tl;dr

Under Heaven

I just finished rereading Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven.

I will start of by saying I love how he writes, I love his books. Ok, I’m kind of so so on Fionavar, but everything from Tigana on I have loved. The Lions of Al-Rassan is one of my very favorite books ever.

When I originally read Under Heaven I gave it 5 stars. On this reread, I feel I need to knock that rating down some. I still enjoyed. Especially the end. The sense of scope at the conclusion of Guy Gavriel Kay's books is always very powerful and one of my favorite aspects of his writing, and I feel this one in particular does that amazingly well.

My issue is simply that, unlike 10 years ago when I first read it, I now know something about China and Chinese culture. And that knowledge means that I can now see the ways in which this story, set in a fictional land inspired by China, is just not very Chinese. On a broadstrokes level it passes well enough, but it misses the mark in many more nuanced ways, some small, some not so small. Starting with names, of people and places. Sometimes I would read one and be like, yeah, that combination of letters just does not work. Things like that. Or things that I have come to expect in Chinese stories. Or details that I know about from having learned about Chinese history (not about what happened, but about how things worked). In the details it just misses the mark, sometimes by a lot.

It's a shame but in a way it makes sense, and I wonder if maybe I'm now expecting something from this book that it never meant to give. Guy Gavriel Kay is not Chinese, however much he researched (I do have to wonder how much he did or did not immerse himself in Chinese fiction, however). And he does very purposely say he writes “historical fiction”, inspired by real places and events but not really those places and events. Is this a case of "sir, this is a Wendy's"?

Still, in the end, it makes me wonder: if I knew more about the Reconquista and the Iberian peninsula in that time (something I've wanted to learn more about for a while now), would I like Lions of Al-Rassan less?