Review:
Sailing to Sarantium, by Guy Gavriel Kay
| Series: |
Sarantine Mosaic #1 |
| Publisher: |
HarperPrism |
| Copyright: |
1998 |
| Printing: |
January 2000 |
| ISBN: |
0-06-105990-0 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
533 |
Crispin is a well-respected mosaicist, a Rhodian, heir to a long tradition
of artistic accomplishment. Rhodias is largely in ruins, and the kings
that fight over its land are far removed from the emperors of Rhodias at
its height, but there's still demand for skilled craftsmanship. Crispin
has a partner, assistants, and the opportunity to do at least adequate
work. It's not a bad life, or at least wasn't before plague took his wife
and daughters while he watched, helpless. Now, he's closed off, angry,
and consumed by fatalism and futility.
His partner, Martinian, could never say why, when the imperious and
obnoxious courier came from the far-off and half-legendary of Sarantium to
summon him to assist with the rebuilding of the Sanctuary of Jad, he
pretended not to be himself and pointed the courier at Crispin instead.
Nor was Crispin entirely sure why he played along, although the courier
was so arrogant and officious that he invited such treatment. He had no
intention of going in Martinian's place and name until his friends
intervened, united in their conviction that he needed something to focus
on and a reason to live.
But nothing about Sarantium is simple. Even before Crispin leaves, the
local queen, precariously balancing between warring factions, reveals her
own reason to send Crispin to the capital of the far-off empire: using him
as a desperate messenger to propose an alliance through marriage. And
when he finally arrives, after unexpected perils on the road, he tumbles
immediately into the deep complexities of the Sarantine court and its
remarkable rulers.
Most of Guy Gavriel Kay's work is historical fiction with the serial
numbers partly filed off and some magic added. The degree to which the
serial numbers are removed varies by work; here, the history is obvious.
Sarantium is Byzantium, fallen Rhodias is Rome, and the emperor Valerius
and his former dancer empress Alixana are clearly Justinian and Theodora.
Knowing that will provide a lot of context, but can also be distracting,
since the temptation to scramble for Wikipedia and line things up with
real history is strong. I read this book the first time without knowing
the history and this second time knowing it. I think I enjoyed it a bit
more on its own terms, instead of as a reflection and reinterpretation.
Either way, though, it's one of Kay's best novels, which is saying quite a
bit.
Sailing to Sarantium has two very different parts: Crispin's
journey to Sarantium, and then what happens when he arrives. The first is
a fairly linear travel narrative mixed with old religion, magic, and an
experience in the woods that's a little disconnected from the rest of the
story. The second is the fast-entangling politics and factionalism of the
city itself, which wastes no time pulling Crispin into meetings with the
most influential people at court.
In my memory, I liked the Sarantium narrative the best, and found the
travel story less significant. Re-reading, I'm not sure I agree with my
earlier self. Kay does write some of the best conversations in fiction;
if you want to see careful verbal maneuvering or gut reactions with
wide-ranging consequences, I can't think of any author who shows both the
words and the nuances as well as Kay. He makes the court maneuvering feel
truly epic. Watching Crispin's blunt competence cut through the Sarantine
court, and seeing him stay focused on his life work despite all those
distractions, is a truly rewarding experience. But that second part of
the book also has some structural problems, and a few characterization
problems.
The structural problem is that Kay wants to tell the same story from
multiple angles, viewpoints, and timelines to show the reader every
implication of the hornet's nest that Crispin kicks over, since quite a
lot happens in the course of one day and night. This mostly works, but it
is so laden with flashbacks, foreshadowing, and rewinds that I started
losing track of the time relationship between the scenes. Kay is a very
skilled author, so he avoids confusing the reader entirely, but I think he
still tried too complex of a temporal structure here.
