This just didn't work for me at all. I appreciate the quality of the writing, but the story, setting, and premise never interested me enough to finish this.
In a departure from Kay's normal European venues, Under Heaven takes place in an alternate version of Tang Dynasty China. In a non-departure, Kay uses this scenery to paint pictures of deeply human characters buffeted by "interesting times" and succeeds in building an original, unique and moving story.
As always, Kay's strength is in the humanity underlying all the history that informs the story. The events of Under Heaven result in the deaths of tens of millions of people, but instead of focusing on the war and the famine, Kay focuses on individuals and how they navigate a world that seems to be crumbling around them.
It is moving, of course, and exciting, and filled with characters that olive and breathe and jump into the mind full-blown.
Kay is a master of this kind of story, thin on battle, and heavy on spirit, and this is certainly a wonderful example.
I can't imagine giving a book by Guy Gavriel Kay two stars and yet here I am. I had a lot of difficulties with this book, hence the nearly 5 years it took me to finish reading it. I did actually read it throughout the period, generally in bursts of a couple of days every couple of months while travelling.
Why was it a difficult read? It felt that GGK was trying too hard to make it a Chinese book. To me the text too often felt like Orientalism, the characters too inscrutable and Chinese so that, despite the omniscient third person narration, it was impossible for us to know their mind or their heart because one could not know the foreign. So many lines had the form and tone of a Burt Kwok epigram to the beginning of an episode of The Water Margin. I had trouble NOT hearing …
I can't imagine giving a book by Guy Gavriel Kay two stars and yet here I am. I had a lot of difficulties with this book, hence the nearly 5 years it took me to finish reading it. I did actually read it throughout the period, generally in bursts of a couple of days every couple of months while travelling.
Why was it a difficult read? It felt that GGK was trying too hard to make it a Chinese book. To me the text too often felt like Orientalism, the characters too inscrutable and Chinese so that, despite the omniscient third person narration, it was impossible for us to know their mind or their heart because one could not know the foreign. So many lines had the form and tone of a Burt Kwok epigram to the beginning of an episode of The Water Margin. I had trouble NOT hearing him read those lines.
Increasingly I also am bothered by courtly stories, whether Western or otherwise. The lives of "nobles" have no more to teach us of the human condition than the lives of others and an author choosing to tell the story of high nobility now seems like laziness or pandering.
I really liked this book, my first by Guy Gavriel Kay. I took my time in reading it because it seemed like a book that deserved to be savored. The detail was great, as were the character developments. The ending was very bittersweet, but complete and satisfying.
Excellent from start to finish, with the caveat that I have no knowledge of how faithful he was to the actual history he references
