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adunten 's review for:
The Summer Tree
by Guy Gavriel Kay
2016 vreading challenge: a fantasy novel (a gimme category for me since I love fantasy).
The Fionavar Tapestry was recommended to me by numerous people who said it was beautiful and required reading for any lover of classic high fantasy of the Tolkien school. I love me some good old sword-and-sorcery epic fantasy, so eventually, after probably five different book lovers told me some variant of this, I gave it a try.
The Summer Tree starts off with impressive awfulness, with an opening that's as flimsy, dull, and trite as anything in fantasy ever has been. A group of five friends in Toronto attend a lecture by a famous and notably reclusive scholar of Celtic mythology. After the lecture, seemingly out of nowhere, the scholar invites the group back to his hotel for drinks, where he tells them he is actually a wizard from a magical realm, and offers them the chance to take a two-week vacation with him in a magical fairy land. And with virtually no questioning of his sanity or motives, most of the five say, “Sure, okay. Sounds good.” And within 24 hours, they're off to Fionavar. It has the feel of being written by someone who just wants to hurry up and get to the swords and sorcery... and I get it, because I want to get the hell out of Toronto and get straight to the swords and sorcery too, but a good Dungeon Master really ought to take a little more care with her setup.
From that dreadful beginning, it doesn't take long to see hints of something more complex. We see very quickly that at least some of the characters – Paul, for example—might have compelling reasons to jump at a chance to leave this world without questioning that opportunity. Paul is driven by a different kind of escapism, and if not offered the chance to escape to a fantasy world, you can imagine he might have found another way out soon, like a high window or a gun.
But ultimately, what I hoped would turn into a beautiful and complex tapestry continued to seem muddled and directionless right up until the the third and final book of the trilogy, The Darkest Road, where the plot finally crystallizes into a final battle between the Dark and the Light. And yes, I say the whole trilogy, because like a lot of fantasy, the trilogy is really one long unbroken story that is only in three volumes because it was too large to be sold as a single book.
One general rule of fantasy writing is that the Dungeon Master can set the rules of the dungeon however she likes, but once set, they must be applied as rigorously as any natural law of the real world. Kay clearly never heard of that rule. There seems to be very little real cause and effect in the story – instead, everything happens either because it is fated or just for mysterious reasons that are never explained, or because some deity or other intervened. Indeed, there’s almost no point to the storytelling because it’s made fairly clear that it’s all going to turn out however the great tapestry and the Weaver decree. (There is the notable exception of a particular child who represents random chance, but even he was dreamed ahead of time by the seer, and thus is presumably part of the overall pattern.) Throughout all three books, seers have prophetic dreams that tell them who needs to be where at the right time, magic rings activate just when they are needed, gods and demi-gods intervene at opportune moments, and are sort of omnipotent when they want to be, yet for unexplained reasons, aren't powerful enough to just snap their fingers and fix everything, and so on. It basically turns the entire story into a giant deus ex machina, which is fairly boring.
Each of the five main characters has a singular destiny, and they either march toward it not knowing why but feeling its mysterious pull, or wait around for it to find them. The characters are little more than marionettes dancing on the strings of Fate. Over and over again, they find themselves simply experiencing some heretofore unknown power within themselves and responding to it, or responding to racial memories of past lives, or simply drawn to do something or go somewhere and they don’t know why but they sense that it's important. And that Fionavar needs them. And incredibly, none of them even attempts to rebel and assert a sense of free agency, except possibly for the mother of a particular child. Even during the final final denouement, after the last great battle, they are all saved once again because someone had a hunch they should get their ass to the battlefield and acted on it. My cat is more of a free agent than any of these people are.
Kay also doesn't explain his universe well enough. I know, I know, it's generally better to show instead of tell in novel-writing, but when your fantasy world has thousands of years of complicated history and prophecy that matter very much in the right-now of the story, you need to give your readers a very firm grasp on the who-what-where-when and especially the how and why. Or at least give them enough tools and hints and basic knowledge about the universe to put the pieces together. Kay drops hints, but they're mainly a welter of Celtic names that can't be easily kept straight, and nowhere does anyone explain to our poor lost Torontonians the basic structure of this world's theology. Instead at random points, they're told by the natives, “Oh, this has to be this certain way because of some event that happened thousands of years ago,” and all they (and the reader) can really do is either accept it on faith, or throw the book across the room.
