I took quite some time to warm-up to this earliest novel of Guy Gavriel Kay. I just couldn’t get excited about five Canadian college students agreeing (with the exception of one malcontent … but there’s always got to be one rebel) to be whisked or warped or rifted or transported (take your pick) to the world of Fionavar just to attend the king’s jubilee. Thrust into a seemingly medieval setting, complete with court politics, royal succession quandaries, manipulative magicians, kingdom-wide drought and blight and an approaching storm of vengeful evil, these young men and women adapt readily and a bit unbelievably. Even the initial loss of one in the crossing barely causes a blip of concern once the remaining four become embroiled in the avalanche of events bearing down on the kingdom.
Of all the characters, both from our world and Finovar, I respected Dave the most as well as Sharra (and I hope to learn more about her in the rest of the series). Paul seemed to excel at doing the right things for all the wrong reasons. Kimberly went native almost before leaving Earth, but Kevin remains an enigma to me. I barely glimpsed Jennifer’s tribulations and fear for her fate.
I saw the influence of Celtic mythology throughout Kay’s worldbuilding and drew parallels with other epic fantasies prevalent and popular in the late 70s and early 80s (Tolkien, Lewis and to a lesser extent Brooks).
I suspect I missed reading the Fionavar Tapestry in high school and early college because I had to rely on what I saw at the grocery store book/magazine aisle, since I didn’t have access to a library or a book store and GoodReads wasn’t even a gleam on the Internet’s nascent horizon. Had I read this series then, I am confident I would have added it to my permanent re-read collection. While The Summer Tree and the rest of the Fionavar Tapestry will remain on my shelves besides Kay’s other later great novels, I doubt I’ll be tempted to re-read it. Not with Tigana or the Lions of Al-Rassan enticing me to return and relive the wonder and the glory.
I met all my reading goals for the first month of summer. I loaded up the first of the month with the authors I knew would delivery excellent stories, leaving the unknown frontier of my book club selections for the middle and end of June. I devoted the last week of the month to reading the first in a relatively new fantasy series by Kevin J. Anderson that I’ve been surprised and engrossed in for days. The third book in his Terra Incognita series releases in a couple of weeks, so I’m all fired up to read the second book as soon as possible.
For July, my GoodReads book clubs are hit and miss:
The Fantasy Book Club decided to read the ever-popular Wizard of Earthsea in July. Since I’ve read this classic by Le Guinn several times already, including recently when the Syfy channel aired a mini-series based on the trilogy, I’m going to skip another re-read this time around.
For Fantasy Literature, I need to read and review Sorcery Rising and listen to Dragongirl.
I’ll round out July by continuing in the Fionavar Tapestry with The Wandering Fire. And, if I can acquire a copy of the second novel in Terra Incognita, I’ll continue exploring and searching for the lost continent of Terravitae in The Map of All Things.
Friday Morning Update: I actually finished The Edge of the World a couple of days ago (but with the holiday weekend I won’t get a review written for a few days). As filler to round out the last couple of days of June, I started reading one of Barnes & Nobles ‘free Friday‘ Nook Books from a couple of weeks ago entitled Stupid History. Aptly titled and I should whip through it in record time, leaving my intelligence intact (I hope). The best surprise I got this morning, though, was the companion progressive rock CD released by Rosswell Six called Beyond the Horizaon. I listened to the first four tracks on the drive in to work today and I felt transported back to the glory days of the 70s and rock bands I grew up with (and savored) like Kansas, Rush and Styx. Click on the CD cover icon to listen to excerpts of the songs:
My first exposure to Kage Baker’s writing and to her Company series. In our future (about two centuries ahead of us), both time travel and immortality are discovered. As with most time travel scenarios in science fiction, history can’t be rewritten, so said travel is of limited use to the plot and the science is foggy at best. Time travel then becomes a means to transport the reader to a different point in our past. Equally useless to the entrepreneurs of the 24th century is immortality, which can only be applied to very young children and requires extensive cybernetic enhancement.
The Company (aka Dr. Suess) still finds a way to make a buck, sending scientists back to the distant past, recruiting young children from the native population, installing immortality, and putting them to work by scavenging and salvaging priceless art, books, plants, etc. for re-discovery and re-sale (by the Company of course) in the 24th century.