The characterization problem is that I previously wasn't paying as close
of attention to Kay's portrayal of women and of male sexual reactions to
women. It didn't bother me before; this time, it started getting on my
nerves. Yes, this is historical fiction (although limitations on roles
for women in history is rather overstated in fiction), and to give Kay
credit it does feature a very strong female character in Alixana. But the
male protector and female seducer dynamic is very strong, and all the
women in this book seem to get shoehorned into it. And perhaps I'm
missing some weakness that other men have, but I have never had the sort
of overwhelming, thought-destroying reaction to the presence of a
seductive woman as Kay's men seem to routinely have in this book. To give
Crispin credit, he maneuvers his way through those conversations without
doing anything stupid. (Kay's characters very rarely do stupid things,
which is refreshing.) But the effort required started undermining my
suspension of disbelief. Even making allowances for a culture that might
consider a woman with her hair down the equivalent of an entirely nude
woman, I simply don't believe that a man who had been married with two
daughters, had a long career, and had the life experience Crispin had
would have that much difficulty with an aggressively seductive woman that
he already doesn't trust.
As a result, as much as I love Kay's political conversational fencing, I
enjoyed the travel portion of the book more on this re-read. Crispin is a
type of character Kay writes extremely well: an honest, honorable man
trying to navigate unfamiliar waters without a lot of context, but with a
firm sense of internal morality, a lot of natural intelligence, and a true
passion for something. At one point in this book, another character
decides to walk away from his current job and follow Crispin wherever he
goes. Kay makes you believe that and want to do it yourself. It's a very
rewarding experience as a reader to watch a character you can trust find
careful, courageous, and tricky solutions to complicated problems.
But I think the best part of this book is Kay's ability to put Crispin's
art, the creation of mosaics, on the page in a way that lets the reader
viscerally appreciate it. Crispin is passionate about mosaics, about how
to make them and how to think about them, and the passion is contagious
and forms the heart and soul of this novel. Kay manages to make mosaics
overshadow some of the most dramatic politics in history, which says quite
a lot. There is almost nothing I love more than reading about talented,
passionate people doing things they are extremely good at. I know nothing
about mosaic that I haven't read in this book and its sequel, so I have no
basis from which to judge the accuracy of Kay's portrayal, but he made me
feel like I could appreciate some of the nuance, skill, and design
constraints of the art form. It's a wonderful reading experience.
Sailing to Sarantium is best thought of half of a long book that
was divided for publication reasons, so don't expect much of an ending
here. It can only be read in combination with
Lord of Emperors,
which you'll want to have on hand when you finish this book so that you
can continue the story.
Followed by
Lord of Emperors.
Rating: 9 out of 10
I have been working quite hard, along with my friend and colleague
Richard Maw, on getting Gitano ready for a release suitable for
inclusion into Debian Stretch.
You can see how we're doing on the various Trello boards for:
As Richard and I work toward a version of Gitano we're prepared to support
long-term in Debian we are making many changes to make our lives easier. For
those of you who have been using Gitano over the past few years, you'll need to
pay attention to some postings which will be coming soon about how to make the
changes you need so as to not explode horribly when you upgrade to the version
we're releasing soon. For those of you who are not yet using Gitano but feel
like you might want to; I'll also be producing some postings about getting
started with the packages. And for those happily running current HEAD of
Gitano already, I'll be posting about some of the new features over the next
little while in case you're not aware of them.
This would be a longish post. I had bought a Samsung Galaxy J-5/500 just a few days before Debconf16 which I had written about a bit 
As I was in a moving vehicle, it isn t easy to know if the imagery is at fault or was it app. , sensor of my mobile ?
Did see 
The part about it being ugly, I dunno but have seen most java apps are a bit ugly. It is a bit generalist I know but that has been my experience with whatever little java apps. I have used.
I don t know what the reasons for that are, maybe because java is known/rumoured to use lot of memory which seems true in my case as well OR it doesn t have toolkits like gtk3+ or qt quick, although have to say that the looks have improved from before when I used it last some years ago
I sent this email to debian-private a few days ago, on the 10th anniversary of my Debian account creation:
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (
At the end of August 2012, I announced my
Previously: 
Next week our friends at 
For the non-Debian people among my readers: The following post presents bits of the decision-taking process in the Debian project. You might find it interesting, or terribly dull and boring :-) Proceed at your own risk.
My reason for posting this entry is to get more people to read the accompanying options for my proposed General Resolution (GR), and have as full a ballot as possible.
Almost three weeks ago, I sent 
Like 
An interesting side problem in