Review - The Lions of Al-Rassan
Sep. 9th, 2008 03:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wilderthanI expected to love The Lions of Al-Rassan. After all, it's Guy Gavriel Kay, and my mother wept for hours over the ending. I have to say I didn't cry, but I came close.
In terms of plot, this is again one of his semi-historical ones, and again, I don't know the time period very well at all. I think it'd probably help if I did: with this one, I just had to keep pushing through my confusion to grasp what was going on -- not that that was a hardship. I've found that even if you don't quite know what's going on at first, if you just hang on and pay attention to all the details, it'll be fine. There's no problem with his world-building, even without knowing the world he's trying to match. One thing I did notice in this book was long stretches of narrative in which events are described, but without close attention to what exactly is going on. If there'd been a bit less of that, I might have felt closer to the characters and less disconnected from the plot.
Something new I noticed, in this one, was his way of hiding what is actually happening. Several times somebody dies, and he misleads you as to who for several pages, and then suddenly it's revealed, and it's not who you were expecting. That got a little irritating, to be honest.
Character-wise, again, GGK is wonderful. I always care about his characters -- rarely so much as the characters in the Fionavar Tapestry books, but that's largely due to how much building up can be done in three books, I think. In this book, he really hurts you with that. The special thing for me was the complex, strange relationship between Ammar and Rodrigo. I half-expected them to kill each other, at the very end, thanks to what Ammar -- I think -- said to Rodrigo when they fought side-by-side: "Shall we kill each other for them now, to set a seal on it?" That would have had a certain rightness to it.
I'm not sure I agree with the people who say this is his best book, but it's certainly a good one and I'm very likely to come back to it, and no doubt I'll love it even more the second time.
In terms of plot, this is again one of his semi-historical ones, and again, I don't know the time period very well at all. I think it'd probably help if I did: with this one, I just had to keep pushing through my confusion to grasp what was going on -- not that that was a hardship. I've found that even if you don't quite know what's going on at first, if you just hang on and pay attention to all the details, it'll be fine. There's no problem with his world-building, even without knowing the world he's trying to match. One thing I did notice in this book was long stretches of narrative in which events are described, but without close attention to what exactly is going on. If there'd been a bit less of that, I might have felt closer to the characters and less disconnected from the plot.
Something new I noticed, in this one, was his way of hiding what is actually happening. Several times somebody dies, and he misleads you as to who for several pages, and then suddenly it's revealed, and it's not who you were expecting. That got a little irritating, to be honest.
Character-wise, again, GGK is wonderful. I always care about his characters -- rarely so much as the characters in the Fionavar Tapestry books, but that's largely due to how much building up can be done in three books, I think. In this book, he really hurts you with that. The special thing for me was the complex, strange relationship between Ammar and Rodrigo. I half-expected them to kill each other, at the very end, thanks to what Ammar -- I think -- said to Rodrigo when they fought side-by-side: "Shall we kill each other for them now, to set a seal on it?" That would have had a certain rightness to it.
I'm not sure I agree with the people who say this is his best book, but it's certainly a good one and I'm very likely to come back to it, and no doubt I'll love it even more the second time.
