Saturday, October 28, 2017

Okay, yeah, I really loved this book :) (My review of River of Stars)

River of Stars (Under Heaven, #2)River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I knew I would like this book before I opened it, because I like virtually everything Guy Gavriel Kay writes, but there were other reasons to hope. I am intrigued by the setting, which is a pseudo-Song Dynasty China, and the plot promised by the blurb is the epic clash-of-cultures type of fantasy that almost always draws me in. But when you read it (if you read it), you soon realize that this is above all a character-driven book, and it is the characters that make this novel so special.

The prose is beautiful, light in a way that makes you believe that this author could write poetry just as easily, and is a pleasure to read, line by line, page by page. But it's still a fantasy, with all the action and fun and vitality that one hopes for in that genre. This is the story of an ancient, crumbling empire facing invading steppe riders, and Kay has constructed a tight plot with sharp, bright action. His scholarship, as always, is exceptional, which he uses to create a sense of time and place so complete that it feels natural, unobtrusive, rather than merely exotic or overwhelmed by details. The events placed in this setting fit logically together like well-crafted puzzle pieces, while still leaving room for heroic action and remarkable face-to-face conflict, with moments where you cheer for and celebrate the brilliant court maneuver as much as the inspired military action.

And all of this works because it's all about the characters; the unfolding plot makes sense because the characters behave according to their natures. They are far from types, or cutouts, though. The main characters and many of the secondary characters are unique individuals with complex but comprehensible objectives. The magic of it is that Kay makes you care about so many of them, living their joy and grief as deeply as if they were real people. The soldier Ren Daiyan; the female scholar Lin Shan; the poet Lu Chen; the brothers and fathers and daughters and ministers and assassins--they live and act and love and fight and die in a world as strange and real as our own, and you live with them and feel for them and experience the story with them in a way that isn't common anywhere, let alone in genre fiction.

River of Stars is a sequel, in a way, to Kay's earlier novel Under Heaven. That book was set in a pseudo-Tang Dynasty, several hundred years before the events of this one. Other than being set in the same fantasy version of China, there is no real connection between them. Under Heaven is a very good book; l enjoyed it in virtually every way, and I absolutely recommend it. Nevertheless, this novel, I feel, is superior. Based on a progression (IMO) from very good to amazing, one hopes the author has the chance to write many more such novels...

River of Stars is both as an exciting fantasy novel and a beautiful piece of literature. I hope, if that recommendation speaks to you, that you love it as much as I do.

View all my reviews