Scan barcode
A review by aleffert
Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay
4.0
It is an impressive feat to write a sequel set a thousand years later and have a totally plausible extrapolated setting. Of course, Kay cheats - he essentially writes historical fiction, but he changes the names, moves things around, joins up characters, adds fictional protagonists, all in service of highlighting, magnifying, emphasizing, creating parallels and contrasts. In lesser hands this could be a real loss of depth—the made for tv movie of history—but Kay takes history and turns it to poetry.
This isn't really a sequel either. It picks up reverberations from the Sarantine Mosaic books, but the main characters are long since dead. Their concerns however, are eternal. We saw Byzantium at its height, now we see Constantinople after its conquest. Before we saw the Byzantine empire expand. Now we see the Ottomans head west. Much of it is from the perspective of the westerners - in thinly fictionalized Venice, Dubrovnik, and Vienna. In all of these places and times we wonder what it means to be true to ourselves.
Of course since it's a Kay book, there's a young person on a journey, and artists and soldiers play prominent roles. Inevitably, all the disparate plots converge at artful moments.
One of his projects as a novelist is clearly the pivotal moments of a life, those moments when we must make a choice and we choose greatness, to struggle, to take the hard path. He even has one character wonder how he could encounter, essentially, evidence of the divine, and *not* do something different with his life.
If you read too much Kay, his books do run together a bit. Everyone is brilliant and witty and dangerous and beautiful. The foreshadowing gets a little repetivie. This one isn't as beautifully tragic as The Lions of Al-Rassan or The Sarantine Mosaic books. But these are small criticisms that add up over a body of work. This is a good book.
This isn't really a sequel either. It picks up reverberations from the Sarantine Mosaic books, but the main characters are long since dead. Their concerns however, are eternal. We saw Byzantium at its height, now we see Constantinople after its conquest. Before we saw the Byzantine empire expand. Now we see the Ottomans head west. Much of it is from the perspective of the westerners - in thinly fictionalized Venice, Dubrovnik, and Vienna. In all of these places and times we wonder what it means to be true to ourselves.
Of course since it's a Kay book, there's a young person on a journey, and artists and soldiers play prominent roles. Inevitably, all the disparate plots converge at artful moments.
One of his projects as a novelist is clearly the pivotal moments of a life, those moments when we must make a choice and we choose greatness, to struggle, to take the hard path. He even has one character wonder how he could encounter, essentially, evidence of the divine, and *not* do something different with his life.
If you read too much Kay, his books do run together a bit. Everyone is brilliant and witty and dangerous and beautiful. The foreshadowing gets a little repetivie. This one isn't as beautifully tragic as The Lions of Al-Rassan or The Sarantine Mosaic books. But these are small criticisms that add up over a body of work. This is a good book.