Tigana
by Guy Gavriel Kay.

1990, 692 pages (ppb, with Kay’s afterword).

Twenty years ago, the two rival Sorcerer-Tyrants Alberico of Barbadior and Brandin of Ygrath invaded and conquered the Peninsula of the Palm, a collection of city-states reminiscent of those of Italy. The city-states were unable to cooperate in face of the invasion, and thus fell without offering much resistance.

There was, however, an exception: the province of Tigana. The Tiganese people were known as a proud and fierce people, and when Brandin sent his son Stevan southward to deal with Tigana, while he himself went to confront Alberico in a neighbouring province, the Tiganese won.

Unfortunately for the Tiganese, Stevan was the sole purpose for Brandin’s invasion. Stevan was Brandin’s most beloved son, and Brandin only attacked the Palm to carve out a realm for his youngest son. So when Stevan was killed, Brandin wheeled his army southward, forgetting Alberico, and crushed the Tiganese.

And not only their armies: Once the Prince of Tigana and his forces were obliterated, Brandin summoned all his sorcerous powers, and erased the memory of Tigana from the minds of every person in the world, excepting those born on Tiganese soil prior to the casting of the spell. He then razed most of the province, levied heavy taxes on the population, and tore down every statue or structure that could remind people of Tigana’s past glory. Finally, he changed the name of the province.

This happened about twenty years ago. In the present, Brandin and Alberico have divided eight of the nine provinces of the Palm between them, ruling their territories with rather hard means — they are, after all, tyrants. In spite of this, most people accept their rule. They offer stability, and have managed to greatly reduce banditry along the roads. But for some, this is not enough.

A group of Tiganese, aided by people from other provinces who long for freedom, work to overthrow the Tyrants. Originally, their plan was to get revenge against Brandin — to kill him and to reverse his spell before the last people who remembered Tigana were dead. But they soon realised that if they killed Brandin, Alberico wouldn’t waste any time in conquering the rest of the Palm. And as Tyrants go, Alberico are among the worst; where Brandin had invaded the Palm for his son, Alberico only did so to sate his ambitions.

Tigana does of course follow the struggle of these freedom fighters, but I won’t go into the specifics any deeper than this, as one of the things I enjoyed the most about the book was discovering who these people were, where they came from, and what they were going to do. I almost feel as if I’ve said too much already, but one has to explain at least this much about the setting of a fantasy novel, I always feel.

As for the rest of the setting, this is fairly normal Low Fantasy stuff. Sure, it’s set in a secondary world; there’s magic and magicians; at least one “mythical” creature is spotted; and there is a small sequence where Kay, if only for a moment, steps over into the realm of Epic. (And by “Epic” I here refer to the typical Fantasy conflict, where a chosen few try to defeat an hostile, or even evil, supernatural force.) On this note, though, I have to say I found it refreshing to read a fantasy novel where the Epic plotline only served as a small side plot, and the main story was devoted to a more profane plot — whereas it usually is the other way around. Additionally, this Epic bit is mainly allegorical, there to show that a phenomenon such as oppression has widespread and unexpected consequences, and, to quote Gro, that everything connects to everything.

As you’ve probably figured out already, one of the major themes of Tigana is freedom. Not very original, I know, but there you have it. However, as I’ve said so often before, a lack of originality means little in art, really, so long as the craftsmanship — or, as in the case of Tigana, the artistry — behind the work is solid. As it undeniably is in the case of Tigana. Also, Kay manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of fantasy by portraying even the Tyrants as humans; as three-dimensional, nuanced, individuals, not only as horrid personifications of an idea, such as “oppression”, “tyranny”, or “terrorism”. On the other hand, while Kay’s heroes definitely are just that — heroes — they have some ambiguous sides, too. One of them, for example, takes a hedge wizard as his slave, to use him against the Sorcerer-Tyrants, thus setting off a discussion — which Kay never really resolves, Gods bless him — about the value and dilemmas of liberty, and of whether the goal justifies the means.

The other dominant theme of Tigana is memory, history, identity, and the interplay between these three concepts. Kay attempts to investigate the relation between the past and the present, or more specifically how our relationship to the past is. One of his “conclusions” here, if such a strong word can be applied, is that it is almost equally dangerous to focus too much on the past, as it is to ignore it. The question then becomes how we should balance this. In his afterword Kay ties this problem to that of identity, pointing out what has already been emphasised in Tigana itself, that how we see ourselves is directly connected to our past — both our personal experiences — as exemplified by Tigana’s older characters — as well as the history of our forefathers — as is the case with the younger Tiganese. Kay claims that one of his reasons for writing Tigana — as inspired by old, manipulated Soviet photos where functionaries who’d fallen out of grace had been edited out, as well as by the numerous attempts throughout history to subjugate a people by exterminate their history — was to examine what happens when someone actually had the means to erase huge parts of history, by way of magic.

One could probably say a lot more about this — but this is a review, after all, not an analysis — and discuss whether he’s succeeded. I’d say he has, though, primarily because the revelation of Tigana’s history to a young Tiganese man who didn’t even know he was Tiganese, was so well written, with so bludgeoning sentimentality, that it made me shed tears at several separate occasions. I actually believe that Tigana is the first book I’ve read whose gods-damned exposition made me cry a mere 116 pages in.