New Review: Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana
January 29, 2003 (8:27 PM) ( link )

ADDED a review of Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana.

Tigana was another bad fantasy novel. Looking back over my most recently reviewed books, I think the last, good, serious fantasy novel I read (thus discounting Mort, which was good but not serious) has to be Robin Hobb's Ship of Destiny, the final novel in the Liveship Traders Trilogy. That was back at the end of October, and now we're at the end of January, exactly three months later. That's a long, cold period without a good fantasy novel.

In part because of my now-serious disaffection with speculative fiction, I'm reading something decidedly non-speculative right now: Robertson Davies's The Fifth Business, the first book in his Deptford Trilogy. I honestly have no idea what the trilogy is about--the only reason I'm reading it is that Davies is a famous Canadian writer whom I've never heard of--but so far Davies writes like a dream, infusing ordinary events and ordinary characters with that special quality that only truly gifted writers can create. In other words, I don't have the faintest clue why The Fifth Business is good (so far), but it is good.

If The Fifth Business ends up as good as it has begun, then I'll probably read the rest of the Deptford Trilogy next, before resuming my normal forays into speculative fiction.