Bedside Books Numbers 5 and 6

So number 5 would be this one

This is part three of  trilogy called The Fionavar Tapestry by the Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay. I put all three of them on my Amazon wish list back in July and have now been given them all for birthday/Christmas gifts. And re-read them, having first encountered them decades ago via the Leeds Library. 

It was the act of a completist really. I'm a bit of a fan of his later work, but the Fionavar Tapestry was his first venture into fiction. Previously he'd been helping Christopher Tolkien edit the manuscripts his father left unfinished at his death and prepare them for publication. The influence shows and it's not a happy one. Tolkien got away with a lot in his writing because he was the first to produce that sort of epic fantasy, and also because he had spent years working on the world it described. Helped of course by an audience with no expectations or tradition of reading that sort of thing. Writers who came afterwards and who produce a sort of sub-Tolkien world are rarely so successful This trilogy is derivative, stiff, and in places both ponderous and unintentionally funny. 

Don't let that put you off the writer completely though. After the FT Kay found his own voice and his own method of telling stories; he sets them in a human world and in a human history that is like our own but just a bit different. Almost an alternative history, or the same history with different characters. So his The Lions of Al-Rassan is 'about' the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, A Song for Arbonne is set within the troubadour culture of medieval Provence, Sailing to Sarantium is about the late Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. This method of writing suits Kay much better than the total fantasy of the FT. It gives him a structure and a background against which he can tell  a good story. smoothly and well, peopled with credible characters. some of whom the reader really cares about, and not all of whom achieve a happy ending. 

There is another GGK on the bedside book pile so we will be returning to him in due course. 

Meanwhile Number 6 is this 

and this one hasn't been read but put away on the shelves. Tis is not because I don't want to read it, because I do. However, I can't just at the moment. The rules for my study suspension, which after all is for a medical reason , which is that basically I just can't study efficiently at present, state that no work can be undertaken relevant to the thesis while the suspension is on going. There is a small chance that Ezra Pound may get a passing mention in the section of my thesis that deals with GCH at war, when his poetry took an uncharacteristic, and brief,  modernist turn, and what with Pound being the father of modernism and all that, the book is currently a No-No. 

So the pile is now down to only three!