[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: Canada
year: 1984
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: The Fionavar Tapestry, #1
dates read: 28.2.23-22.3.23
one thing I appreciate about Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree is that, intentionally or otherwise, none of the main characters is written as straight. I don’t think it is intentional, probably, because all of the sex (of which there’s a reasonable amount) is exclusively a man and a woman (or, in one case, possibly a man and three women; it’s not clear whether they arrived all at once or one at a time), but there sure is a lot of subtext that makes it very easy to read that way.
I mostly enjoyed the book, on the whole, although the turn towards intense sexual violence in the last few pages felt gratuitous and unnecessary. the writing is beautiful (no hanging clauses here!), the characterization is really excellent — every main character is a nice balance of flaws and appealing traits, and the side characters are well-drawn. if I read the rest of the trilogy, it will be because of the characters.
its biggest flaw is that it essentially rewrites The Lord of the Rings but without the ring (mostly — there’s a ring, but not like that). oh, the king of the dwarves is ordained by staring into a deep mirrored lake and perceiving astronomical phenomena in it? how novel. Rakoth Maugrim waits to reveal himself until after his ancient fortress has been rebuilt? never heard that one before! one of the protagonists’ allies is a member of a powerful but minuscule order of wizards, referred to by the color of his clothing? oh, tell me more…
it does make some innovations, and some of these are good, or at least conceptually interesting — mages being magically bonded to a non-mage as their “source,” for example, which I think is probably what Jordan had in the back of his mind with warders in Wheel of Time. a lot of the innovations, though, are really just:
all of this is exacerbated by the core problem with the world-building: the central premise of the novel is that Fionavar (transparently stolen from the name of Findabair) is The First World — the realest or truest world of which all others are a reflection. oh, and what’s that? the cosmology of the realest world is full of Celtic (and one Norse) gods and legendary figures, such that Dana/Danu, “Mörnir” (read: Odin/Thor), Nemain, etc. are the true/primary gods and everything else is either a misunderstanding or an inferior offshoot? that is, simply, racist — an issue that’s echoed by the dichotomy between the “lios alfar” (cf. Old Norse ljós “light”) and the “svart alfar” (cf. Old Norse svartr “black”). guess which ones are the good guys and which ones devour the corpses of their enemies after battle! oh, also there’s a decadent slave-owning southern kingdom where people get summarily executed by the royal family and people have vaguely Arabic-sounding names, just for good measure.
I gave this 3.5 stars (I’ve dropped it down twice the more I think about it), but that’s almost entirely a reflection of the aesthetic quality of the writing and the (again, really excellent) characterization. the world-building is a lazy, mildly to severely racist mishmash of things and the plot, except for the isekai element, is just an obvious retreading of Tolkien.
edit: also considering the antisemitism that underlies Tolkien’s dwarves, the decision to have the dwarves be the ones who’ve betrayed the world (out of their greed for power/ancient magic) and unleashed the Unraveller feels…well, it’s got a certain antisemitic conspiracy theory vibe, I must say!
moods: adventurous, dark, emotional, tense