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waysofseeing recommended Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan to me, a novel which touches on a favorite historical subject of mine, but by way of fantasy. I finally got around to reading it, a few weeks ago.
Since I first I plunged into the novel, I've been puzzled by one, nagging question--which troubled me precisely because I've read so much about the events which clearly provide Kay's inspiration, here: Why write what could almost be a historical novel, or an alternate-historical novel, with reconfigured geography and even cosmology? Why rewrite history as fantasy?
( History vs Fantasy )
Obviously, Kay's venture into fantasia saves the author from having to explain to history geeks like me why certain, carefully-selected historical details are rendered so un-historically, permitting him for example to occasionally condense events that took place decades or even centuries apart.
More importantly, though, Kay's flights of poetic license allow him to defuse the fraught subject of relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in what was about to become the era of the Crusades and Reconquista, events which would lay the foundations of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Instead, Kay imagines a triad of faiths that differ not about scriptures but about heavenly bodies, a move which is both sublime and (in an alternate-universe sense) plausible. So, historical preoccupations aside, I can understand and respect Kay's flights of fancy.
Speaking of my geekiness, did I bother to mention that The Lions of Al-Rassan is vividly, movingly written novel that kept me up at nights and left me with a lump in my throat ...?
waysofseeing recommended Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan to me, a novel which touches on a favorite historical subject of mine, but by way of fantasy. I finally got around to reading it, a few weeks ago.Since I first I plunged into the novel, I've been puzzled by one, nagging question--which troubled me precisely because I've read so much about the events which clearly provide Kay's inspiration, here: Why write what could almost be a historical novel, or an alternate-historical novel, with reconfigured geography and even cosmology? Why rewrite history as fantasy?
( History vs Fantasy )
Obviously, Kay's venture into fantasia saves the author from having to explain to history geeks like me why certain, carefully-selected historical details are rendered so un-historically, permitting him for example to occasionally condense events that took place decades or even centuries apart.
More importantly, though, Kay's flights of poetic license allow him to defuse the fraught subject of relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in what was about to become the era of the Crusades and Reconquista, events which would lay the foundations of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Instead, Kay imagines a triad of faiths that differ not about scriptures but about heavenly bodies, a move which is both sublime and (in an alternate-universe sense) plausible. So, historical preoccupations aside, I can understand and respect Kay's flights of fancy.
Speaking of my geekiness, did I bother to mention that The Lions of Al-Rassan is vividly, movingly written novel that kept me up at nights and left me with a lump in my throat ...?
