Subject: Guy Gavriel Kay: A Song for Arbonne

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1993 09:55:05 GMT

Does Guy Gavriel Kay's "A Song for Arbonne" really need another positive
review?  Not really, but it couldn't hurt:  Some drums bear repeated beating.
To set the appropriate tone, though, I'll start by quoting a verse from Phil 
Alcock's "Publish and Be Damned":

	"We feel your novel suffers from pretensions
	 The plot, you see, is really too complex:
	 All your characters have more than two dimensions
	 There ought to be more violence and more sex.
	 We want a happy ending; yours is tragic:
	 The hero doesn't even get the girl!
	 No dragons, elves, or dwarves, or even magic
	 You really have designed a boring world!

	 Write for us a trilogy,
	 A four- or five-book trilogy..."

"A Song for Arbonne" is, essentially, an alternate-history fantasy.  The
book has few formal fantasy elements -- beyond its being placed in a world
that never was -- and those elements are not that important to the story.
It isn't precisely an alternate history -- or, if it is, it's *very*
alternate -- because there are two moons, but aside from that, the setting
is a recognizable late-medieval Europe.

The world is one in which Christianity never developed.  The dominant
religion is semi-pagan, worshipping a vaguely Celtic God and Goddess.
Perhaps for that reason, perhaps not, its Roman Empire or equivalent
fell sooner and harder than ours, and is barely remembered myth.  Those
differences, though, are allowed to make exceedingly little difference to
the society that develops.

Arbonne itself is patterned on (13th-century?) Provence, in the south of
France.  (Perhaps an idealized Provence:  One gets the indistinct impression
that the inhabitants have good teeth and working drains.)  It is a land of
troubadors and Courtly Love.  Gorhaut, to its north, is Arbonne's warlike
and patriarchal antithesis:  It's a land in which the Goddess gets short 
shrift (as do women in general), and which is controlled by a man determined
to destroy Arbonne.  (The next-most significant country appears to be 
patterned on 15th-century Italy.  Go figure.)

A boring world:  No dragons, elves, or dwarves, and no magic that makes a
difference.   Just a world like our own.  (I find myself spending a lot
more time writing about the setting than about the story.  That's fair
enough.  It's the setting -- and the people who inhabit it -- that stay
with me most vividly.)

"A Song for Arbonne" represents Kay's best writing to date.  "The Fionavar
Tapestry" is great fun to read, but its a reworking of standard epic fantasy.
"Tigana" represents better and more original writing, but it was never as
much fun to read.  This book kept me turning the pages.  The absence of
fantasy elements may have been an advantage; they're a crutch.  This book
stands or falls on the authors ability to make the characters live and to
make the reader care what happens to them.  Stands, as it turns out.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope