A review by tsavatar
Tigana: Anniversary Edition by Guy Gavriel Kay

4.0

I can see why Guy Gavriel kay was hired as Tolkien's postumate archivist. He has all the worldbuilding talent and singlemindedness of Tolkien, but with better writing and more comprehensible beats. His prose does slog at times and he suffers from that quintessential "fantasy writer" flaw of writing eight pages where one will do. But he is an immaculate worldbuilder especially one skilled in what i like to call "adjaecent worldbuilding" - the show don't tell of worldbuilding, or, if you want to leave the realm of writing behind the Dark Souls approach to worldbuilding. Sure GGK engages in twenty pages of character backstory but he drops these subtle hints that flesh out his worlds of cultures without spending two chapters, ten diagrams and an excel table to explain how his magic works (see: Rothfuss) or how a certain nation is run (see: GRRM). Plus he writeswell and the story is deeply engrossing even if it drags and drags and drags at time. The story is, at first glance, so simple and pulpy that it seems the type of sword and sandal that a Leiber or Howard moght write: twenty years ago, the Palm, a fractured not-renaissance-Italy that does not have much in the way of local wizards is taken over and split by not one but two powerful sorcerer kings from across the sea. Alberico, the first one is a haughty but nervous sorcerer-general looking to get rich and score points back home in Barbadior in order to one day become emperor. Brandin of Ygrath, the more powerful Sorcerer, is already emperor in his homeland and basically has just come to the Palm, Caesar-like to vibe, expand his domain and give his young son a taste of command. Bad move. His son isn't really a conquering hero and is swiftly killed on the field of battle by the leaders of one of the Palm's fractured duchies - the Tigana that gives the book its title. Mad with grief and genocidal rage Brandin starts to systematically destroy all the art, literature and most of the population of Tigana but he doesn't stop there. He casts a powerful spell causing the very name of the country and of its cities to be erased from the world from everything but the minds or its dwindling inhabitants. Foreigners can't even hear or repeat the name of Tigana, and all references to it slip their mind fast. For those born in Tigana the name is a constant reminder of his anger, of his determination to basically ethnically and culturally cleanse them off the face ofthe world. Brandin then calls the land "Lower Corte" after Tigana's ancestral enemy and exiles himself in the Palm, far from his empire, wife and other son until the last man woman and child to ever know Tigana ever existed is dead and buried. The book then spends 700 pages developing a plot, by resolute Tiganans to orchestrate a war and kill both sorcerer-kings, saving their legacy and their land.

Kay says the book is about memory and the lengths people will go for revenge and i can see that. The book waxes philosophically about memory, remembrance and trauma at times but does so in a pleasant, pub-philosophy way, not in a systematic PHD nerd way (read: Bakker). It's also full of good characters doing bad things, weird sex and conflicted villains and this is at least a couple of decades before Joe Abercrombie wrote his first "say anything about Logen Nine-Fingers". Abercrombie is more concise and to the point and if i had to choose just one not-renaissance-italy fantasy book I'd probably still go for the nastier, brutish (er?) and considerably shorter Best Served Cold but I am a confessed Abercrombie simp.

All in all Tigana is a great if lengthy book and an absolutely recommended read.