Mendoza is an orphan from the Spanish Inquisition rescued and then recruited by the Company at the very edge of the Pit. After several years of operations and education, she receives her first field assignment, not in the New World (as she desired to be as far as possible away from ‘the monkeys’), but in dreary damp England. While collecting rare specimens from the Garden of Iden, she falls in love with one of the manor’s servants, a fiercely fanatical Protestant young man adrift in a resurgence of Catholicism courtesy of Queen Mary and Prince Phillip of Spain.
I enjoyed the historical aspects of the novel, especially England during the Counter-Reformation. Kage Baker did a good job of immersing me in both Spain and England. I still prefer Connie Willis’ writing style as evidenced in The Doomsday Book and her other Oxford time travel novels and stories.
I’m not a fan of romance, especially teenage romance (and Mendoza is in her late teens while on this first assignment), so I struggled through about half of this book. I also missed some of the humor (or failed to register it as such) exhibited by her fellow agents and their reactions to the ‘monkeys’ (the cyborg agents’ derogatory term for mere mortal men). The predictably tragic ending arrived to my great relief and the novel finally moved back to the original mission – preserving plants.
Perhaps I took the fear and loathing of the immortal agents towards human beings too much to heart. It concerned me that these agents of the Company felt such disdain and dread towards their former brothers and sisters. Commerce and computers seized the day, while the monkeys scampered about and threw bananas at each other. I got the distinct impression that the Company and civilization of the 24th century felt humans were irredeemably inclined to violence and destruction, in a constantly repeating cycle.
I could never see myself becoming a Mara, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading of her struggles and setbacks, her uncanny ability to turn even the most desperate tragedy into a resounding triumph. Daughter of Empire occurs on Kelewan, the home world of the Tsuranuanni, the flip-side of the coin that embodies the Riftwar Saga (as told mostly from Midkemia through Magician, Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon).
Despite a near complete lack of traditional fantasy elements, this novel delivers an astonishing number of surprises, twists, intrigues and gambles. The rich world of Kelewan and the culture and heritage that is the Tsuranuanni Empire infuse all aspects of the reading experience. Mara’s journey from virginal novitiate to one of the twenty gods of the Tsuranuanni to ruthless Ruling Lady of one of the oldest Houses in the Empire steeped us in her gut-wrenching grief, unflinching resolve through spousal abuse and sweet relief through each successful gambit in the Game of the Council.
I plan to continue reading the rest of the Empire Trilogy and highly recommend this first installment in that series.
The final installment to the Riftwar Saga series contained page-turning action and most of the answers to mysteries and questions posed from earlier in the series, including a surprise twist that posed … more questions. While I enjoyed reading A Darkness at Sethanon, I felt the characters gained less growth this time around, being more reactive to the harsh circumstances thrown at them on their quest to stop Murandamus. The Pug, Tomas and Macros cameo chapters intrigued me the most, providing more background about themselves and the other elves, and more worldbuilding with glimpses of rift space and the end or beginning of the universe.
I enjoyed reading this series and feel it provides a good solid fantasy adventure story.
The following information provided to the group members as reading aids in e-mailed handouts:
About the Book:
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
Within weeks of its publication in 1915, The Rainbow was condemned by British authorities. A London court ordered the destruction of all copies seized from its publisher, leaving in the hands of oft-bemused readers fewer than 1,500 copies of the novel that would later be recognized as D.H. Lawrence’s masterpiece.
Its timing proved particularly unfortunate for The Rainbow, whose anti-war heroine sparked public outrage as World War I entered its second year. This fueled the controversy already surrounding the novel, which the National Council for Public Morals had targeted for its potential to demoralize the public through indecent language.
Both the politics and sexuality expressed in the novel are components of an intensely individualistic philosophy that Lawrence sought to articulate in this fictional chronicle that follows three generations of the Brangwen clan. The story begins in 1840 on a farm in the rural midlands of Nottinghamshire and traces one family’s social, geographical, and religious expansion during the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. In a genre style similar to that of the Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Lawrence depicts the importance of food and drink within the context of everyday people’s lives and the events that matter to them: weddings, holidays, christenings, and funerals.
The central character is Ursula, who is introduced as a young girl. The development of her consciousness becomes the chief occupation of the novel even as she pursues her education and a romance with her first love. Her story is continued in Women in Love (1920).
This novel falls within the broader definition of Victorian literature, though its author is certainly a product of the Victorian age and the events of the novel fall entirely within that timeframe.
About the Author:
D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) grew up in poverty in the Nottinghamshire town of Eastwood, which would serve as the setting for his early novels, including The Rainbow. His mother Lydia encouraged his education and their close relationship has been the subject of much critical debate.
