The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road

By -

 The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road (#2 and 3 in The Fionavar Tapestry), by Guy Gavriel Kay


I went ahead and finished the Fionavar Tapestry stories.  The trouble, of course, is that if I tell you anything about the plots, it will spoil the whole trilogy, but I'll do my best.

We have five people from our own world who have been taken to Fionavar, the original of all the worlds, where they were dragged into the burgeoning war between Maugrim (the dark lord) and pretty much everyone else.  At the end of the first book, they went home, but now, months later, they're back again.

I said before that it's pretty Tolkien-esque and that continues.  Many of the story beats are really similar to Lord of the Rings, though there are no hobbits.  Kay adds King Arthur into the mix, which is interesting -- especially as he bears a curse -- and there are other Celtic elements.  And a good deal more sex, of course.

Special side note:  There is also a half-god, lieutenant of Maugrim, who started off as a regular forest dweller, but turned to the Dark after the girl he liked fell in love with somebody who wasn't him.  He's spent the last thousand years working towards his goal of killing everything in the world -- hopefully including the Dark Lord -- which seems like a little bit of an overreaction.  I was reminded of a post Jenny wrote long ago, in which she said something like "I understood already, and it isn't enough."  Possibly if you're the sort of person who is going to try to kill the whole world if the girl you like doesn't like you back, she should definitely not go out with you.

All the various characters go their separate ways, accomplishing their deeds, through the second book, and in the third, they start to converge again towards the final battle.  Not everyone makes it that far; Kay is quite willing to have some of his characters die.  

Will anybody survive the final battle?  Will the Dark Lord be defeated?  If you've got to know, you'll have to find the books yourself.  I did quite enjoy them; I just also couldn't stop matching events and characters with LOTR.

Comments

  1. CeliJuly 18, 2021 at 11:57 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more