The Lions of Al-Rassan

”One sun for the god. Two moons for his beloved sisters. Uncountable, stars to shine in the night. Oh, man and woman, born to a dark path, only look up and the lights shall guide you home.”

I can’t believe I took this long to read this book. I’m a loud and proud lover of GGK’s books, and up until this point my favorite of his was Under Heaven. How could any book be better than Under Heaven, I wondered. Surely, at most, it’d be just on par with it. I’d definitely get around to it sooner or later.

How very wrong I was. This book is now easily my favorite GGK book, by a very large margin.

To summarize a very complex book, circumstances bring together a small band of people from very different backgrounds, both political and religious. They bond through shared circumstances, and then find their bonds and loyalties tested as world events start pulling them back apart again. As with all of GGK’s books, it’s rooted in actual world history (I’m not familiar with the period myself, but it’s evidently based on Moorish Spain and the religious conflicts that happened then), but with GGK magical realism flair. Uneasy peace turns into conflict, religions clash, and loyalties are examined. It’s very complex, and I’m trying to keep things vague for my friends who want to read it.

GGK’s hand is evident here in the quality of the writing (fantastic) and how he somehow manages to make all these complex political and religious machinations make sense to the average reader. It’s not an overwhelming read, it’s very compelling and easy to digest. I instantly loved all the main characters, and was actually breathless near the end during the book’s climax. Contrary to what you might expect, the climax of this book isn’t played out on a major battlefield, but it’s exciting all the same.

I don’t really know what else to say here, except that if I could give it 6/5 stars, I would. I know that sounds fangirly, but I don’t care. I haven’t met a GGK book I didn’t like, and I very much liked this one.

3.75 out of 5 stars

As I continue to work my way through Guy Gavriel Kay's work, I've arrived at The Lions of Al-Rassan, a book that many consider to be Kay's best work. It certainly has the swiftest pacing of any of his books (that I've read so far). He deftly moves his characters around the map, while their allegiances shift and swirl and their cultures clash. It was a bit dizzying trying to piece together who was siding with whom at one point or another and sometimes the characters motivations didn't always make sense to me. This made it difficult for me to connect with the main players. In the end, it was a solid story about complex heroes and compelling cultures. It was not my favorite GGK book, but I had a good time with it.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

Guy Gavriel Kay is an author who gets a lot of respect from writers. Brandon Sanderson has said that we're all just trying to be as good as Guy Gavriel Kay. If that's true, then after reading The Lions of Al-Rassan I'm starting to think he's the Bob Dylan of fantasy writers.That is to say he's a good writer, who knows how to build characters and put words together. The way he does it in this book has some serious flaws that left me dreading to pick it up, and with no real interest in the characters or what happened to them. This book gets three stars because it is a well-written piece of literature, with a plot that works, but it's nothing more than that. In terms of pacing and story structure, I also found it to be quite a bit off.Three major problems kept me from enjoying this book, and I'll start with the world. What Kay did with this book was to take Medieval Spain, with its well-known conflict between Christians, Muslim, and Jews, and change the names. Let me be clear: this is not Medieval Spain, it is not alternte history. This is a fantasy world with two moons and different constellations that just happens to have the exact same geography as Spain. So does the rest of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Gee, that's funny. The three sects are Asharites (Muslims), Jaddites (Christians), and the Kindath (Jews). If these were three groups that Kay had invented and come up with a good reason for them to be at odds, then it would be interesting. Unfortunately, he chose to have many of the same practices, beliefs, and prejudices that the real-world groups have. The biggest one is the blood libel, used against the Kindath.My question is that if the correspondence was going to be so strong, why didn't he just write about actual Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain? I kept reading this thinking it was a very very very very thinly veiled, very nineties attack on Christians and their history (with enough attacks on Jews and Muslims to make it fair). This sort of thing was very popular in the eighties and nineties (as in [b:The Mists of Avalon 40605251 The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1) Marion Zimmer Bradley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529610467l/40605251.SX50.jpg 806813]), and Kay's choices don't make it hard to see it this way. As it was, it was either a not-very-creative fantasy world, or a bad historical fiction.Kay's characters also kept me from really getting into this book. There's a doctor, a few kings, and some concubines and courtesans, and a few young men learning their way in the world. And of course the poet. They'd be interesting if they didn't insist on acting in such implausible ways. The main point of implausibility is their sexual choices: the characters in this book just can't stop doinking. It's insane. There is a stretch of at least 60 pages in the mass-market paperback that is all people doing it. There's a lot of comparing breasts to pears and melons... . Much of the sex is completely inconsequential, which is really hard to believe in a population without established methods of birth control (yes, medieval birth control existed but it's never mentioned in this book). Not only is much of it meaningless to the plot, it's meaningless to the characters. I just don't believe in meaningless sex, I guess, but if it's meaningless pleasure that has no effect on the plot, why is it in the book?I just don't buy that a physician, a woman in her late twenties, who is portrayed as overly sensible would “take a young man into her bed” for some meaningless pleasure without thinking there would be any consequences in terms of their relationship. I'm having a hard time imagining this character doing that. And then he's just got a crush on her, from a distance...still? After having sex with her? He still just watches her from afar, thinking he can't have her...after he “had” her? What the...? I just don't get it. So sex is just meaningless to this women to the point where she'd have sex with a nineteen year-old boy just because she felt like it one night and then the rest of the book she's...what the hell, nevermind. I think I've made my point. Even if you do believe people can have sex without emotional or other consequences, you still have to question what's going on with this character. I'm just not buying it.The last thing I found annoying was the structure: constant back and forth, summary and rehash, and huge events just glossed over. That made it hard to follow.The overall effect of all this was that I didn't look forward to reading this book. The test of a four or five star book is that I think about the characters when I'm not reading the book. These characters were so implausible that I just didn't think about them. When I picked up the book, I was just thinking “what implausible thing are they going to do in the next chapter?” There were a few tense situations, and a few that I really enjoyed, but the whole book was not engaging.P.S.: Tigana was a much better book; more imaginative, better characters, actually compelling, but I still didn't think it was that great. I mean, what were those people doing it in the closet for? See, same problem.

I almost feel bad that I didn't like this book much. I actually liked the story and the characters, but the writing style prevented me from becoming attached.
GRRM skips between a lot of people in his books, but each segment gives you enough time and emotion to be attached to the character. With this book I would find myself just starting to get to know a character and “bam” it shifted to somewhere else, which prevented me from forming a strong attachment with anyone. This was made a little worse by the fact that it took me a couple paragraph sometimes to realize that I was reading about a character because they were being called by a different name.
I felt like I was forcing myself to read through the book. It would have been better even if I disliked the characters, but I just didn't feel anything about them...

Summary: I would recommend giving it a shot. If the writing style appeals to you it is a good story, if not move on.