It's been so long since I last blogged because I was sorting out the last of my thesis. I guess I wait for half a year until I get the results back now. I'm not even certain who will be marking my thesis, yet.
But FireWall part one is complete. I'm no longer a student, now more a house husband and job seeker with a strange abundance of this thing called 'time'.
So, I'm back into reading eagerly, and decided to pounce on Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree.
It was written in 1984, back in the post-Tolkien period where fantasy authors were looking to re-create Grandpa Tolkien in slightly different ways. I found the book a fascinating read, not because of the content, but the state of the genre a generation ago.
First of all, it was a portal fantasy, a la Narnia or Harry Potter. That generally isn't done these days. I have not read a adult-marketed portal fantasy in quite some time. I can't even remember the name of the last one I read.
There were elves and dwarves and a dark lord in a fortress with a high tower to the far north. There were 'chosen ones' who knew nothing about the world they had been prophecised to save, put alongside kings and shamans who die unexpectedly, putting our heroes in charge. There was even a flaming mountain where the villain was contained.
Although splendidly written, The Summer Tree tells the fantasy reader of 2014 how far we've come as media consumers and global citizens. The 'white man as saviour and moral authority' trope has become cringeworthy, and black-and-white heroes and villains is decidedly passe.
Near the end, Kay seems to knowingly wink at the reader, as if to say 'I know what I've done, but at least I'm showing you I know,' when his white male 'prophecised saviour' character bawls out a king-to-be over myopic ethnocentrism.
It was an enjoyable sojourn in a comfortably familiar, heavily Tolkienesque universe. There were no surprises, though there were several moments of appealing humanity. I won't be reading the sequels, though Kay very much stepped up his game with Tigana, six short years later. Fantasy is a steadily advancing genre, and to think we have come so far in such a short time bears much hope for the future.
