oh Tigana! 20 years ago, the warring lands of the peninsula known as The Palm were conquered by two opposing Tyrants, and split into two. during this time of war and magic, one land was punished, transformed, forgotten. 20 years later, a band of men and women fight to reclaim that land, its history, their memories. oh Tigana!
SPOILERS FOLLOW
memories of a distant life can be a strange and beautiful and sorrowful thing. i can remember places, scenes, people in the land where i was born, far away from here, long ago. a dilapidated mansion in the fields. muddy streets, the smell of cooking meat and the sound of laughter, the sour tang of the food, mangos. a great-grandmother in front of a cookpot in a dark house, a grandmother drunk and curled up in a corner, an uncle holding my hand. do these things define me, are they a part of what make me who i am today? it is hard to say. at times, they feel like stories i've read, scenes from a forgotten movie. gone, all gone. but yet they live still, in their way.
the tragedy at the heart of Tigana is the erasure of history, the stealing away of memory. the transformed and forgotten land of Tigana lives still in the hearts of its former citizens, in the minds of those who work to see it reclaimed, to see themselves made whole. the idea of Tigana drives them forward. the reclaiming of Tigana is a slow-moving battle, one that costs many lives, innocent and otherwise. the towns burned, the children tortured to death, the battle costing so many lives... is it all worth it? of course it is, of course. but one of the many wonderful things that Kay accomplishes in this novel is to show the ambiguity at the core of this quest. it is not a black & white matter and Kay deals only in shades of grey. memory is a place that defines us; it is a place that we recreate to give our lives meaning. but clinging to memory, using the past as the sole thing that defines who we are, holding past misdeeds in our hearts to give us a kind of furious purpose - that is also a sad place, and a place fraught with peril. the entirety of the novel is a narrative about reclamation, about making a memory and a place whole. but at the very end of the tale, a minor character decides against revealing a key secret, in which the history told would shatter those who heard it. he purposely decides to leave a story un-whole, to allow Tigana's protagonists a kind of peace in their ignorance, to stop the past from continuing to rule the present. it is a brave, quiet, humane decision. sometimes the past should not rule us. that both ideas - dueling conceptions of how to see the past - are able to live in one novel, and so empathetically, is a sublime accomplishment.
one of many such accomplishments. where do i even start?
props for creating a world that is an alternate version of the city-states of warring old Italy, and yet is entirely its own place. props for balancing heavy themes and brisk adventure. props for Dianora, who whores herself out to her oppressor, no matter her original intent for vengeance... Kay does not reinvent this familiar type - he breathes new life into it, he makes her intentions and her actions understandable, her love real, her death a tragic one - but also a death full of tenderness and meaning. props for his sympathetic and clever gay character, one who uses simpering stereotype as shield and decoy. props for his inclusion of Alienor and her sadomasochism... i've read a score of tales that supposedly explore s&m, and few that so clearly open the heart of this kind of sexuality with such honesty - and brevity. props for Kay's ability to understand sexuality as central to experience, his skill at writing a love scene, his unwillingness to dwell on sex in a way that drools - that makes the experience a stroke fantasy. Kay illustrates sex as somehow both ambiguously mythic and prosaically real; how often does that occur in a fantasy novel? props for centralizing magic in this tale and yet making that magic just one part of the whole. this is not a novel of magic misadventure; it is a novel of people and politics and memory and longing. props for the portrait of one of Tigana's villains - the Tyrant Brandin. the character is larger than life, remote, inaccessible - and so tragic, so understandable. he commits terrible crimes; one of the worst is revealed in the closing pages. and yet this is a father who acts from grief, who destroys out of love for his slain son, who commits unforgiveable atrocities in the name of the most relatable of emotions - the love of a parent for their child, the rage of that parent towards those who have destroyed that child.
and BIG PROPS for the writing itself. my gosh, the man can write. his prose is often stunning: impressionistic, delicate and airy, blunt and earthy, real. he is what many writers aspire towards: a poet who writes in narrative prose. he can depict the colors of a sunset and the chill of night without cliché; he can describe a royal garden reshaped to reflect nature's chaos with language that brings you right there, that make a place both real and unreal. he can create mystery and wonder with words that are blade sharp; with sentences that are full of sad and terrible honesty; with paragraphs whose substance and meaning feel ephemeral at first, like the sound of wind through trees, but that can be read again, and again, and gain meaning with each re-reading. he can shape a reader's experience by putting them briefly in a character's life, sharing their perspective, and then smoothly moving the reader along as one voice fades and another one comes into focus - in a flow of prose that is never jarring or abrupt, that feels natural, organic. scenes are viewed from multiple angles, in a way that illustrates the defintion of even-handed.
have you heard of the director Otto Preminger? he was a favorite of the French New Wave, a hollywood director reconstructed as a genuine auteur. his defining hallmark: a very specific even-handedness in his storytelling, a visual manner that links all characters in a scene as equals, each having their own personal and equally important perspective and meaning, each potentially key to the narrative. Kay has the same kind of widespread focus. there are heroes and there are villains, and yet they are all recognizably human. and they are linked - by their past, by their goals, in ways that they are often slow to understand, in their shared humanity. each has their own perspective, their own fears and hopes and dreams. one hero enslaves a man. one villain makes the roads safe. another hero callously rejects his son and executes that son's boyhood lover. another villain is a man whose heart nearly died with his son, only to be born again, in love, in an effort to change himself and his ill-gotten world.
the novel has a central sequence that details a stark conflict taking place on another world, perhaps another reality. it is in many ways a timeless passage: the story of a fertility rite, a harvest war, a struggle in an alien yet familiar place - a place where actions resonate throughout all of the worlds. this was my special favorite part of many favorite parts in the novel. the timelessness, the simplicity, the sense of many lives, many worlds, linked together so that one skirmish, one win or one loss, has profound impact on all other worlds.
i love how Kay is focused on this connectivity between all things. it is a holistic and genuinely spiritual perspective on life. i love how he connects Tigana to his Fionavar Tapestry - the idea of a central world that gives life to all others, one where we may be reborn. patterns of peace and war; myths that resonate beyond one world into many others; a tapestry of worlds. Prince Alessan's quest is a mosaic of small actions aiming themselves towards one great possibility. the Prince's quest parallels the meaning of the novel itself: many parts that compose one great whole; many memories of one great loss, histories forgotten and remembered anew; many voices and many lives, paths that cross and move apart and may or may not come together again, bodies and souls that live and die and may yet live again.