In this sense, I can't help comparing Fionavar to a science fiction novel I vread recently, [b:Blindsight|48484|Blindsight (Firefall, #1)|Peter Watts|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386924412l/48484._SX50_.jpg|47428] by Peter Watts. Watts didn't explain either – he just threw out heavy-hitting words and concepts with the barest hints and trusted his readers to either know what he was talking about, or be able to figure it out. But that was SCIENCE, mostly real-world stuff that you could go look up if you didn't understand it. What's fair play there is a lot less workable in a stand-alone fantasy world that has almost no external referents the reader can already understand, except for the oddly heavy dose of Arthurian legend.
The trilogy is filled with stereotypically ridiculous fantasy tropes: storied magical artifacts that are thousands of years old and yet still in perfect condition and which just happen to turn up in someone's basement when needed; past lives; astral traveling; flying unicorns (because a regular unicorn just wouldn't be fantastic enough I guess); vast armies with no discernible supply lines; battles that rage for entire days and nights; and heroes who take on combats they can't possibly win, and somehow, with a last-minute injection of superhuman strength, win them anyway. People are forever coming back from the dead or from a sleep or captivity of a thousand years, seemingly no worse for wear, and our heroes are always being saved from certain death by the last-minute intervention of some god or demi-god.
I’ve been told the prose is beautiful, and I suppose it is, but it’s also ponderous with its own solemnity and self-importance. There’s no lightness to it. It’s a Gothic church of a book, elegant but stern, with no soaring, lovely Baroque flights of fancy. This feeling of leaden heaviness is exacerbated by Simon Vance's technically excellent but perhaps overly grandiose audio narration. He lends the text every ounce of self-conscious gravitas that was already written into it, and then some.
The dialogue feels incredibly stilted. There are no language barriers between Earth and Fionavar (this despite the fact that the linguistic legacy of Fionavar appears to bear very little relationship to any earthly language, although a number of place names feel very Celtic), but everyone in Fionavar speaks in that hackneyed semi-archaic idiom that is such a hallmark of high fantasy – not full-on “thee” and “thou,” but a lot of “Hark!” and “hither” and “For I, too, would speak with you,” and so on. There's nothing wrong with it as long it's understood that it's just the way everyone talks in this world. But it works less well when your main characters are from late 20th-century Toronto. Strangely, our five Torontonians are speaking the lingo like pros as soon as they get there, but when they talk amongst themselves, they still do it in modern American, and yet they never question or discuss the shifting idiom.
One refreshing facet of the storytelling is that one of the main characters very quickly becomes a seer, and not just a seer, but The Seer. We see seers and other types of prophecy-tellers a lot in fantasy, but they’re almost universally sources of external wisdom. Here we get a rare glimpse inside the troubled mind of a young, inexperienced seer who doesn’t understand what’s happening to her any more than her friends do. She is suddenly burdened with the gift of prophecy, and she struggles with the responsibility of having enormous events turn on her words, combined with the uncertainty of not really knowing herself what her visions mean and the question of how to interpret them and how much of them to share with the people looking to her for guidance, whose lives may depend on her advice.
Another refreshing facet is
The Fionavar Tapestry, ladies and gentlemen: You keep waiting for the pattern to come into view, and you eventually realize it's just always going to be a strange and crappy bunch of random threads and bad dialog. To be fair, the story's pacing and direction seem to improve in the final book, but it's still largely an exercise in silliness. And this is coming from someone who loves sword-and-sorcery high fantasy. It's basically a two-star book, upgraded to three because, well, I love sword-and-sorcery high fantasy. And it's a fairly good ride if you can look past all its awful flaws and just let yourself relax and get a kick out of the flying unicorn.
The Fionavar Tapestry was recommended to me by numerous people who said it was beautiful and required reading for any lover of classic high fantasy of the Tolkien school. I love me some good old sword-and-sorcery epic fantasy, so eventually, after probably five different book lovers told me some variant of this, I gave it a try.
