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A review by ejkimberley
The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay
3.0
A book which spends a great deal of time setting up its eventual confrontation, culmination and resolution, and a book which consequently feels as if its first 500 pages exist largely for the sake of its final 10, for better or for worse.
Kay is clearly very interested in the world he's developing, and his enthusiasm for and interest in the investigation of the lives of common people in the time and place he's drawing on may be infection. But his willingness to put so much work into his research compels one to ask whether placing the story in an alternate universe, with every so slightly modified names, is strictly necessary.
I have no complaints, as an Anglo-Saxonist, regarding his research and the way he presents it. I only question the necessity of obscuring that information behind altered spellings and titles and terms.
This is a very solid work of historical fiction, with a supernatural element. And yet it doesn't seem willing to admit that historical fiction (supernatural notwithstanding) is what it is.
Given how much work Kay puts into recreating this world, and how much time the reader will spend exporing it, I regret Kay's conventional inclination to hide behind fictionalised names and identities. It's clear he's interested in the realities which lie behind it. The reader cannot help but be equally so. Any attempt to alienate the reader from that reality seems at cross-purposes with the larger intentions of the work.
Kay is clearly very interested in the world he's developing, and his enthusiasm for and interest in the investigation of the lives of common people in the time and place he's drawing on may be infection. But his willingness to put so much work into his research compels one to ask whether placing the story in an alternate universe, with every so slightly modified names, is strictly necessary.
I have no complaints, as an Anglo-Saxonist, regarding his research and the way he presents it. I only question the necessity of obscuring that information behind altered spellings and titles and terms.
This is a very solid work of historical fiction, with a supernatural element. And yet it doesn't seem willing to admit that historical fiction (supernatural notwithstanding) is what it is.
Given how much work Kay puts into recreating this world, and how much time the reader will spend exporing it, I regret Kay's conventional inclination to hide behind fictionalised names and identities. It's clear he's interested in the realities which lie behind it. The reader cannot help but be equally so. Any attempt to alienate the reader from that reality seems at cross-purposes with the larger intentions of the work.