The Lions of Al-Rassan

The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995) Guy Gavriel Kay

This is a very good, albeit very depressing book. Set in the same world as Sailing to Sarantium, this book describes the battles between the followers of Jad versus the Asharites.

If Sailing to Sarantium reminded me of Rome, this book reminded me of Spain. Of the Crusades. Of Christianity and Islam, with Judaism caught in between.

Yes, of course the Jaddites and the Asharites do not equate precisely to Christians and Muslims, and the Kindarath are not the Jews, but the parallels are striking, and in a time of continued religious conflict, difficult to read without equating the imagined faiths with the real faiths.

My only other problem was that I did not care for the conceit of the last chapters. If someone is dead, let them be dead and tell me. None of this Schrödinger’s cat business of dead/not dead. Just tell me when and if someone is dead. The entire book was building towards this point, just give us the bad news and get it over with.

Despite those minor irritations, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and as usual with his books, had a difficult time putting it down at night to go to bed. As always, I love Guy Gavriel Kay’s characters almost as much as I love the fact that he can tell a story in one book. Ammar ibn Khairan. Rodrigo Belmonte. Jehane. They all become read in my mind, and it mattered very much to me what happened to them. Yet it is Guy Gavriel Kay’s storytelling that I like the most.

The afternoon’s challenge in the lists had been effortless, in fact. One of the things that with which he was having trouble.

There had been five of them against the two of them, and the Karcher had chosen four of the best captains in Ragosa to join him. There was a visible anger in those men, a grimness, the need to prove a point and not just about wages. It had been contrived as a display, and entertainment for the court and city, not to-the-death. But even so, eyes beneath the helms had been hard and cold.

It ought never to have been so swift, so much like a dance or a dream. It was as if there had been music playing somewhere, almost but not quite heard. He had fought those five men side-by-side and then back-to-back with (him) who he had never seen in his life, and it had been as nothing had ever been before, on a battlefield or anywhere else. It had felt weirdly akin to having doubled himself. To fighting as if there were two hard-trained bodies with one controlling mind. They hadn’t spoken during the fight. No warnings, tactics. It hadn’t even lasted long enough for that.

I love that passage. He doesn’t describe the fight, yet I can imagine it easily (which is pretty impressive for me, as I don’t normally see pictures in my head as I read. Only scattered images for passages that particularly move me.)

So read this book, but plan to follow it up with something light and cheerful, just in case you too see too much of the real world.

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