{"id":12621,"date":"2009-12-18T17:29:16","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T22:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/12\/18\/12621.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:54:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:54:00","slug":"book-report-sailing-to-saranti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/12\/18\/book-report-sailing-to-saranti\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Sailing to Sarantium"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and Your Humble Blogger took the bird-in-the-hand approach and started Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium<\/a> 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.\n

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<\/i> than detailing the sources of pleasure.\n

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<\/i> 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.\n

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.\n

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.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger fails to follow advice, but is as grateful as if I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18957,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621\/revisions\/18957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}