character somewhere else!)
Finally, I must make mention of the one gaping flaw in The Last Light of the Sun. I've avoided it as long as I can, but duty calls; fortunately, it's a complaint I've made about many recent fantasy books. There is no map! I always find it hard enough to read an imaginary-world fantasy book, with a huge cast of characters ranging across vast landscapes, without the additional difficulty of mapping out the imaginary geography in my own head. It helps, slightly, that Kay's world here is based on our own, and that it follows three books already set in this world, but none of the maps in those books dealt with this part of Kay's "pseudo-Europe", so while I know what's being discussed when the characters in Last Light refer to Al-Rassan and Ferrieres and Sarantium, I have less idea when they refer to Jormsvik and Rabady Isle and Brynnfell. Generally, it's not too difficult to figure out the "lay of the land" here, but as a fantasy reader, I want to puzzle out theme and motivation and character and all that; having to figure out the geography too is a little much. This book needs a map, and I hope that future editions get one.
The Last Light of the Sun marks a bit of departure for Guy Gavriel Kay, but it also stands at least partially in the tradition of the work for which he's known and valued. I found it worth the four-year wait…but I am wary of saying so, lest Mr. Kay take it as permission to wait another four years for the next one.