D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence worked for a few years as a schoolteacher, though his poor health forced him to quit soon after the publication of his first novel, The White Peacock (1911). This debut was populated by idealized versions of friends and family, as Lawrence often created characters inspired by those he knew. His first commercial success was the essentially autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913).
A prolific writer, Lawrence churned out multiple drafts of The Rainbow amid a stormy romance with Frieda Weekley, the wife of his former teacher and a mother of three. The couple fled to her native Germany and traveled widely, returning to England two years later to marry after her divorce was finalized.
Lawrence began associating at this time with members of the influential Bloomsbury Group, particularly writer Katherine Mansfield and philosopher Bertrand Russell, with whom he fashioned an unsuccessful plan to establish a revolutionary anti-war political party. A string of ill-luck and hardships – including suppression of The Rainbow – followed.
In 1920, the couple continued their travels and Lawrence returned to prolific form, writing several novels, travelogues, translations, scholarly works on literature and psychoanalysis, and poems in the years to come. Malaria nearly killed him while living in Mexico and his health never fully recovered. In 1928, he published his most controversial novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; unexpurgated editions of the novel were unavailable for more than 30 years.
Lawrence succumbed to tuberculosis in 1930. His ashes are enshrined at Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico.
Discussion Topics for The Rainbow
Much of The Rainbow focuses on conflicts and tensions that exist between people in romantic relationships. As you read about Tom and Lydia, Anna and Will, Ursula and Winifred, and then Ursula and Anton, consider the degree to which these characters and their struggles touch on your own experiences with romantic love.
How might we use this novel to trace and understand industrialization’s effects on the lives of rural English people in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century?
How is Ursula a product of a transitional age, one that moves from an agrarian-based economy and culture to an industrial economy and culture?
Lawrence wrote that The Rainbow is “like a novel in a foreign language.” What elements strike you as unusual, perhaps difficult to translate or understand?
Although the novel depicts England in the Victorian era (roughly 1840-1905), the novel is in many respects modernist. Lawrence concentrates on the inner consciousness of his characters and relies on symbols to add depth to his plot. Including the rainbow itself, what other symbols does the author rely on to convey meaning?
I arrived early to the third of four lectures and discussions of Victorian literature hosted and promoted by the Kansas City Public Library. Kaite Mediatore Stover, the Readers’ Services Manager for the Library, was helping to setup the conference room for the lecture. I took the opportunity to discuss with her the recent news articles about a possible change in the Library’s policy with respect to online card applications for patrons outside the Kansas City metro area. The Library does not charge a fee to anyone who applies for a card and this has caused an unusually high volume of applications from the St. Louis area (where the local library system does charge for access to it’s system if a person lives outside it’s taxbase). The result has been a flood of online checkouts of ebooks from the Library’s Overdrive site, leaving some local patrons with no recourse but the waiting list for popular ebooks. I apologized for my earlier misunderstanding concerning the Kansas City earnings tax (a one percent income tax paid by anyone who works in Kansas City, Missouri, regardless of where you live – like me, who lives in Lansing, Kansas, yet works in KCMO). I assumed, wrongly, that the earnings tax collected out of my paycheck trickled down to the Library and offset my access to the Library’s resources and programs. The Director set me straight and reminded me that all libraries, including the wonderful Kansas City Public Library, accept donations and in fact, receive between five and ten percents of their total budget through charitable giving. Properly chastised, I went searching for information to help support the Library and found the Library Foundation web page, where I can donate conveniently online.
I didn’t get a chance to ask Kaite about her thoughts on the Librarian Boycott of HarperCollins, because our lecturer arrived, as well as Melissa Carle, the Weekend supervisor at the Plaza branch, and other readers began to join us in the conference room overlooking Brookside and Brush Creek. This unique reading program, A Taste of Victorian Literature, was first offered at the Waldo branch last summer, but returned this Spring to the Plaza branch, albeit in reverse order. So, I’ve finally caught up with the program, since I read D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in July and attended the inaugural lecture, presentation, discussion led by Andrea Broomfield, associate professor of English at Johnson County Community College, and which included authentic Victorian era refreshments. But that was then, and this is now, so I spent most of April reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, taking my time to absorb and appreciate the nuances and subtleties of her third novel.
(To view spoilers, please highlight this redacted text.)
