Some of the oldest possessions I’ve got are books. Sometimes, like the Ship of Theseus, they’re copies of books many times removed – I’m on my fourth copy of Good Omens, for various reasons, my second copy of The Lord of the Rings and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I’m looking to replace the paperbacks of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic next time I’m in a nice, big bookshop with those lovely cloth-bound new editions of both. For some of these books, though, I’m on a carefully looked after and never loaned to anyone first copy.
For Ink and Ember’s ambassador program this month I’m penning this love letter to reading. And to the book that really lit the fire for me.
Guy Gavriel Kay. The Fionavar Tapestry. This, I think, is where it all began for me. I don’t even know who recommended it to me. Probably Penny.
Spoilers follow. Ish. Y’klnow, vague ones. It’s been a while.
Sure, I’d read loads before this. I’ve already mentioned the injury sustained reading Pooh Bear books back in the day. But my senior school library was phenomenal. A wonderful range of fantasy and science fiction to tempt the budding reader fresh off the back of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I discovered Stephen Donaldson, read about the utterly despicable Thomas Covenant and found out that heroes didn’t have to act heroic to save the day. Honestly, the most heroic thing Covenant does in the space of 6 books is die! And all this a few years before the publication of The Colour of Magic, my discovery of the Discworld, and then the story really starts.
Thomas Covenant set the tone for the kind of fantasy I wanted to read. Person or persons taken from our world into a fantasy realm where they are somehow the saviour of the world. Yes, it’s tacky, but it’s always been good fun. I mean just look a the classic Dungeons and Dragons cartoon! That’s where this idea was seeded in my mind. Could that door be the one? Of course many years later the same device is used to such fabulous comedic effect in Yonderland on TV and Elvenquest on the radio.
So The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant took 1 person, maybe two from our world to The Land. The Mirror of her Dreams took people from lots of different worlds and brought them together on the grounds that one of them was bound to be the saviour, surely! But the Fionavar Tapestry brought six people together into a world that desperately needed help and each of them ends up contributing in their own unique way. There are chunks of this book that are a hard read because you can see what is coming and you really don’t want it to happen, there are chunks that sneak up on you and hit you right in the emotions and you don’t see it coming, and there are more than a few what the actual f*ck just happened scattered throughout.
The Fionavar Tapestry weaves internally consistent magic systems, with characters taken from our world and slowly finding out their place in this mythic story, with elements of Arthurian myth threaded through a greater mythological structure… it’s incredible. I almost dare not re-read it for fear of finding flaws. I have read some of his other words. Tigana is beautiful, memorable, and does not have the ending either I or my wife wanted it to have. Seriously, that ending is not nice. It’s like one of the old Road to… movies with Bob Hope, where the cavalry are riding to the rescue through the last act of the film and never make it. Only the Road movies are a comedy and Tigana quite definitely is not. The Lions of Al Rassan, A Song for Arbonne, and the Sarentine Mosaic books were the last of his I read. Somehow I’ve missed out on 8 books and counting – but then I have been distracted by Terry Pratchett, Jodi Taylor, Charles Stross, and Caimh McDonnell, all of whom are (or were) prolific authors.
The worst thing in the Fionavar Tapestry for young me, used to pronouncing Lovecraftian entities with grace and aplomb, was the names. Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, pah! Easy. But Irish names? In my defence, there’s no handy pronunciation guide for the gentle reader, no Dramatis Personae to refer to. I remember reading a re-telling of the Arthurian legends and working out that this long string of seemingly random letters starting Gwa was actually Gallahad (blaming the Welsh for that one)! Anyway, no such thing as audiobooks back in the day when I was reading this and here’s this fantastic character called Diarmuid. Applying the Lovecraftian approach I figure that’s dee-arr-moo-id. Perfect. And so that character was named for the rest of time. Until a TV programme back in the 1990s where one of the gardening types shares the name. And they’re all calling him Dermot. Seriously? That’s how you pronounce it? Oh, FFS.
Anyway. Pronunciation issues aside, this book has stayed with me since senior school. I think this year it might just be time to re-read…
This post is part of the Ink and Ember Ambassadors’ Program. I’m here to champion Urban Fantasy in its various guises from the cozy to the downright sinister. Remember, the world isn’t what you think – let me show you how the world really is…
