A BRIGHTNESS LONG AGO

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

The publication of a new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay is always cause for celebration, and A Brightness Long Ago does not disappoint. Set in Kay's alternative world, the novel is a look at the mercenary bands that ravaged Batiara, Kay’s analog to Italy. Although there is little magic or supernatural in the novel, as with many of Kay’s books, the story has as much the feel of fantasy as it does well-research historical fiction, resulting in a book that seems to have fallen through a crack from another world

The novel opens with the assassination of Count Uberto of Mylasia, known as “The Beast” by the mercenary commander Falco Cino. This event changes the life of the Seressan Guidanio Cerra, who was living in Uberto’s court and found the aftermath of the assassination, when his mentor was targeted, to be too hot, especially since he knew the identity of Uberto’s assassin. On his way home to Seressa to open a bookstore with his cousin, Guidano found himself under the protection of Teobaldo Monticola di Remigio, another powerful mercenary who desired to have Guidanio tutor his young sons, and who happened to be the lifelong enemy of Falco Cino.

Kay does an excellent job following all of his characters, using Guidanio as a viewpoint character, but also employing the guise of a omniscient narrator to tell the stories of Teobaldo and Falco, as well as Falco’s niece, Adria, the healer Jelena, and the Firentan banker Antenami Sardi, who is seen as a buffoon. Throughout the course of the novel, the complex political and religious situation in Batiara is revealed and it is only through his common sense that Guidanio is mostly able to retain his freedom and his life against the backdrop of the rivalry in which he finds himself.

The world in which these characters move is a violent one, although Kay and his characters are clear that, even as mercenaries, they have no real desire to fight. For them, a successful campaign is one in which they are hired, face the enemy, and come away without having to have fought, although payment and plunder are always welcome. In the distance, the siege of Sarantium is a looming threat, which places this novel some time prior to Kay’s previous novel, Children of Earth and Sky. Although Teobaldo’s eldest son is manning the walls of Sarantium, the characters who move amongst the city states of Batiara have no influence on those distant events, nor, as Kay makes clear, do they have as complete control over closer events.

Throughout the novel, Kay is happy to take a look at minor characters and provide asides that reveal their future. In other cases, he shows the plans of his main characters and then allows the wheel of fate to go awry, changing everything they had planned. This happens early in the novel when Count Uberto’s attempted seduction of a local maiden does not go as planned, but is a recurring theme throughout the novel.

A Brightness Long Ago offers a complex picture of a variety of people trying to make their way in a world that doesn’t care about them, no matter how much they try to take their fates into their own hands. Even if the characters don’t, and can’t realize it, Kay provides their realization of their true situation in a unique way when the novel warrants it. Despite this, the novel never descends into nihilism, pointing out that the world in which these characters move and live will continue long after they are dead, their actions leading to the actions of those who will follow them. This point in driven home by Guidanio’s narrative, which is told as an older man looking back on his past and remembering those who were important to his rise, but also at the very end of the novel, when Guidanio is allowed to look forward.

There is a sense of reality to A Brightness Long Ago, which allows Kay to explore the lives of these individuals and the times in which they lived as reflections of the period in which bands of condottieri established themselves in Italy. He can create the situations and individuals he wants in order to tell his story rather than shoe-horning them into the historical narrative of our own world, and in the process creating a fully realized culture of his own.

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