The Lions of Al-Rassan

This was good. Really good, even, but it just wasn’t what I wanted from the story. The book is heavily character-driven and damnit if I wasn’t waiting for the plot to happen the whole book. I think anyone who appreciates history and intrigue will really enjoy it, but just be aware of what you’re going into.

Historical fantasy following several characters from various cultures in an Al-Andalus inspired peninsula during the time surrounding the Reconquista.  I loved how GGK used historical events and real civilisations to talk about broader themes of religion, faith, destiny, culture, love, family etc. Being familiar with the history of Spain during Al-Andalus and the Reconquista eras, it was great to recognise many events and reading this while vacationing in Andalusia, amongst the areas that inspired this novel, felt like even more profound reading experience.  His writing is stunning with a gorgeous poetic prose perfectly recreating the atmosphere of an elegant medieval society. His characters were all compelling and complex people and I especially loved Jehane and Ammar.  I wasn't a fan of how some important events being told rather than shown, deaths about seemingly important secondary characters happening off screen.  I really liked the ending and I was happy seeing how some of the characters ended up though I would have liked to learn about the other side characters' fate. 
Overall a great historical fantasy with gorgeous writing and interesting characters, I will definitely be reading more of Guy Gavriel Kay's books. 

Lions of Al-Rassan is one of the best fantasy books I've ever read, and I say this even though I'm not entirely convinced it is fantasy.



Whatever its genre, it tells the tale of Moorish Spain and events leading to the Reconquista, but through the lens of the fantastical. The major powers and players are sufficiently mixed up and layered with new details to make it clear this is not earth (there are two moons in the sky!) and it's not a historical account , but things are also immediately recognizable, even as an American. Instead of Christians, Muslims and Jewish peoples, you have the Jaddites, Asharites, and the Kindath - with all the same customs, stereotypes, challenges, and desires. It's a little weird, to tell the truth, but more on that later.

Thankfully, it is much more than just a fantastical retelling of Cantar de mio Cid. At the heart of Lions of Al-Rassan are the lives and personal stories of impossibly powerful, emotional, and clever men and women. There's The Captain himself, Rodrigo Belmonte, a genius tactician and leader of the strongest band of Jaddites on the peninsula. Opposing, or allied, with him is Ammar ibn Khairan, an Asharite poet, advisor to kings, killer of kings, and lovable rogue. Finally there's the woman that stands between them, Jehane bet Ishak, a Kindath doctor whose life is defined equally by love, war, and medicine.

These three heroes are the pillars of the book, with themselves and the people that follow and love them serving as a metaphor for the mishmash of cultures and the inevitable conflict arising on the peninsula itself.

Al-Rassan is a ticking timebomb of external pressures and irreconcilable differences, but there is a compelling argument made by its characters that it doesn't have to be. There's a dream shared by many characters that conflict is not inevitable, that it is possible to blend disparate cultures (in some cases quite literally) to create something new, better, but fragile. This struggle is the source of its many emotional highs and lows.

I don't think I've ever read a more human book, especially in the fantasy genre. Characters frequently stop and appreciate beauty, celebrate companionship, weep at tragedy, and profess respect for their friends and rivals.

The key here is that, with few exceptions, there are no evil men. There are competing and incompatible cultures, religions, and political systems, but humans are human, and their shared likenesses are as important as their differences. These are crafty and intelligent men having crafty and intelligent conversations with each other, even in conflict. You end up sympathizing with everyone, even going so far as hoping, naively, that they somehow all get what they want.

They won't, of course. One of the greatest themes running throughout the book is that these men would be great and lifelong friends if not for just one small problem - the tragedy being that these “small” problems are often the most defining parts of their lives.

It is a nearly flawless book, though there are a few problems I couldn't get past.

I've read plenty of books that straddle the line between fantasy and historical fiction, but this is the first time it's been a source of distraction. Events and characters are so close to their real world counterparts - often with comically referential names, titles, or descriptions - yet at the same time are very clearly not.

I kept wishing that the book fully committed to fantasy or history.

Take the three major religions as example. Going by their descriptions, you'd likely say they are sufficiently fantastical: the Jaddites worship the sun as god, the Kindath worship the two moons, twin sisters of the sun god, and the Asharites worship not the gods but the stars and the human prophet who preached their glory.

