2013 read #15: The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay.

The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay
309 pages
Published 1984
Read from January 27 to January 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Just the other day I was thinking how much I liked science fiction (and fantasy) from the 1980s. "Much" here is a relative term -- I haven't read a whole lot of it -- but I dig the way the mainstream SF of that decade sorted through and incorporated certain elements of experimental New Wave science fiction, reinventing the genre without going completely daffy with it. Pretty much everything I've read from that decade shares a particular flavor, as comfortable and as comforting in its own way as Pat Benatar or Jefferson Starship, pairing relatively down-to-earth, human-scale stories about "ordinary people" with bonkers backdrops and the apotheosis of pulp art covers to produce the comfort-food reading of a generation. "Post-New Wave" might be a better descriptor than "from the 1980s," as the narrative sensibilities arose during the '70s New Wave and continued well into the '90s, but the Reagan Decade definitely contributed to the style and sensibility of the era's speculative fiction. Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle (1980), Julian May's The Many-Colored Land (1981), Harry Harrison's West of Eden (1984), Greg Bear's Eon (1985), A. A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth* (1989), Gordon R. Dickson's Time Storm (1991)... I told you it wasn't a long list, but I stand by the point I'm making here, damn it, which is that 1980s spec-fic was pretty awesome, and I really should just bookmark this list for future reading.

The Summer Tree (yet another one of Jory's recommendations) is consummately '80s, right on down to the DeLorean silver shade of the cover, and the open-chested shirt and straw hat on the author's photo. It fits comfortably within my ordinary-people-in-bonkers-backdrops pigeonhole. In fact, it's a straight-up wardrobe/looking-glass fantasy, where five ordinary white collar kids get snatched up and taken to a realm of wizards and elves and dwarves and shit. In the early going all I could think of was Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, which (albeit tolerable) is not my favorite book. I'm not a huge fan of wardrobe fantasy in general. It took a while, possibly half of the way through the book, but eventually Tree surmounted its awkward beginnings and became adequately engrossing. Part of the long delay was the characters: introduced all at once, the five white collar kids didn't resolve into distinct entities until well into their Fionavar adventures. Also part of the problem was Fionavar itself. I'm pretty much over elves and Dark Ones and their ilk, and I'm completely over personified evil and baddies motivated solely by hatred of "the Light." I always love a good fantasy-world crucifixion, though, so without spoiling anything more, I can say that was when the book truly grabbed my interest.

While the Fionavar Tapestry isn't close to my favorite fantasy series (so far), I'm invested enough at this point to continue with the next two books. It's always nice to go into a fantasy series knowing it has a definite ending, and won't take eleven massive volumes to get there.


* I had no inkling of this until I wiki'd it for this entry, but The Last Legends of Earth -- long one of my favorite books -- turns out to be the last volume of a four book series, the Radix Tetrad. I'm feeling cautiously delighted by this discovery. Hopefully the first three volumes will live up to the conclusion. Unfortunately, my library doesn't have any of the preceding three books, so I'll have to see if they can request Radix, In Other Worlds, and Arc of the Dream from elsewhere.