The Summer Tree starts off with impressive awfulness, with an opening that's as flimsy, dull, and trite as anything in fantasy ever has been. A group of five friends in Toronto attend a lecture by a famous and notably reclusive scholar of Celtic mythology. After the lecture, seemingly out of nowhere, the scholar invites the group back to his hotel for drinks, where he tells them he is actually a wizard from a magical realm, and offers them the chance to take a two-week vacation with him in a magical fairy land. And with virtually no questioning of his sanity or motives, most of the five say, “Sure, okay. Sounds good.” And within 24 hours, they're off to Fionavar. It has the feel of being written by someone who just wants to hurry up and get to the swords and sorcery... and I get it, because I want to get the hell out of Toronto and get straight to the swords and sorcery too, but a good Dungeon Master really ought to take a little more care with her setup.
From that dreadful beginning, it doesn't take long to see hints of something more complex. We see very quickly that at least some of the characters – Paul, for example—might have compelling reasons to jump at a chance to leave this world without questioning that opportunity. Paul is driven by a different kind of escapism, and if not offered the chance to escape to a fantasy world, you can imagine he might have found another way out soon, like a high window or a gun.
Spoiler
I wrote this before I found out what he actually does, and I had no idea how prophetic it would prove to be.But ultimately, what I hoped would turn into a beautiful and complex tapestry continued to seem muddled and directionless right up until the the third and final book of the trilogy, The Darkest Road, where the plot finally crystallizes into a final battle between the Dark and the Light. And yes, I say the whole trilogy, because like a lot of fantasy, the trilogy is really one long unbroken story that is only in three volumes because it was too large to be sold as a single book.
One general rule of fantasy writing is that the Dungeon Master can set the rules of the dungeon however she likes, but once set, they must be applied as rigorously as any natural law of the real world. Kay clearly never heard of that rule. There seems to be very little real cause and effect in the story – instead, everything happens either because it is fated or just for mysterious reasons that are never explained, or because some deity or other intervened. Indeed, there’s almost no point to the storytelling because it’s made fairly clear that it’s all going to turn out however the great tapestry and the Weaver decree. (There is the notable exception of a particular child who represents random chance, but even he was dreamed ahead of time by the seer, and thus is presumably part of the overall pattern.) Throughout all three books, seers have prophetic dreams that tell them who needs to be where at the right time, magic rings activate just when they are needed, gods and demi-gods intervene at opportune moments, and are sort of omnipotent when they want to be, yet for unexplained reasons, aren't powerful enough to just snap their fingers and fix everything, and so on. It basically turns the entire story into a giant deus ex machina, which is fairly boring.
Each of the five main characters has a singular destiny, and they either march toward it not knowing why but feeling its mysterious pull, or wait around for it to find them. The characters are little more than marionettes dancing on the strings of Fate. Over and over again, they find themselves simply experiencing some heretofore unknown power within themselves and responding to it, or responding to racial memories of past lives, or simply drawn to do something or go somewhere and they don’t know why but they sense that it's important. And that Fionavar needs them. And incredibly, none of them even attempts to rebel and assert a sense of free agency, except possibly for the mother of a particular child. Even during the final final denouement, after the last great battle, they are all saved once again because someone had a hunch they should get their ass to the battlefield and acted on it. My cat is more of a free agent than any of these people are.
Kay also doesn't explain his universe well enough. I know, I know, it's generally better to show instead of tell in novel-writing, but when your fantasy world has thousands of years of complicated history and prophecy that matter very much in the right-now of the story, you need to give your readers a very firm grasp on the who-what-where-when and especially the how and why. Or at least give them enough tools and hints and basic knowledge about the universe to put the pieces together. Kay drops hints, but they're mainly a welter of Celtic names that can't be easily kept straight, and nowhere does anyone explain to our poor lost Torontonians the basic structure of this world's theology. Instead at random points, they're told by the natives, “Oh, this has to be this certain way because of some event that happened thousands of years ago,” and all they (and the reader) can really do is either accept it on faith, or throw the book across the room.
