Well, and Your Humble Blogger took the bird-in-the-hand approach and started Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium rather than following advice. And I don’t regret it. The thing about recommendations, particularly an author that is new to me, is that I only vaguely remember them, and once I stick the name in the back of my mind, it stays there, with no sense of urgency. Sometimes for years. But if I have a book in my hand, particularly if I get the first few pages turned, then there’s a good chance I will read it.
So. I read it. And enjoyed it. Although I must say I have several problems with the book (and its sequel, or the second volume, or whatever, which I have now also read), which I will detail here, making me sound as if I don’t like the book at all. In fact, I enjoyed it a lot, and am only carping about my Sources of Reader Annoyance because that is so much easier than detailing the sources of pleasure.
The main thing, of course, is the pseudo-history. Throughout the whole of the first book and half of the second book, I was consistently irritated, page after page, by the conceit that this was not Byzantium, nor was it an alternate-universe Byzantium, but rather Sarantium, a fictional world that happened to correspond to the Byzantine Empire in about a thousand ways. I didn’t see the point of it. I mean, eventually the conceit allowed Mr. Kay to change the actual history in a major way, but he could really have done that in an alternate-history sort of thing. An interview I read indicated that he felt that writing about Justinian and Theodora under other names let him off the hook for (perceived) claims that he actually knew things about these historical figures, their motivations and habits and preferences, that are not actually recoverable. I am not convinced. But then, I enjoy reading Mary Renault’s Greek novels, and have never thought that she was making a preposterous claim that her portrayal of Plato or Alexander or Theseus were in some way accurate representations of their mental state. They are creations, meant to be consistent with the history, but meant to be understood as fictional. That is much easier for me than the pseudo-history, where I have to keep in mind which city is Rome’s analogue in the book, and what he is calling the Goths, and which heresy is represented by which.
And further, and this I thought was really interesting (warning! YHB feels the need to emphasize how interesting he found something), the fictional Sarantium was implausible in ways that were taken directly from the real Byzantium.
That is—as a work of speculative fiction, which this very clearly is, we have an otherwise naturalistically portrayed city in which almost everything—your job, your friends, your marriage prospects, your daily habits, your place of worship—was circumscribed by which of two rival sports teams you supported. Where loyalties to the teams have been handed down, generation to generation, making two cities within the city, where armed gangs of fans would clash in the streets after dark. Where a person could change factions, from one team to the other, only at great risk and personal sacrifice…but possibly opening up tremendous opportunities as well. Now, the author does not attempt to explain how this all came to be, but just presents it to us as how the city is. And it is utterly preposterous, ridiculous and unacceptable. And, of course, entirely factual, taken from the history books without embellishment.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Have you read The Dragon Waiting (John M. Ford)? It’s an alternate history of (as it turns out) Richard III, but the history divergence has its roots in Byzantium. Anyway, if you did (or had) read it I’d be interested to see what you thought of it (I adore it, myself). I mention it because I feel I had the same reaction you did to Sarantium (a nice enough set of books, and I liked it more than disliked, but when discussing it tend to dwell on the dislikes).
Well, I am glad you enjoyed the book! I’d be curious to know what you liked about it, as well as what you disliked, if you feel like blogging on that side of things.
Re your annoyance at the fictional world thing: yes, entering the work from the direction you entered it, that would likely be a source of annoyance. I don’t think there’s anything for that, but perhaps I could say a few things that would help explain why Kay has done what he has done in that regard, even though there isn’t any point to it with respect to this work in itself.
And I agree that from the standpoint of these books alone, there isn’t a great deal of point to it. Doing it that way may keep the alternate-history purists off his back, because they can just dismiss his work as “not alternate history” rather than hounding him for not following the “alternate history” rules, which probably saves him some vexation. But that doesn’t make the novel better. Kay did it that way, really, because that’s what he does, what he had been doing as a fantasist for a decade prior to writing these novels, and by the time he got to writing _Sailing for Sarantium_, he was not going to change his ways, not after finding a way of bringing together history and fantasy in a fashion that he and his (not small) readership find satisfying.
