Tigana

     I recently finished the book Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. I have read a few of Kay's books before, and I tend to appreciate his blend of fantasy fiction and historic elements. Tigana is much of the same. For a fan of fantasy that breaks the "Forgotten Realms mold" the book will hit home. For those who stay outside the genre, you might be interested in the political play, thoughts of life and loss or conflicted and skewed love/relationships that line the book.
    While overall, I would describe the reading experience as above average a few blaring items jumped out at me that I had an consciously hard time getting around. The first isn't just a complaint against Kay, but rather a gripe with many of the fantasy writers over the years. I understand that names are important. They help the reader connect to a character and can carry a number of meanings that the reader can attach to the character  via his or her past experiences. In fact, in this book names are pretty much everything, but...
      During the course of this novel Kay has to repeatedly give a short description after a lesser character's name so the reader can remember just who that individual is and what purpose they serve. It seems to convolute the already slippery slope of fantasy character development.
     If I named a character Kyra odds are my interpretation of that name would be different from many others who would hear the exact same name. My qualm however is the use of names so exceedingly "creative" that they muddle the story and make secondary characters hard to differentiate from one another.
     This might also have something to do with his knack of introducing characters chapters into his book and then leaving that character to die a quick and forgettable, hypothetical literary death in the reader's memory only to bring them back 100's of pages later to make you recall just where they were and how they fit into the puzzle.
     He also allows a select few his characters to become too great. Their level of understanding, physical ability or perception sometimes boarders on supernatural...(crazy for a fantasy novel I know), but he tries for historical accuracy within the genre, an on its own that is both fine and creative, yet, to me, the trope falters a little with the glimpses of ultimate power that his characters seem to posses when the need arises.
     Where the book grabbed me was the main character development and the powerful messages that Kay hides underneath the layers of this novel.
     I know strong character development is an incredibly hard task to do well, and Kay's minor characters seem shallow and insubstantial only because of the depth he devotes to his main characters.
     Kay plays heavily on subtly and nuance. This is not a work that a person can read "half-ass." It takes a lot of thought to suss out all the heavier meanings to the piece, and when looked for they are lofty and frequent.
     His main characters possess a level of development that you truly feel their voice, and after a while their thought process. You, as the reader, begin to understand what character (A) would do in situation (B), and that is a lofty feat. It's more than that though. Not only can the reader know how that character would act, but why he/she is motivated to commit the act, and the reader can then impress their own feelings on the situation.
     By doing this Kay does what I believe to be one of the truest purposes of fantasy fiction. He takes a character that only exits in the reader's imagination and creates them so undeniably in their mental facility that the reader begins to associate parts of his/her mental process in the understanding of the decision, and therefor the reader is presented the opportunity to learn more about the deeper thought process we all undergo when making powerful decisions.
     All that being said, the novel Tigana renders a literary nerd like me weak in the knees for its powerful themes and motifs. Within the work Kay makes the reader question legacy, the power of history and the means someone (the reader perhaps) would take to justify a ends.
     At what point does a person need to let history die? Is that concept even possible? Within the book Kay takes a concept of someone/something being stripped of identity and made as if to have never existed. He calls into question the idea of names and places being lost to subjection and the fight that takes place between trying to preserve a history that has fallen by the wayside and moving on to forge a new legacy under an alien presence/language/leadership.
     He raises questions of what level would the reader (by following the characters' though process) be willing to violate their own morality to fight for a cause that he/she believes to be just. There are also ideas of a loss and grief fighting against reason, unification through adversity and in an amazing (at least to me) stroke of non-clicheness with a villain character who just might be the most uncorrupted individual in the whole novel.
     It's not the typical fantasy novel. It requires thought and a level of personal understanding to truly appreciate. It's a good read. A little frustrating keeping names straight and getting into plot lines introduced much later into the story, but the level of character development and the deepness of thought behind the ideas of the work make it a novel worth reading. To me it harkened SLIGHTLY to ideas from Frank Herbert's classic Dune, (btw Dune = as close to a perfect fictional novel that has ever been written in my opinion) but Tigana used a little less subtly and lacked the ground-breaking awesome that Herbert spews forth on his page.
     If you like fantasy/adventure and have the ability/need to process a written work at a level higher than the latest paper back dribble that lines the shelves of book stores this is a novel to check out. If you hate the truly fantastic; this is still an approachable book. The fantasy is subtle (in a relative comparison to most books in the genre) and carries enough other offerings that it should appeal to anyone looking for a challenge.