With the closing of the rift at the end of Magician, I wondered where Raymond Feist would take me in Silverthorn, the next novel in the Riftwar Saga series. The three brothers (Arutha, Lyam and Martin) spent a year touring the Kingdom and returned to Krondor to plan Arutha and Anita’s wedding. Jimmy the Hand, a young full-of-himself thief and rising star in the Mockers, foiled an assassination attempt upon Prince Arutha. Because Jimmy aided both Anita and Arutha in escaping Krondor during the Riftwar, he chose to warn Arutha before reporting to the Mockers, and for his divided loyalty he was branded a traitor by his Guild. Arutha haggled with the Upright Man, the leader of the Mockers and, unknown to Jimmy, his father. Arutha agrees to make Jimmy his Squire and the Mockers agree to hunt for the Night Hawk assassins. With the Mockers’ assistance, Arutha invades the Night Hawks’ hideout in Krondor, but what should have been a rout, instead turns into a zombie apocalypse melee until Jimmy burns the place down around them.
Thinking the threats to his life abated, Arutha and Anita proceed with their wedding. Jimmy gets a bad feeling and restlessly searches the upper galleries of the hall, stumbling upon a former high-ranking Mocker now turned assassin. Despite being knocked senseless, gagged and restrained, Jimmy manages to divert the assassin’s shot, which misses Arutha but strikes his bride-to-be Anita. Even the great Pug can’t cure Anita, so he places a spell upon her that slows time down to a barely perceptible crawl, allowing Arutha time to find an antidote for the poison. An interrogation session with the assassin reveals the name of the poison (and also the antidote) to be ‘silverthorn’ but no one on hand in Krondor has ever heard of it.
Thus, a quest is begun. Pug returns to Stardock to search Macros’ library and eventually discovers a way to return to Kelewan, where an even more comprehensive library exists founded by the Tsurani Assembly of Great Ones. Predictably, Pug is detained as a result of his last acts at the Imperial Games before closing the rift. Meanwhile, Arutha and a small party, including Jimmy, head to the Kingdom’s own repository of knowledge at Sarth.
Eventually, knowledge of the silverthorn is gleaned and Arutha’s party seeks it through elven territory in the west and the far northern reaches of Midkemia. Pug extricates himself from detention and goes on his own quest for the Watchers, also in the far northern reaches, but on Kelewan. Both storylines include action, adventure, danger, puzzles and more walking dead. Jimmy provides some sidekick humor to lighten the mood.
Arutha returns with the antidote and saves Anita. Jimmy continues his campaign to become Duke of Krondor. Pug finds the Watchers and agrees to be instructed in magic for a year.
Silverthorn delivered an almost typical quest adventure, focusing on Arutha’s obsessive need to save Anita and Jimmy’s transition from thief to trusted companion and squire to Arutha. Even though Pug only popped in for a few chapters, I am positive his quest will result in further adventures in later novels. Tomas appeared only in a couple of brief cameos, but at least he’s settling in nicely among the elves and fatherhood agrees with him. Princess Caroline, twice bereft of lovers in Magician, sets her sights on Laurie and I see another royal wedding in the near future.
Probably not quite a four star rating, but definitely better than three or three and a half. Stop in at Fantasy Book Club Series group to review discussions of Silverthorn (with a Q&A thread monitored by Raymond E. Feist) from April 2011.
The second half of Magician became increasingly dark as I approached the climactic end to the Kelewan-Midkemian Riftwar. I observed definite growth to full maturity between Pug and Tomas, and perhaps that growth from boyhood through young adult into adulthood is what I lament – the rite of passage of most normal young boys, though Pug and Tomas could never be mistaken for normal. While everything seemed wondrous and adventurous in the first half of the novel (also known as Magician: Apprentice), I felt the oppression of circumstances, the collision of events and the machinations of a magician previously thought trustworthy. Not all was dark and gloomy, yet I didn’t walk away from this book thinking it ended on a resoundingly happy note.
A couple of scenes stood out as a bit over-the-top and stretched the envelope of believability: Milamber’s reaction to the Imperial Games and Tomas’ ability to overcome a dead dreaded god-like being with his boyish mental fortitude. And I can’t deny I felt gut-punched by the eleventh-hour betrayal by Macros. (to view spoiler, please highlight this paragraph).
For a debut work, I applaud Raymond Feist for a magnificent tale and the beginning to a well-loved fantasy epic. I’m continuing the Riftwar Saga by reading Silverthorn this month.
The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
