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ianbanks 's review for:
Guy Gavriel Kay helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion and read bedtime stories to J. R. R.'s grandchildren. He came to the genre with credentials. Here, in his first novel, you can see a lot of the themes, trademarks and stylistic idiosyncracies that have made him one of my favourite writers. However, this is probably my least-favourite of his books (there's one other contender,but we'll get to that in a few more books) because there is so much of what I love about Mr Kay's writing still developing here and feeling a little clumsy compared to what is to come.
He commits the debut novelist's sin of throwing everything at the wall at once and hoping that it all sticks: one of the really memorable things about Kay's writing is how he creates characters who deliver arched, layered, incredibly subtextual lines and comebacks and makes it seem effortless and totally believable. Here we have a bunch of university students with an utterly amazing body of life experience and wisdom between them managing to completely subvert and undermine a centuries-old kingdom chockful of intriguers and schemers. It does feel a little hard to swallow.
But everything else is just sublime: Kay manages to create a believable world and history that has more than a few echoes of Tolkien's original creation. It feels a little less luminal than Middle-earth, but no less wondrous and astonishing for it. As a Tolkien-esque homage (because there is too much originality here for it to be a rip-off, but enough of the serial numbers remaining for it not to be completely unique), it is astonishing: as a creation in its own right, the quality of the writing and the thoughtfulness that has gone into the motivation and history of the cast lifts it far above so many of Kay's contemporaries.