That said, from the standpoint of Kay’s fiction taken as a whole, the fictional world thing is extremely important and deepens the reader’s appreciation of the novel in relation to Kay’s other novels, not only because _The Lions of al-Rassan_ and _The Last Light of the Sun_ are set in this same world, but mainly because each fictive world is, in Kay’s conceit, an _other_ world. The reader is not meant to conceive of it as our world, as one would if it were a work of historical fiction. Nor is the reader meant to conceive of it as if the work were detailing an alternate universe version of our world, in which a thought experiment about how history might have been different can be played out. Rather, the reader is meant to conceive of it as a world existing in parallel to our own–not as an alternative to it, but as a world that simply exists in its own right, but that has strong parallels to our world because it, and all the worlds that are, have a relation to one another and to Fionavar, the first of all the worlds and the closest to the Creator’s Halls. Echoes of events on Fionavar influence the unfolding of history on all the other worlds, remote in space and time from it. When one knows all of Kay’s novels, and knows the fantasy conceit that puts all of them in relation to one another, one reads them that way, seeing characters in later books as versions or and responses to characters in other books, as the stories of characters’ successes in one world provide consolation for the tragedies that befell their counterparts in other worlds, such as ours. That’s really the point of the alternate world thing, and it simply cannot be seen from the perspective of just one of Kay’s books, especially not Sarantium, where the conceit that links the novels together is so deeply implicit that only people who already know it will see any sign of it at all. (Hm. I guess that’s another argument against starting with _Sarantium_ instead of _Tigana_ or _Arbonne_, where the conceit is explicitly addressed.)
Another reason that Kay’s use of the alternate world thing might have been annoying to you, having picked up the novel as a Byzantium novel, is that Kay writes, I think, with the assumption that his readers know little or nothing about Byzantium: they are reading the book because they like his fantasies, and after they read his books, they will learn about the Byzantine Empire and Byzantine art and say, “Cool! So this is where his ideas came from!” He doesn’t expect his readers to be interested, directly, in how he is playing variations on the details of the reign of Justinian and Theodora.
The fact that Kay’s novels present fantasy versions of this-earth history is a feature of them that has grown much more prominent in their presentation to readers over the years. In _Tigana_, his first work of this kind, there are just a few brief acknowledgments of books that he found inspiring, which don’t even reveal that _Tigana_ is a reworking of Italian history and culture. The historical setting is a bit more prominent in _A Song for Arbonne_ and much more prominent in _Lions_, but I think _Sarantium_ was the first work in which Kay provided the readers with a whole bibliography and named his setting in such a way that the parallel to our world’s history was blatantly obvious. In fact, I know several people who read and loved _Tigana_ without knowing that it had any connection to real history at all. Given that Kay started using the alternate-world version of our history as kind of a private source of inspiration that he didn’t expect his readers necessarily to notice, much less share, it’s easy to see why he doesn’t orient his works in this vein toward the reader who will be approaching them with a strong, well-informed interest in their engagement with the historical realities of our world.
So, the upshot is, if you want to see the point of the fictive/alternate/parallel world thing, read _Tigana_ and then _A Song for Arbonne_. There that feature of the novel is prominent (and in _Tigana_ it is explicitly addressed) and the historical fiction thing is more implicit, whereas in _Sarantium_ the historical fiction thing is prominent and the conceit that explains the fictive/alternate/parallel world thing is deeply implicit.
And then, if you really love those books and they’ve made you curious, read The Fionavar Tapestry, which is the root tale for all the rest, so of great importance, mythologically speaking, but a lesser work in terms of fictive quality (imo).
I found the alternative (non-) history actually rather intriguing, but mostly because I’m not a history buff, and to me he does the historical assonance approach just so darned well…
Chris’ point I agree with–it’s not an alternate history because it’s not meant as a thought experiment in how something might have turned out if it diverged at a critical point. Though I’m one of his people who didn’t know that Tigana had any relationship to history at all (can’t miss it in Lions of Al-Rassan, of course) and I’ve never read the Fionavar Tapestry series. But Tigana and Song for Arbonne are the kinds of books that make the list of five going to the desert island, and all that. Can’t recommend them highly enough. Hope you enjoy GGK as much as I do. 🙂