Author Origin: Weyburn, SK - lives in Toronto, ON
Page Count: 416
Genre: Historical Fantasy Fiction
Difficulty: Hard
Grade Level: 11+
Key Talking Points: Memory, grudges, fortune and fate vs choosing your path in life, feminism, family and familial expectations.
Sensitive Subject Matter: War, murder, the mention of rape and violence upon innocents, sex (not graphic).
My love affair with Guy Kay continues in this blog. Fan girl alert!
For information on WHY Guy Kay is my favourite author of all time, and my personal history with his work, not to mention an account of the time I completely embarrassed myself when I met him, see my review on Tigana: HERE
Summary: In A Brightness Long Ago, Guy Gavriel Kay returns to a fictionalized Renaissance Italy (the setting of some of his most powerful and well-loved books) in the time just before the fall of Byzantium. It tells the story of how Danio Cerra, son of a tailor, came into contact with some of the greatest men and women of the world in his youth, and his own rise to power in part due to those interactions. Danio finds himself a part of assassinations, plots for power, horse races, decades long grudges, mercenary campaigns, and even an unlikely love story, sometimes as a witness, sometimes as a key player or accomplice.
As always with Kay, Danio is not the only character who has a role in telling this story. As Danio encounters new characters, the narrative takes off after those characters and lets them share in the weaving of the story. Some of those characters are significant, even integral to the overall arch of the plot, such as the mercenaries whose long standing feud instigates key conflicts. Some are minor, such as the younger son of an aristocrat who love horses and endears himself to you with his naivete. While some verge on completely insignificant, like a man who bet his life savings on a horse race- he holds on a few paragraphs and then moves on with his life apart from the narrative. In doing this, Kay creates a world with depth and vibrancy in all its corners. This is part of the magic of Kay's writing, that you are made to care about these characters that show up on one page, only to die on the next. He'll have you in tears, both joyful and sorrowful, over these people and their struggles. And every once and a while you'll be surprised when a seemingly minor character reappears and suddenly takes a key role later on (remember that adorable younger son?).
Having been set in the same world as previous books, A Brightness Long Ago feels like sinking into a favourite armchair- you recognize all of the lumps and feel comforted by them. I didn't realize going into this book that it would have this setting, and so it was a slowly unfurling joy for me to start catching the references to previous texts. A Brightness Long Ago, is placed a long time after the events of The Sarantine Mosaic, although remnants of the work of that text's protagonist, a mosaicist named Crispin, still remain, as well as landmarks that he sees as he travels to Sarantium (Kay's name for Byzantium). There are hints that one of the main characters from Brightness is related to a character from Mosaic, and some of the same supernatural forces are also still at work. The ending of Brightness also leads directly into the beginning of Children of Earth and Sky, which was Kay's most recent work previous to this. All that being said, you could read and thoroughly enjoy Brightness without having read any of Kay's other work.
The majority of Kay's books exist in the in-between of Fantasy and Historical Fiction, so much so that I have coined the term "historical fantasy fiction" to describe them (this term may have already existed 😜). They are inspired by real people, places, and events, but fictionalize the details and inner lives of these people. Kay does an extensive job researching the time periods he is going to use, and as such the book feels like a living, breathing thing in your hands. The fantasy part comes into it when Kay takes what people from the time period would have believed in, their superstitions or folklore, and makes them real in the context of the story. In Brightness, this takes the shape of the existence of ghosts. Various characters see ghosts, feel their presence, and some even become ghosts themselves as we glimpse the first few moments of their afterlife. This is always an interesting aspect of Kay's writing and, in the case of Brightness, also gives the reader some closure when beloved characters are killed.
Something Kay does differently in this book compared to his other works is the use of first person. This threw me at first, as it isn't something I have seem from him before (at least in my memory- I have read his books over a span of 15 years). The main narrator is Danio Cerra and he is reflecting on his life as a young man from his current role as a "man no longer young" (Kay 3). There is an omniscient third person narrator that bookends many of the larger transitions of the book (into chapters or parts), and also a third person limited narrator that takes turns inhabiting a number of characters, both major and minor. Once I got used to the fact that there could be three different types of narration, it was easy to transition, but some adjustment time was needed. Something that was also new in this text was a section where Kay seems to be speaking directly to the reader on the nature of storytelling itself. Again, this threw me off a bit at first, but as a stand-alone, the writing is quite beautiful, reminiscent of Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage" from As You Like It:
"So many stories that can be told, in and around and braided through the one we are being given. Don’t we all know that stories can be sparks leaping from the bonfire of an offered tale to become their own fire, if they land on the right ground, if kindling is there and a light breeze but not a hard wind?
Someone is deciding what to tell us. What to add, what not to share at all or when (and how) to reveal a thing. We know this, even as we picture in our minds another young man, a tailor’s son from Seressa, remembering a spring ride, how we used to like to sing…
We want to sink into the tale, leave our own lives behind, find lives to encounter even to enter for a time. We can resist being reminded of the artificer, the craft. We want to be immersed, lost, not remember what it is we are doing, having done to us, as we turn pages, look at a painting, hear a song, watch a dance.
Still, that is what is being done to us. It is." (Kay 242-243).
The only critique I have, and this is very rare for me with Kay's work, is that there are some passages and turns of phrase that repeat too often, enough so that they become noticeable and a little annoying. This is primarily during Danio's narration. While I understand that a main motif in the book surrounds the nature of memory, and that memory is often cyclical, I still got a little sick of reading the repetition.
Teacher Note: As with much of Kay's work, the plot is complex and the writing is sophisticated, making this text more suited to older readers. The multiple styles of narration, as mentioned above, could be difficult for some readers to follow.
As for course connections, a common thread within Kay's work involves strong female characters. There are a number of characters in Brightness that challenge the expectations the patriarchal world has of them. Some make that choice explicitly, while others are handed a life that allows more freedoms for a woman at the time. Either way, these characters provide an interesting avenue for exploring the literary lens of Feminism, especially as they are being depicted by a male author. The text also focuses a lot on the choices people make and the ways people use the powers they have, lending itself well to analysis using both Psychoanalysis and Marxism in addition to Feminism.
Final Thought: As always, the story is compelling, the writing is engaging and intricate, and the book has left a mark on my heart. The way Danio describes the woman he loves in the book reflects my own feelings as I finish another of Kay's novels:
"The sailors say the rain misses the cloud even as it falls through light or dark into the sea. I miss her like that as I fall through my life, through time, the chaos of our time." (Kay 3).
📚 Ms. CAN Lit
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