In this sense, I can't help comparing Fionavar to a science fiction novel I vread recently, [b:Blindsight|48484|Blindsight (Firefall, #1)|Peter Watts|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386924412l/48484._SX50_.jpg|47428] by Peter Watts. Watts didn't explain either – he just threw out heavy-hitting words and concepts with the barest hints and trusted his readers to either know what he was talking about, or be able to figure it out. But that was SCIENCE, mostly real-world stuff that you could go look up if you didn't understand it. What's fair play there is a lot less workable in a stand-alone fantasy world that has almost no external referents the reader can already understand, except for the oddly heavy dose of Arthurian legend.
The trilogy is filled with stereotypically ridiculous fantasy tropes: storied magical artifacts that are thousands of years old and yet still in perfect condition and which just happen to turn up in someone's basement when needed; past lives; astral traveling; flying unicorns (because a regular unicorn just wouldn't be fantastic enough I guess); vast armies with no discernible supply lines; battles that rage for entire days and nights; and heroes who take on combats they can't possibly win, and somehow, with a last-minute injection of superhuman strength, win them anyway. People are forever coming back from the dead or from a sleep or captivity of a thousand years, seemingly no worse for wear, and our heroes are always being saved from certain death by the last-minute intervention of some god or demi-god.
I’ve been told the prose is beautiful, and I suppose it is, but it’s also ponderous with its own solemnity and self-importance. There’s no lightness to it. It’s a Gothic church of a book, elegant but stern, with no soaring, lovely Baroque flights of fancy. This feeling of leaden heaviness is exacerbated by Simon Vance's technically excellent but perhaps overly grandiose audio narration. He lends the text every ounce of self-conscious gravitas that was already written into it, and then some.
The dialogue feels incredibly stilted. There are no language barriers between Earth and Fionavar (this despite the fact that the linguistic legacy of Fionavar appears to bear very little relationship to any earthly language, although a number of place names feel very Celtic), but everyone in Fionavar speaks in that hackneyed semi-archaic idiom that is such a hallmark of high fantasy – not full-on “thee” and “thou,” but a lot of “Hark!” and “hither” and “For I, too, would speak with you,” and so on. There's nothing wrong with it as long it's understood that it's just the way everyone talks in this world. But it works less well when your main characters are from late 20th-century Toronto. Strangely, our five Torontonians are speaking the lingo like pros as soon as they get there, but when they talk amongst themselves, they still do it in modern American, and yet they never question or discuss the shifting idiom.
One refreshing facet of the storytelling is that one of the main characters very quickly becomes a seer, and not just a seer, but The Seer. We see seers and other types of prophecy-tellers a lot in fantasy, but they’re almost universally sources of external wisdom. Here we get a rare glimpse inside the troubled mind of a young, inexperienced seer who doesn’t understand what’s happening to her any more than her friends do. She is suddenly burdened with the gift of prophecy, and she struggles with the responsibility of having enormous events turn on her words, combined with the uncertainty of not really knowing herself what her visions mean and the question of how to interpret them and how much of them to share with the people looking to her for guidance, whose lives may depend on her advice.
Another refreshing facet is
Spoiler
a certain female character is captured and violently, brutally, horribly raped and tormented by the villain and his henchman in all the worst possible ways. She ends up pregnant and makes a narrow escape despite the villain's orders that she be killed. Although it is generally known that this happened to her, there is never a hint of shaming. Her status as a survivor of this evil only renders her more regal and respected as the story goes on, and she becomes something of a beloved figurehead for the entire army of the Light.The Fionavar Tapestry, ladies and gentlemen: You keep waiting for the pattern to come into view, and you eventually realize it's just always going to be a strange and crappy bunch of random threads and bad dialog. To be fair, the story's pacing and direction seem to improve in the final book, but it's still largely an exercise in silliness. And this is coming from someone who loves sword-and-sorcery high fantasy. It's basically a two-star book, upgraded to three because, well, I love sword-and-sorcery high fantasy. And it's a fairly good ride if you can look past all its awful flaws and just let yourself relax and get a kick out of the flying unicorn.