“River of Stars”: Picture “Game of Thrones” in China
Guy Gavriel Kay's exquisite Asian-inspired epic fantasy offers a fresh twist on intrigue and adventure
Topics: The Listener, Audiobooks, Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Fantasy, Game of Thrones, China, Books, Entertainment News
Much as I look forward to each new episode of “Game of Thrones” and the less-frequent but even more engrossing books in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series on which the HBO show is based, epic fantasy’s Medieval settings can get old. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doublets, broadswords and castles, of course, but there’s also no reason why so many works in the genre have to adopt them, either. Even novels that deliberately try to break the conventions established by J.R.R. Tolkien and T.H. White have a hard time establishing worlds with a non-European flavor.
Or so I thought until I stumbled upon Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Under Heaven,” a bewitching tale set in the invented country of Kitai, which is closely patterned after Tang Dynasty China. It was a meeting shaped by audiobooks, since what I was looking for when I found it was a long multi-character story read by my favorite narrator, Simon Vance. Vance has taken me through a dozen books by Anthony Trollope, the entire “A Dance to the Music of Time” sequence by Anthony Powell and miscellaneous other novels by Dickens, Hilary Mantel and V.S. Naipaul. To my ear, he strikes exactly the right balance between distinct characters and the unified sensibility of a third-person omniscient narrator. When I crave the pleasure of being entirely enveloped in the imaginary world of a long novel, I want Vance to read it to me.
Kay has written other series set in European-inspired worlds (also narrated by Vance in their audiobook editions), but it was the Asian ambience of “Under Heaven” that drew me. A sequel, featuring wholly different characters and based on the Northern Song Dynasty of over 100 years later, has just been released, “River of Stars.” If “Under Heaven” took place in a semi-mythical world of spells, heroes and legends, “River of Stars” transpires in a highly sophisticated culture — the Kitai think of themselves as, above all, “civilized” — in which courtly skills and palace intrigue have taken precedence over military prowess.
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.




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