And yet when you read of their cultures, practices, and so on, you'll quickly find they are literally Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Kindath (Jews) are called the Wanderers, valued for their skills and trades when times are good, but immediately blamed, persecuted, segregated, expelled, and labeled as sorcerers and baby eaters when times are bad. It's not subtle!

It's also not a bad thing, necessarily, because the fantastical framing is as good of a teacher as any historical drama would be. And yet... it remains distracting, taking me away from its world and putting me back in my own.

More distracting are the names of its characters: Rodrigo “The Captain” Belmonte is of course El Cid himself, Rodrigo “The Lord” Diaz. The character of Ammar ibn Khairan is based on a man named Muhammad ibn Ammar. A major city in the book is named Silveness (Seville), ruled by the khalifate (caliphate), which eventually falls and is replaced by the Almalik (Almoravid) dynasty.

Both book and reality contain a Sancho the Fat, yet they are different people... sorta?

On more mundane annoyances, there are a number of writing ‘tricks' that Guy Gavriel Kay goes back to a few too many times.

Often - too often - there will be a scene in which an important event is viewed through the perspective of one of the characters. It will then end on a cliffhanger - like a character's death, not yet named - and then the perspective shifts. Sometimes the cliffhanger is resolved, but more often than not this trick happens a 2nd or even 3rd time, or the time frame jumps suddenly and you're left to infer what happened before the book eventually just tells you.

The writing is very clearly aware that it's dangling the reveal in front of you, and it'll purposefully lead you down false conclusions to stretch out the tension even more. Once you notice the trick it's hard not to get impatient or even frustrated by it.

There are also a number of repetitive words and phrases that grate after a time - people can only talk about “dissembling” or “diverting” so many times before it becomes irksome - but they're minor.

Indeed, all of its problems and distractions are minor when compared with the work as a whole. They are primarily noted only because the rest of the work is so phenomenal that even the smallest error stands out of place.

It's a remarkable book, one that should be on the shelves of every fantasy fan, and it's made me a Guy Gavriel Kay for life. Just don't read it too close to taking a test or quiz on the history of Spain, because it will cause you to fail spectacularly.

”One sun for the god. Two moons for his beloved sisters. Uncountable, stars to shine in the night. Oh, man and woman, born to a dark path, only look up and the lights shall guide you home.”

I can’t believe I took this long to read this book. I’m a loud and proud lover of GGK’s books, and up until this point my favorite of his was Under Heaven. How could any book be better than Under Heaven, I wondered. Surely, at most, it’d be just on par with it. I’d definitely get around to it sooner or later.

How very wrong I was. This book is now easily my favorite GGK book, by a very large margin.

To summarize a very complex book, circumstances bring together a small band of people from very different backgrounds, both political and religious. They bond through shared circumstances, and then find their bonds and loyalties tested as world events start pulling them back apart again. As with all of GGK’s books, it’s rooted in actual world history (I’m not familiar with the period myself, but it’s evidently based on Moorish Spain and the religious conflicts that happened then), but with GGK magical realism flair. Uneasy peace turns into conflict, religions clash, and loyalties are examined. It’s very complex, and I’m trying to keep things vague for my friends who want to read it.

GGK’s hand is evident here in the quality of the writing (fantastic) and how he somehow manages to make all these complex political and religious machinations make sense to the average reader. It’s not an overwhelming read, it’s very compelling and easy to digest. I instantly loved all the main characters, and was actually breathless near the end during the book’s climax. Contrary to what you might expect, the climax of this book isn’t played out on a major battlefield, but it’s exciting all the same.

I don’t really know what else to say here, except that if I could give it 6/5 stars, I would. I know that sounds fangirly, but I don’t care. I haven’t met a GGK book I didn’t like, and I very much liked this one.

This book is phenomenal.

