From the critically-acclaimed author of The Fionavar Tapestry comes an epic fantasy novel of love, both courtly and forbidden, and two kingdoms endlessly opposed…Blaise of Gorhaut is a warrior. He fought for his king and country, until the king died with an arrow in his eye at the battle of Iersen Bridge, and a dishonorable treaty ceded a good part of his country to foreign hands. He has broken … hands. He has broken relations with his father, adviser to the king of Gorhaut, and abandoned the use of his family name.
Now, Blaise is a mercenary. He never expected to work for the lords of Arbonne, the warm, fertile lands south of Gorhaut, whose people praise the love of women—they even worship a goddess, instead of the god. They are a soft people, or so he thought. But for all their nonsense about love, their troubadours and songs, they will fight for their country, when invasion comes from the north.
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Lush, lyrical language lends this epic fantasy a sense of the era–the High Middle Ages–and a bit of magic (an earth with two moons, a blind High Priestess who seems to read minds, and the conclusion). Intrigue. Murder. Mayhem. Day-to-day life in Southern Arbonne, where troubadours, music, and women’s wisdom contrasts with the rigid, patriarchal, and aggressive Gorthaut, land to the North. The pace is slow, but vivid action scenes abound. The prologue–a forbidden love–sets the consequences for the rest of the book. Plot-wise, not a lot of surprises because the reader will pretty much intuit the hero’s journey, but the ending caught me completely off guard.
I actually started reading this book 20 years or so ago but for some undetermined and totally unfathomable reason I didn’t finish it. Perhaps I was too busy being a parent helping to raise our three children. Perhaps I was too involved in my career. I’m sure those two reasons were part of it but I think that what really contributed the most was a real bad case of Muse envy. My Muse was just beginning to awaken after a long dormant period and I was beginning to do a little writing around the time I was reading A Song for Arbonne and my Muse was so shaken by the immaculately flowing style of the author that she, through her envy, forced me to stop reading it. Since then, however, my Muse has matured enough to admit that she will most likely never attain the high standards of Mr. Kay and the brilliant Muse who inspires him, so, it was okay to read the book. This feeling was enhanced by a conversation, of the social media variety, with one of my favorite authors, SJA Turney in which he, in a not so mild a suggestion, implored me to give it another go as this book was his favorite of all time and had done much to set him on the path to becoming an author.
So, dear reader, what did I find the second time around? A masterful bit of storytelling full of great characters and a plot that kept me mesmerized throughout as it wove around and through the fabric of human emotions. One thing I realized about a third of the way through was that I basically knew the path the character of Blaise de Garsenc was going to take to become who I imagined he would be in the end. However, what I could not imagine was the many different forks that path would take, a long, winding and entertaining road indeed. As to this being a work of fantasy, it does, after all, feature an earth with two moons, it is also a work of real history as well,especially in the way the author portrays the misuse of religious power and the dangers inherent in that type of elitist exclusivity. To me it calls to mind the Crusading Popes and the modern Islamic jihadists. One thing that is certain is that I am in awe of the writing acumen of Mr. Kay and will certainly be adding his other works to my ever growing “to be read” pile.
5 stars for this brilliant and beautifully written book.