Guy Gavriel Kay, The Sarantine Mosaic (Penguin Canada, 1998)
Lord of Emperors (Penguin Canada, 2000)
Wikipedia defines "Mosaic" as the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials." Mosaic forms the focus, both in literary terms and within the narrative itself, of Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic duology. The book is about a mosaicist, and at the same time, it is something of a mosaic itself, if one can see a story as being composed of small pieces of narrative, instead of glass.
I re-read The Sarantine Mosaic in its entirety very recently, and only a few days after putting the book down did I learn that GMR has never reviewed it. Thus the task fell to me, even though I must admit, as I always must, that Guy Gavriel Kay is by some considerable margin my favorite living author. This review is therefore unlikely to be objective, but what good is an objective review, anyway?
The Sarantine Mosaic is set in the same fantastical proto-Europe that Kay first explored in The Lions of Al-Rassan (still my favorite Kay novel, by the way), but this time, the action takes place several centuries earlier in lands farther to the east of the virtual Iberia of the earlier book. The action focuses on the greatest city in the world: Sarantium, the Imperial city, the city whose goings-on dominate the entire world, whether they pay tribute to the Empire or not. Sarantium is a city around which Kay builds considerable mystique:
To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune -- or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something too vast for his capacity.
In a lengthy prologue, Kay provides a series of quick glimpses of life in Sarantium several decades before the main action of the book. This part of the book has always been for me the book's biggest stumbling block, as Kay introduces a large number of characters, even by his standards, and intercuts between the action involving them quickly and, at times, confusingly. That being the case, I have found it difficult to really get into the book until I finally reached Chapter One, about fifty pages in. However, there is a reason for this, which only becomes clear as one reads farther into the book.
In Chapter One we meet the man who will become our main character, and thus our main viewpoint through which to view Sarantium: a mosaicist named Caius Crispus (Crispin for short). Crispin makes a fairly powerful first impression, even for a Kay character: he is a demanding perfectionist; he cares for his art almost exclusively; he is foul-mouthed and ill-tempered; he is extremely talented -- and he is deeply embittered by the deaths of his wife and daughters in a plague a year before. Crispin lives in Rhodias, a depleted nation that was once home to the same world-spanning Empire that Sarantium now holds most of. The parallels are clear: Sarantium is Byzantium, and Rhodias is Rome.
As the book's main action begins, a courier comes to Rhodias bringing a summons for a great mosaicist by name of Martinian to come to the Imperial Court at Sarantium to consult with Valerius II, the Emperor, on the decoration in mosaic to be installed on the dome of the great new sanctuary the Emperor is building. Martinian, however, decides that he is too old to go, and decides to send Crispin in his stead, pretending to be Martinian. Crispin is loath to leave, but all of his friends and family members urge him to go, mostly in unstated hopes that by doing so, Crispin will find his will to live again. He agrees to go, and the stage is almost set, when he makes two final visitations before leaving: he is brought by force to Gisel, the Queen of Rhodias, who gives him a dangerous message to bring to the Emperor, and a magician named Zoticus, who gives Crispin a mechanical bird which turns out to be able to communicate telepathically with Crispin.
Crispin thus sets out for Sarantium -- over land, a nice irony given the book's title -- and has a very eventful journey, during which he makes several more friends and a couple of enemies and comes into contact with the supernatural in the form of an ancient pagan god before finally, halfway through the book, reaching Sarantium itself.
It's tempting to continue to summarize the plot, because there are many ways in which the real meat of the book begins once we reach Sarantium. Crispin is brought before the Emperor and his captivating Empress, and almost immediately he finds himself embroiled in complex court politics that should be of no import to a man who has come to Sarantium to be a mere artisan. But of course, he can be no mere artisan, for the Emperor himself has chosen him to provide the decoration for the great dome of the Sanctuary to Jad that he is building. It will be the biggest, grandest sanctuary in the world, with the biggest, grandest mosaic in the world. This is the challenge Crispin confronts.
Sarantium is, we quickly learn, a world unto itself, and Kay provides more complexity within the walls of a single city than many fantasy authors provide for their entire worlds. Sarantium is a city of great art and base actions; of men and women who strive for immortality, of men and women who strive to deny it; it is a city of lofty ideals and of long-held grudges. It is a city at the junction between two worlds, East and West, and it is a city whose citizens divide themselves into factions aligned not with political beliefs but with particular teams at the most important social institution in Sarantium: the chariot races at the Hippodrome. Through all of his motions into and around this city, Crispin strives to create something. This becomes a major theme of the duology: the desire of all people to leave behind something of themselves that will endure.
Kay introduces several narrative devices that would feature in his next several novels here, chief among them the brief aside dealing with the fate or doings of some very minor character who has no, or almost no, real role to play in Crispin's story. Through these asides, Kay indicates that some people leave something enduring behind that has little bearing on how they lived their lives. One of these asides provides one of Kay's distinctive "grace notes," as he calls them: small reminders of previous books. It turns out that Crispin is in Sarantium at the same time that the Asharite religion, which figured so strongly in The Lions of Al-Rassan, is begun by a man who wanders into the desert and returns a prophet.
In the second book, Lord of Emperors, another man comes to Sarantium, this one from the east: a doctor named Rustem, who has saved the life of his own King (ruler of a land that rivals the Sarantine Empire) and has been tasked with going to Sarantium and acting as a spy to try to learn the intentions of Emperor Valerius II. Thus, we see Sarantium again through a new man's eyes, even while we see it through Crispin's, even though he is now the one who knows the city a bit while Rustem is new. Rustem is, again, a very memorable character, intelligent and strong-willed and perceptive. It was surprising to me to discover that Rustem actually interacts with Crispin much less than I recall from my first reading, ten years ago.
Kay shifts his point of view often, and over the course of the book it starts to appear as though Kay is showing us Sarantium in much the same way a mosaicist would: a larger picture comprised of much smaller pieces arranged in specific patterns. Kay's effort is to create a literary mosaic, and he succeeds greatly. That is why his lengthy prologue has such a hard time taking flight: aside from the title, we're not yet aware that we're supposed to read the book, partly, as a mosaic.
The Sarantine Mosaic is thematically rich, having insightful things to say about not just our desire to leave something of ourselves behind but also about our relationship to art, how art intersects and interacts with our world and our reactions to it. All Crispin truly wants to do is create, but as he discovers once and again, he cannot retreat from the world into his acts of creation because his acts of creation themselves keep pulling him back into the world from which he would retreat in the first place.
As in all fantasy, magic plays a role in The Sarantine Mosaic, but as in all of Kay's historical fantasy, the role of magic is a muted one. Kay does not write books about wizards wielding spells of enormous power. His approach to magic is one of mystery. Magic is there, in the form of artificial birds who communicate through telepathy, children who have dreams that portend for the future, pagan gods in haunted forests, and -- most interestingly for me, this time around -- in the flames that dance through the streets of Sarantium, observed by all but never really commented upon. Magic is a fact of Kay's world, but a minor fact mostly taken as evidence of the workings of the God and as evidence of a deeper world beneath our own.
Where does The Sarantine Mosaic place in the pantheon of Kay? I found it deeply pleasing on this re-read, much moreso than I recalled it being the first time. Ranking the books of a favorite author is always difficult, especially when one has yet to read a book by that author that one actually doesn't like. (Kay has yet to write anything that disappoints me, but we'll see if that streak stays alive when Under Heaven arrives later this year.) For me, The Lions of Al-Rassan is still my favorite, followed by The Fionavar Tapestry, which is very near and dear to my heart. After that? Well, to be honest, I tend to nearly rank all of the books equal after that. Maybe not quite equal in all cases (I'm still pretty sure that Tigana is my least favorite, even though it's a terrific book), but were I forced to part ways with any of them, the decision would be extremely difficult.