Guy Gavriel Kay is an author who gets a lot of respect from writers. Brandon Sanderson has said that we're all just trying to be as good as Guy Gavriel Kay. If that's true, then after reading The Lions of Al-Rassan I'm starting to think he's the Bob Dylan of fantasy writers.That is to say he's a good writer, who knows how to build characters and put words together. The way he does it in this book has some serious flaws that left me dreading to pick it up, and with no real interest in the characters or what happened to them. This book gets three stars because it is a well-written piece of literature, with a plot that works, but it's nothing more than that. In terms of pacing and story structure, I also found it to be quite a bit off.Three major problems kept me from enjoying this book, and I'll start with the world. What Kay did with this book was to take Medieval Spain, with its well-known conflict between Christians, Muslim, and Jews, and change the names. Let me be clear: this is not Medieval Spain, it is not alternte history. This is a fantasy world with two moons and different constellations that just happens to have the exact same geography as Spain. So does the rest of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Gee, that's funny. The three sects are Asharites (Muslims), Jaddites (Christians), and the Kindath (Jews). If these were three groups that Kay had invented and come up with a good reason for them to be at odds, then it would be interesting. Unfortunately, he chose to have many of the same practices, beliefs, and prejudices that the real-world groups have. The biggest one is the blood libel, used against the Kindath.My question is that if the correspondence was going to be so strong, why didn't he just write about actual Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain? I kept reading this thinking it was a very very very very thinly veiled, very nineties attack on Christians and their history (with enough attacks on Jews and Muslims to make it fair). This sort of thing was very popular in the eighties and nineties (as in [b:The Mists of Avalon 40605251 The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1) Marion Zimmer Bradley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1529610467l/40605251.SX50.jpg 806813]), and Kay's choices don't make it hard to see it this way. As it was, it was either a not-very-creative fantasy world, or a bad historical fiction.Kay's characters also kept me from really getting into this book. There's a doctor, a few kings, and some concubines and courtesans, and a few young men learning their way in the world. And of course the poet. They'd be interesting if they didn't insist on acting in such implausible ways. The main point of implausibility is their sexual choices: the characters in this book just can't stop doinking. It's insane. There is a stretch of at least 60 pages in the mass-market paperback that is all people doing it. There's a lot of comparing breasts to pears and melons... . Much of the sex is completely inconsequential, which is really hard to believe in a population without established methods of birth control (yes, medieval birth control existed but it's never mentioned in this book). Not only is much of it meaningless to the plot, it's meaningless to the characters. I just don't believe in meaningless sex, I guess, but if it's meaningless pleasure that has no effect on the plot, why is it in the book?I just don't buy that a physician, a woman in her late twenties, who is portrayed as overly sensible would “take a young man into her bed” for some meaningless pleasure without thinking there would be any consequences in terms of their relationship. I'm having a hard time imagining this character doing that. And then he's just got a crush on her, from a distance...still? After having sex with her? He still just watches her from afar, thinking he can't have her...after he “had” her? What the...? I just don't get it. So sex is just meaningless to this women to the point where she'd have sex with a nineteen year-old boy just because she felt like it one night and then the rest of the book she's...what the hell, nevermind. I think I've made my point. Even if you do believe people can have sex without emotional or other consequences, you still have to question what's going on with this character. I'm just not buying it.The last thing I found annoying was the structure: constant back and forth, summary and rehash, and huge events just glossed over. That made it hard to follow.The overall effect of all this was that I didn't look forward to reading this book. The test of a four or five star book is that I think about the characters when I'm not reading the book. These characters were so implausible that I just didn't think about them. When I picked up the book, I was just thinking “what implausible thing are they going to do in the next chapter?” There were a few tense situations, and a few that I really enjoyed, but the whole book was not engaging.P.S.: Tigana was a much better book; more imaginative, better characters, actually compelling, but I still didn't think it was that great. I mean, what were those people doing it in the closet for? See, same problem.

The ending is incredible

3.75 out of 5 stars

As I continue to work my way through Guy Gavriel Kay's work, I've arrived at The Lions of Al-Rassan, a book that many consider to be Kay's best work. It certainly has the swiftest pacing of any of his books (that I've read so far). He deftly moves his characters around the map, while their allegiances shift and swirl and their cultures clash. It was a bit dizzying trying to piece together who was siding with whom at one point or another and sometimes the characters motivations didn't always make sense to me. This made it difficult for me to connect with the main players. In the end, it was a solid story about complex heroes and compelling cultures. It was not my favorite GGK book, but I had a good time with it.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

Not as bad as my rating, i just couldn't grasp the story and i never learned to love nor hate the characters. I listned to the audiobook, perhaps that was part of the problem, maybe to complex and versatile story to listen to when comuting?

