UNDER HEAVEN – GUY GAVRIEL KAY – REVIEW

In The Merchant Of Venice Portia tells Shylock that “the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven”. In other words, for mercy to matter, it must be freely given, not counted or rationed or begrudged.

So it is with beauty. Where other novelists might have to spread their gifts across a novel, saving their snappiest prose or their worldliest wisdom for particular payoffs or set pieces, Guy Gavriel Kay paints rich, vivid portraits with almost every clause of every sentence. Beauty simply drips and seeps off every page.

For those not familiar with Guy Gavriel Kay, or GGK to his fans, the Canadian is a genre bender of the highest order. His fantasy credentials are impeccable. Kay was assistant editor to Christopher Tolkien during the release of the Silmarillion whilst his first novels, the The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, returned to source, dizzyingly melding and reforming the Celtic and Norse myths that had inspired the Lord of the Rings itself, before sprinkling a little Arthurian legend on top as an extra garnish.

For the most part though, Kay’s novels are not classical fantasies. Instead most take historical events and places and distort them almost imperceptibly, hiding their origins in plain sight. So, in the Lions of Al Rasan, Kay tells a version of the story of Moorish Spain in the time of El Cid. In the Sarantine Mosaic he turns to Byzantium and Justinian.

This device, the shift from history to fantasy, allows Kay greater freedom to create page-turning tension. As he himself put it in an essay for his authorised website Brightweaving,

“I want to keep readers turning pages until two in the morning or better (or worse!). So consider this: if I base a book on a slightly altered past the reader who knows what happened in that time and place does not know with any certainty what will happen in my story.”.

Without ever giving the impression that his research has been anything less than dedicated, Kay takes full advantage of this freedom, creating space for compelling personal dramas amidst the historical upheaval.

Under Heaven, Kay’s 2010 historical fantasy set around a near parallel of the An Shi Rebellion in Tang Dynasty China, builds on this model. The story is one of loss, honour, duty, and the freedom of an individual to find his own personal peace, even in a world dominated by archaic protocols and extraordinary turmoil.

The main story follows Shen Tai, the second son of one of the great generals of the dynasty, who is observing his two years of mourning at a battleground at the edge of the Kitan empire, by burying the shrieking dead of both Kitan and its neighbour, the Taguran empire.

Tai’s life is changed in an instant when the Empress of Tagur gifts him 250 Sardian Horses. We are told that to gift a man a single Sardian horse would honour him greatly, and to gift five would exalt him above his peers. 250 of the famous mounts is an empire changing gift, one that will mean Tai’s death if he is not exceptionally judicious. The gift sets the Kitan court racing, drawing Tai back from exile into the brewing battle between Kitan’s foremost general, Roshan, and its ambitious new first minister Wen Zhou, a man who also happens to be advised by Tai’s older brother.

Further north meanwhile, Tai’s sister, Li-Mei, is being forced into marital exile with the neighbouring Bogu, a shamanistic society modelled on the Mongols that would, several hundred years after the Tang Dynasty, eventually conquer China.

To cement their status as imagined rather than purely historical worlds, Kay’s novels often feature an additional fantasy element woven into a character’s narrative. In the Lions of Al Rasan, Diego Belmonte is blessed with combat clairvoyance, in Children of Earth and Sky Danica Gradek enjoys telepathic communication with her dead Grandfather.

This is done so unobtrusively and with so much conviction that their deployment makes Kay’s worlds feel more real rather than more unknowable. In Under Heaven, a variation of warging serves as this addition, and comes to play an important role in Li-Mei’s story.

Some readers have mused that they want Tai’s choices to matter more in the grand scheme of things, but to do this, to yearn for greater serendipity of cause and effect, is to misunderstand this book, and Guy Gavriel Kay, entirely.

Under Heaven has power precisely because of Shen Tai’s struggle between mattering and not mattering. It has power because the breaking of history can change the world beyond the power of men to heal, leaving them able only to find beauty in the shards of what once was. Tai has bounced from career to career, an student, soldier, poet, mandarin in training, looking for the best way to influence the world. His sister, in her own way is no different, musing “who accepts the world only as it comes to them?”.

And yet, throughout the novel, Tai is, despite his best efforts, mostly powerless to do anything but accept the world, buffeted from Governor to Governor, courtesan to Emperor to heir. He begins the novel in a literal no man’s land between two empires, and ends it almost equally powerless at home, having divested himself of that poisoned gift, the Sardian horses. It is his gradual understanding of his own insignificance that starts to change both Tai and those around him.

But just because Tai’s choices do not single-handedly define the empire, does not mean that they do not create change. At various points in the novel we are introduced to the idea that doing the right thing in the right moment is paramount, even if it leads to chaos, even death. Choosing honour rather than dishonour, kindness rather than cruelty, these things matter in Kay’s worlds, as much if not more than the literal beauty of art, music, poetry that tend to be central to his works and his characters.

Kay’s protaganists tend to be moral, as well as visual, aesthetes, whether their profession is poet, artist or soldier. It is part of what makes these worlds so easy to long for, despite the depredations and brutalities of history that Kay replicates, tweaks and intensifies. In the Lions of Al-Rasan the brutal asceticism of the Muwardi is contrasted to the tolerance and artistic patronage of the Asharite golden age personified by Amar Ibn Kairan. In Under Heaven we regularly see Tai fight back against the swift and brutal punishments that Kitan protocol demands of mandarins and soldiers.

In Kay’s work, history is a wave that crashes over the world and leaves even the most extraordinary men and women to do what little they can as it rushes over them. Sometimes that means saving thousands. Sometimes that might mean saving yourself. But if it means the latter rather than the former, that doesn’t mean that the choice didn’t matter. For Tai, and for those around him, the forks in the road, the choices made in exceptional times, shape both the present and the future. Indeed, to read Kay is to be constantly confronted with alternative paths and possibilities, subjunctive histories within a broader subjunctive history. Again and again, we see the forks in the road that might have changed everything, or nothing. None of these forks are straight, but each one matters.

The wise in Under Heaven are precisely those who are classically, biblically, serene. That is, the wise are those who understand the limits of their power, who have the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, courage to change the things they can, and wisdom to know the difference. The unwise are those who overreach or fear to adapt, who do not realise that life is as much about how you survive in the world as how you change it.

As Kay puts it in this achingly beautiful novel.

“Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came.

You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed