Lord of Emperors

http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/lord-of-emperors/

Lord of Emperors is the second (and final) novel in Guy Gavriel Kay???s THE SARANTINE MOSAIC duology. The story, set in a pseudo-Byzantine Empire, mostly centers on Crispin, a mosaicist from a neighboring kingdom who???s been commissioned to decorate the ceiling of a new chapel the emperor is building. Against his wishes, Crispin has been drawn into the Sarantine court???s political intrigue. In this second installment, the political turmoil finally comes to a head and Crispin???s life is, once again, drastically altered by events he can???t control. Not only are his and his friends??? lives in danger, but the changing political climate has major consequences for his art.

While reading Sailing to Sarantium, the first book in the THE SARANTINE MOSAIC, I had a hard time believing in the characters and the drama ??? I thought the plot lacked the world-shaking significance that the characters seemed to be overwhelmed by at every moment. I felt manipulated ??? like Kay was showing me murder, lust, adultery, shocking brutality, witty repartee, and titillating suggestions to make me feel like there was more going on than there really was. While I liked Kay???s characters, it felt like a big soap opera to me and I was impatient with the story.

The first part of Lord of Emperors is more of the slow drama and introspection that occurred in Sailing to Sarantium ??? every character analyzing what everyone else says, scrutinizing each gesture, contemplating every look, even reporting how they would think about this word or that gesture when they looked back on it sometime in the future. We???re reminded over and over how subtle and dangerous everybody is:

The room seemed laden and layered with intricacies of past and present and what was to come. Nuances coiling and spreading like incense, subtle and insistent.

There are several sweet and touching scenes, but most of Lord of Emperors is more of the melodrama of Sailing to Sarantium. Finally, about 2/3 of the way through, there is a major upheaval followed by a slow unwinding of its tragic consequences. There are some real heartbreaking scenes in the last third of the novel, and the story ends on a beautifully bittersweet note. It just takes a really long time to get there.
Guy Gavriel Kay???s strength is making his characters come alive. Thus, when the big events finally occur, they really are painful and tragic and we worry about these people???s futures. I cared about Crispin, his queen, the charioteers, and the cook and his apprentice. However, I didn???t feel the need to be privy to every thought they had along the way ??? how many times do I need to be told that Crispin is thinking that only two women in the world wear a particular perfume? THE SARANTINE MOSAIC should have been trimmed down to just one book ??? I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

I also think I would have felt more appreciation for THE SARANTINE MOSAIC if I had read it earlier in my acquaintance with Guy Gavriel Kay???s work. His world and characters are so full of life, there???s so much drama and passion, and I admire the character development. At this point in my reading history, however, I can???t help but notice that Kay???s intrusive style, which I???ve always thought of as almost over-the-top, never changes. Now that I???ve read ten of his novels, what I once admired ??? the type of story, the deep characterization, that particular distinctive prose ??? starts to become tiresome. If you???re new to Kay, or if you can???t get enough of his style, you???ll have a better experience with THE SARANTINE MOSAIC than I did.

Again I listened to Audible Frontier???s audio production which was narrated by Berny Clark. Dialogue is his strength ??? I thought it was perfect. His narration is a little too slow (I had to speed him up) and I think some listeners will think it???s also a little bland, but I liked how his reading didn???t elevate Kay???s drama even further.

This is an adequate sequel and conclusion to the series, GGK's prose and world-building continue to improve on what I thought was a perfect rendering of a fantastical Byzantium. I'm not even sure if I want to classify this as a sequel, it felt more like an expansion; with new characters, more depth, and a greater emphasis on city life. Unfortunately, issues that I wrote off in the first entry have returned and are even more obvious, my two main issues being the romance/portrayal of women and the ending. I will admit that I finished the last third of this book while fighting a nasty cold, but I really felt this story come apart as I approached the closing chapters.

This book picks up right after the first and details the remainder of Crispin's stay in Sarantium, the affairs of a newly introduced Bassanid (Persian) physician, and Emporer Valerius II's plan to reconquer Rhodia. The bulk of this novel is devoted to the characters and their development; Crispin in particular. I did not love the balance of plot to development in this one, it felt like none of the characters had any influence on what was going on, and their development was likewise forced and poorly articulated, which is a surprise given how amazing and lyrical the prose was.

The main problem that I kept running into was with the female characters. First of all every single female character in this book is otherworldy gorgeous, mensa-level intelligent, and witty, and fashionable, on-and-on. There are no normal women period, and GGK writes every interaction and description of these pseudo-goddesses as if he'd never spoken to or met a woman in his life. The descriptions of sex and the intermingling of sex and politics are written from such a bizarre and detached perspective. The emotions involved totally absent from the dialogue, the female characters acting more like tools than women. It's a serious issue given how prominently the female characters feature in the plot and in the development of the principal male cast. A big part of this novel is Crispin's relationship with the four most powerful women in the story, and which of them he ultimately beds/couples with. Given the way they are written, it's hard to get a sense of the characters' feelings for each other, so the fact that any one of them was interested in Crispin came off as contrived.

My knowledge of Byzantine history largely agrees with the details that GGK has included in this series, with my only real question remaining being whether Rhodias is supposed to be Greece or Italy. Where Sailing to Sarantium largely stuck to the record, this book deviates significantly. I get that this is historical fiction and that GGK was trying to tell a historically flavored story not a retelling of Justinian and Theodora, but this book breaks many of the conventions established in the first entry. It makes me question the need for such attention to the historical record when the plot never intended to respect it in the first place. I would normally be fine with deviations, but where this story deviates it turns into a very generic fairy tale with themes pulled straight from the catalog of the Brothers Grimm. It offended me to see such lyrical prose, incredible world-building, and historical detail wasted on a nonsense plot.

This brings us back to the issue with the women in this novel. It compounds with everything else to make the entire novel worse off. What I loved in the first book, the fantastical realism and attention to detail, are still there but robbed of their authenticity and diminished by the presence of what I am coining as Machiavelli-fuckdolls™. I can see some readers saying that this portrayal is by design and that women in this period of history were to some degree as this book portrays them. I'm not buying that. I could understand a lack of agency being excused by the historical record, but these women don't lack agency at all, instead, they're politically focused robots even at their most intimate moments. Real women aren't like that, and I don't care if they're part of some ruling caste and trained from birth to be pragmatic and unfeeling, it just doesn't jive. As I've noted above this entry doesn't even care to stick to the historical record all that closely, so the women are as they are by the deliberate choice of the author. It sucks.

This book gets full credit from me for the quality of the writing, and the city of Saratium is spell-binding, to say the least. The Chariot race in particular is probably my favorite moment of the entire series. All that said this is a little bit like putting lipstick on a pig because the core story mechanics just weren't there.

TL;DR: Come for the city and the chariots, Stay for the Machiavelli-fuckdolls™.