4/10

This was luxuriously and beautifully written. I've never read anything by GGK before, but I can absolutely see why he has the reputation that he has, based on this. Each sentence, each paragraph was an absolute treat.

Beyond the writing style, the story itself was absolutely worth reading. Three different religious groups struggling to coexist in an approximation of Spain during the time of Moorish occupation, and the novel follows the political and social conflicts that that kind of coexistence would imply. The characters that we follow come from a wide variety of social positions within that society, and seeing them interact was fascinating and informative. I loved every page of this book.

I didn't like this one as much as A Song for Arbonne. There were too many kings and it was hard to keep them straight.

Excellent book. A beautiful re-imagining of the Reconquista and El Cid. I particularly enjoyed the conflicts of interests for the main characters: all quite humane and willing to see other people as people, despite their religion, yet part of the larger tapestry of conflicting loyalties. Who are you loyal, in the end? Interesting, beautiful book. The only sad thing about this book – it was the last unread Kay book for me. No more unread Kays left for me, until he writes something new.

I liked this book. Although it went on a bit long and there were too many twists and misdirections at the end tying up the lose ends.

I almost feel bad that I didn't like this book much. I actually liked the story and the characters, but the writing style prevented me from becoming attached.
GRRM skips between a lot of people in his books, but each segment gives you enough time and emotion to be attached to the character. With this book I would find myself just starting to get to know a character and “bam” it shifted to somewhere else, which prevented me from forming a strong attachment with anyone. This was made a little worse by the fact that it took me a couple paragraph sometimes to realize that I was reading about a character because they were being called by a different name.
I felt like I was forcing myself to read through the book. It would have been better even if I disliked the characters, but I just didn't feel anything about them...

Summary: I would recommend giving it a shot. If the writing style appeals to you it is a good story, if not move on.

First of all, allow me to give Kiala her due for picking this book for Vaginal Fantasy. After last month's pick, we were sorely due for something of substance. I will also remind everyone that last month's pick was MY doing, so I'm duly chastened.

Anyhow. The Lions of Al-Rassan is an absolutely mesmerizing book. As I understand it (and please correct me in the comments if I am incorrect) it's a fantastical alt-history of the Iberian Peninsula. With one small exception, I would pause to call it fantasy at all.

In fact, the only issue I had with the book was my own lack of historical knowledge. I was constantly trying to make parallels between the nations, religions and peoples of the book with our own world history, and that was perhaps a little distracting.

But, to the story. I don't want to spoil, and I don't really want to get into the intricacies of the tale (there are many). This book does many things, and it does them all well. It's an action tale, a love story, a cautionary tale that seems to hit on modern fears and insecurities, and more. The web of characters seems to constantly expand, and yet I never felt as though I was receiving unnecessary information.

The people in this book are complex, and you'll come to care deeply about many of them. They are all flawed, though some more than others. There is romance, and it is very complicated. Life is complicated. War is horrible. Good people can do terrible things. You'll forgive some of it, but not all.

This is the third time I've read this book and I love it just as much. It says something about a book's power when you cry through the entire last chapter and then are still crying as you finish the epilogue.

Frequently amazing, powerfully written, and constrained from brilliance.

This is a fictional work with a (very small) amount of magic, and is not formally set on Earth, but it is essentially the Spanish reconquista recast. The cast is large, but it is centrally concerned with two strong – but not ruling – figures from the Asharite and Jaddite faiths and civilizations, their shifting loyalties, the rulers they serve, their friendships. Both of those religions, and a third, the Kindath, are pretty clearly representative of real-world religions.

I enjoyed the book very much and I loved most of the characters, but it suffers from some common writing complaints, mostly to do with the plot being too “pat.” The warriors are too good; some of the characters too noble; certain death too frequently averted; everything works out a little too perfectly most of the time. It feels like an airbrushed history.

As a top-flight, grade-A novel, it leaves a bit too much to be desired. As a B-rate one, it blows most of the competition out of the water.