A Brightness Long Ago - Guy Gavriel Kay

I want to give you a quick reaction, which I put together a few minutes after finishing this book - hopefully that will convince you to give it your attention. If not, there's more below. But this was my first, unfiltered thoughts:

This is numinous, illuminating work. Expectations high, expectations surpassed. Very emotional. Going to be thinking about it for a while.

Not convinced? OK. Let's get into it a little more:

A Brightness Long Ago is a fantasy novel from Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s also a remarkably hard novel to talk about. That’s to its credit; the reason it’s hard to talk about is that there’s so much going on, so many layers, so many personalities, so much story, that getting a handle on it to explain why it’s so great has proven a bit difficult. So, lets start with this: This is a fantastic book, which explores life, death, sacrifice, age, the role of chance in history, and the role of people in the world. And that’s only a narrow sampling. 

This is a book with a lot to say. But it’s not just that, not just a pick-up-and-play philosophy text. It has characters whose lives feel as real as the reader’s own, whose loves and hatreds, dreams and duties, whose enmities and hopes all shape them, and the people around them. These are living, breathing people, with a rich inner life to match the political machinations and world events they find themselves entangled by. The world? The story’s set in the world of one of the parallel, almost-histories that Kay does so well, and I drew parallels with the renaissance Republic of Venice, which we’ve seen once before in another work of Kay’s.

So that’s the elevator pitch. Deep, complex, believable characterisation. Vividly realised, semi-historical setting. A story that draws you in and won’t let go, through all its tides of hope and torment. The narrative is about people, first – about the way their personalities, their ambitions their affections and enmities shape the world around them.

The world is classic Kay, in both senses. It feels like a lightly shifted version of Europe in the 1400’s, with a focus in a peninsula of warring city states with more than a passing similarity to Italy of that period. Regular Kay readers will have seen this world before – and even this small part of it, which was also heavily featured in his last novel, Children of Earth and Sky. New and old readers alike can delight in the lyrical prose, which builds a world up brick by brick, a world which feels instantly familiar, but with flashes of strangeness woven through it – a dream of sea-foam in the mortar. It’s a mark of Kay’s skill that every  tree, every leaf, every stone, every wall feels alive, a luxuriant tapestry for his characters to run through. And while the detail is there, the wider aspect doesn’t suffer. There’s feuding cities, driven toward conflict by politics negotiated on a knife’s edge. There’s mercenary armies on the march, with all the destructive potential that implies. And there’s joys, as well – horses running their hearts out, and unexpected friendships found between cups of wine.

This is a sprawling epic, engaging with difficult questions about ethics and systemic and personal morality, while also getting up close and personal – be that romance, individual crises of conscience, duels or any other of the plethora of human experience. This is such a densely packed story, and throughout, is absolutely captivating.

I normally go on about the plot and the characters a little more – here, I wanted to give impressions of the breadth and scope of the work, of the way it made me feel, of the depth and emotional integrity of it because getting into the detail quickly got a bit spoilery.

Suffice to say, if you’ve picked up a Kay novel before, this is another masterclass in fantasy from him; smart, emotionally raw, incredibly well characterised, wrapped in some truly beautiful prose. If this is your first step into this world – it’s fantastic. That simple. Pick it up and you won’t want to put it back down. It’s an ambitious, compelling story whose ambitions are realised, and which it’s a genuine pleasure to read.

If you need to know whether it’s worth buying? Yes. Stop reading this, and go pick it up instead. You won’t regret it.