REVIEW: Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

Title: Children of Earth and Sky
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: NAL, 10 May 2016
ISBN: 978-0451472960
E-Copy: Sent by the Publisher
Reviewer: Yagiz

"From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.

The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming."

As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world..."

I've been a big fan of Kay's work since I read Tigana in the '90s. His standalone The Lions of Al-Rassan and his Sarantine Mosaic duology (Sailing to Sarantium &a Lord of Emperors) have long been two of the highlights of my fiction reading. Today I would read anything that Kay writes. But this is a somewhat dangerous state of mind because, despite my best efforts, it sets my expectations very high.

When I first heard about Children of Earth and Sky I was thrilled that Kay had decided to take us back to his Sarantine world. Even though I left the real-life, modern-day Sarantium nearly 25 years ago, I've always kept a little of Istanbul's magic in me. I've, no doubt, nurtured a romantic view of the large, bustling, cosmopolitan city in which living is not always easy, but this emotional intimacy augmented my senses during my reading nonetheless.

"That great, triple-walled city wasn't called Sarantium any more, it had been conquered. It was where the khalif ruled."

Children of Earth and Sky is set in alternate-history 15th-to-16th century Eastern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean. The author borrows from historical Venice, Dubrovnik, Vienna, Uskoks of Senj (Croatian social bandits), Prague and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. The reader can also notice other little details here and there throughout the book. For example, Kay's "Osmanli" is the exact Turkish word for Ottoman. All these details help Kay create an alluring setting for his story, which is another perfect example of what he puts as "history a quarter turn to the fantastic".

True to Kay's more recent works, this one doesn't contain strong fantasy tropes either. The reader is not going to find magic systems or dragons in this book. There are, what I would call, suggestions of supernatural, however I believe they are open to interpretation. One could imagine (all right, all right! The typical fantasy reader would not, but a stubborn reader could) a rational explanation to the author's few supernatural suggestions.

In Children of Earth and Sky, Kay weaves his tale masterfully through many story threads focusing on different protagonists, producing one of the best character-driven stories I have read in the recent years. The reader can't help but chase after Danica (a young Senjen raider), Marin (the youngest son of a merchant from Dubrava), Pero (a young artist chosen to paint the Khalif's portrait), Leonara (the beautiful Seressan spy) and Neven (a young soldier in the elite infantry of the Khalif). There is intrigue and enough characters to make the reader appreciate the plots.

There are also excellent secondary characters in the story, such as the duke of Seressa (Venice). I noticed (or I thought I noticed) something subtle: I think Kay changed his writing style slightly depending on the character. For example, he used parenthesis to describe the duke's thoughts when the story focused on him:

"...His grasp of matters appeared to be stuck like a gun-wagon on a road after heavy rain. (The duke was briefly pleased, he was arriving at excellent phrases tonight, if nothing else)..."

Another subtle change in prose was the author's switching to present tense for certain parts of the story. As far as I remember, Kay first employed this technique in his wonderful Under Heaven (here's my review of Under Heaven - I can't believe it's been more than 6 years... Time flies!). I'm usually not a great fan of present tense narration, but Kay is very subtle in its usage. He pulls the reader closer to the story by switching to present tense. During that period, time seems to flow slower, almost like in a slow motion video.

I've closed most of Kay's books with an air of melancholy, and Children of Earth and Sky is no exception. Not only I'm sad to finish a great story, but Kay's stories have something special that grabs heart and guts, and squeezes them. For a long time I thought this was caused by romance. But I've come to realize that it is sorrow... it is life with all its unfairness, and time with its stubbornness to stay still.

"We live among mysteries. Love is one, there are others. We must not imagine we understand all there is to know about the world."

Children of Earth and Sky is another amazing book by one of my favorite authors. Despite my high expectations, I found everything I was looking for in it. Without a doubt, it is one of the best books of the year.

Memorable Quotes:

• “We don’t wear masks only at Carnival."
• “The son grows next to the father’s tree or seeks higher ground away from it”. 
• “We are always falling. Even if we are the children of god.”
• “Men and women could live or die randomly, the way dice fell in a tavern game."
• “There are always innocents who die during times of fear and rage, no matter how gentle hands and heart might have been, how much tenderness lay within a soul under the night’s stars."
• “We aren’t heroes if we lead men into battles we will lose”.