I should have loved Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana: it has an imaginative premise, distinct and interesting characters in difficult situations, and a unique setting. But I ended up disliking it anyway (though not as intensely as I disliked The Fionavar Tapestry).

Tigana is one of the independent provinces of the Palm, a peninsula vaguely reminiscent of Renaissance Italy. Several decades ago, Brandin of Ygrath, a powerful sorcerer, began conquering the Palm's various provinces. When Brandin turned away from war with the provinces in order to defeat another sorcerer, Alberico, he sent his son Stevan to capture the last unconquered province, Tigana. But the Prince of Tigana kills Stevan in that battle, and Brandin abandons his war with Alberico to sweep into Tigana with the wrath of a vengeful father who also happens to be the most powerful magic-user in the world. After a brief and brutal victory over Tigana, with an equally brutal execution of the Prince, Brandin exerts his magical powers to eradicate the memory of Tigana from the Palm. Many, many years later, a small band of adventurers, some of the few left who remember Tigana, attempt to restore the name to the public conscience.

Although the premise of Tigana is not exactly what I had initially imagined (I thought the novel would be about real historical memory and the loss thereof, rather than magically imposed forgetfulness), even Kay's actual premise is still more interesting than the average fantasy novel. Furthermore, unlike the various lands of Fionavar, the Palm feels like a fully realized location, with vast distances between certain parts, distant ports that nevertheless affect local commerce, and plenty of people busy with their ordinary lives rather than with the shenanigans of the protagonists. Finally, Kay does a great job with putting his characters in interesting situations--Dianora's struggle could have been the fodder for some amazing passages, and Kay's treatment of Brandin is one of the fairest treatments of a "villain" that I have ever seen.

Unfortunately, Tigana fails for one simple reason: Guy Gavriel Kay is a terrible writer. Even with such a great foundation, Kay simply cannot write an exciting plot. He does not know how to weave a complex storyline: instead, he mostly writes a plodding narrative that moves dutifully from place to place, with occasional unexpected authorial intrusions in the form of new characters, history, or situations for which the reader has had no preparation. Only near the very end, when Kay has awkwardly arranged all of the final pieces together, is there a hint of excitement--and even there the action is somewhat less than suspenseful.

But the worst part about Kay's writing is his tendency to excessive philosophizing during moments that don't merit it. All the best novels contain moments of emotional turmoil, physical shock, or deep reflection. The best authors let these moments speak for themselves: we see what happens to a favorite character and, because we know and care about that character, we sympathize with his anguish without needing the author to tell us how anguished he is. Kay, on the other hand, does not let these moments speak for themselves. Instead, he feels compelled to embellish "significant" moments with extensive screeds on just how significant those moments are, in case we missed it the first time around.

The earliest example of this tendency is the overly long chapter where we are introduced to Dianora--and hear all about her anguish, and her turmoil, and the pain, the pain! The most humorous example of this tendency comes when Kay carefully explains why a night of kinky sex--complete with bondage and bite marks--is emphatically not an adolescent fantasy, but instead a symbol--nay! a complex, fully fledged allegory--of what life without freedom is like. And the most obvious examples of this tendency are those passages where Kay mysteriously talks about "meaning," a word which is as ridiculous and insignificant here as "infinite compassion" was in The Fionavar Tapestry. Indeed, Kay seems to invoke "meaning" whenever he knows that a scene should be significant, but he can't find any other way to explain it. For example:

"There was a silence. They could hear shouting from the streets below now, and the sound of running footsteps. . . . Devin was suddenly claimed by an image, another of his intrusions of memory: that campfire in Ferraut, Alessan playing songs of Senzio for Erlein, an enraged shadow by the river. There were so many layers here, so many charges of meaning."

It's almost as if Kay believes that telling us how meaningful a moment is will actually make us believe it. Please.

In the hands of a better author, Tigana could have been awesome, a seminal fantasy novel to move and influence generations of readers and writers. In Kay's hands, Tigana falls far short of its promise.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu