Though our identities are made up of many disparate qualities, few are as treasured as our names and the places of our birth. From the former, we draw our familial pride, a heritage that impels us to do honor to those from whom we come. The latter we invest with almost mystical significance, allowing it to be a source of our dignity, a justification for our dispositions, and a means by which we can connect ourselves, in an unbroken lineage of shared culture, to our venerated ancestors. Both are powerful forces that shape our lives in ways that we would find difficult to thwart, even if we wished to.
If these characteristics are so vital to who we are, who would we be if they were taken from us? Would we mourn our dislocation and fight to reclaim what we lost, or would we take comfort in the realization that humans are, everywhere, fundamentally similar and that names and birthplaces are only impulses to distinguish ourselves from the masses? Mr. Kay asks this question and more in this majisterial work. And though he veers off course from time to time, he leaves us with a fascinating and nuanced answer.
On a distant world, shadowed by two moons, a great peninsula is divided into nine, contentious, monarchical states which have all been, at one point, at war with one another. Attempts to cohere the nine into a more unified whole met with stiff resistance until, 20 years prior to the main sequence of events, the son of king Brandin of Ygrath, was slain in open war by royals from Tigana. Vengeful in his grief, Brandin, the known world's mightiest sorcerer, lashed out at Tigana, banishing its name, its culture and its history from the minds of its sons and daughters. He ordered its libraries burned, its institutions crushed and its leading lights extinguished in an unmatched display of power and fury that culminated in both Tigana's destruction and the reorganization of the Palm into two superstates, the west controlled by Brandin and those who fear and love him, and the east commanded by Alberico, a warlord and a powerful sorcerer in his own right.
Twenty years on, Tigana is, for all but a few, known as Lower Corte, a troublesome and difficult state where dreams go to die. But amidst its broken palaces, a rebellion grows. Spearheaded by a prince of Tigana, one of the few men alive who still remembers his country's past glory, it recruits members sympathetic to its insurgent cause, exposes them to the truths Brandin's magic has hidden from them, and shapes them into arrows meant for Brandin's heart. For there can be no other response to a crime so heinous, so dark, as the one which Brandin visited upon them. Revenge must be had.
Though Tigana has moments of brilliance, it is an inescapably flawed work of fantasy fiction. Mr. Kay should be commended for his ambition; for he set out to tell a tangled tale of war and revenge while making potent, philosophical points about the power of memory and identity and the extent to which they underpin who we are and what we care about. This is no easy feat. And so, given that he largely succeeds in this, I applaud him for penning a work that manages to be both entertainment and intellectual fodder, twin virtues lacking in all but a small minority of fantasy tomes. Unfortunately, it is Mr. Kay's characters who doom him here.
Though he has committed an unimaginably heinous crime, Brandin is largely depicted as a sympathetic character, trying to forge order from chaos. How can such a creature be sympathetic, especially when he never appears to express any great remorse for the extremity of his crimes? Worse yet, though, is Brandin's lover, a woman secretly from Tigana who spent years worming her way into Brandin's affections in hopes of assassinating him. Her skeins of the narrative are almost entirely consumed with lovesick claptrap, for she has inexplicably fallen in love with the object of her hatred and now finds it difficult to justify her own existence. Yes, there are others here who serve the story far better; the members of Mr. Kay's rebel band each take turns at captivating the reader, but even these ruthless and ambitious souls struggle at times to justify their bizarre actions. The Men in Tigana seem to be as preoccupied by rage and schemes as the women are consumed by hapless love.
Tigana certainly has its powerful moments. Mr. Kay tells an unusual story quite well, but the irrationality of his actors cause the plot too often to falter, allowing the reader too many glimpses behind the proverbial curtain. Far too much deus ex machina for my tastes. Lovers of good, romantic fantasy, though, will not be disappointed. (3/5 Stars)
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