Product Description

Crispin the mosaicist wants to concentrate on his art. Rustem of Kerakek, a physician, is also on his own journey of self-discovery. But no man may withdraw from society that easily, and both men soon find themselves drawn into the deadly webs of Sarantium. The sequal to "Sailing to Sarantium".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142774 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Customer Reviews

Read it if you loved Sailing to Sarantium
Despite a few niggles, this was an extremely enjoyable and satisfying conclusion to the story begun with Sailing to Sarantium.

I agree with the previous reviewer about the writing (especially the over-use of "And...", which was particularly noticeable), but a more important flaw for me was a number of events that were not 100% believable. A commander deserting his post to go on what looked like a wild-goose raised my eyebrows, then the stakes were raised with a successful plot against one who has been potrayed as the unbeatable master of intrigue - who would surely have seen it coming, and finally there's a disastrously mis-timed invasion (launched just *before* the defending army is due to sail away to a distant war of its own).

For all my criticisms, this is still a wonderful book that stands head-and-shoulders above the vast majority of fantasy writing. There are some interesting new characters, as well as a few old ones more fully fleshed out. There's another thumpingly exciting chariot race. Crispin's unfolding emotional recovery and romantic entanglements (he must have had something very special to attract so many high-born and desirable women!) also make a pleasant story: I was truly glad for him when things turned out better than he could ever have believed.

Kay close to his best. Good plot, poor prose. Buy it anyway
Guy Gavriel Kay is one of my favourite writers; he combines the character depth and plot struture of Dunnett and Renault with an extraordinary sense of place and a brilliant interweaving of history and imagination to provide the quality of writing rarely found in this, or any genre. This, the second part of the Sarantine Mosaic, opens with a fresh character (Rustem, the physician) and weaves him effortlessly into the loose threads of the preceeding book. The tone is sharper, harder and more brutal than its lyrical predecessor but it more than delivers all the early promise; characters are brought out of the shadows and built up to a fine tension so that even the killing of one of the key players (a Kay special) is gloriously done.

If I have one gripe as to the characterisation it is his constant ability to create deep, fascinating homosexual male characters while rendering all of his women uniformly straight. It would be good to break out of this sometime but some things simply won't work for a writer and maybe this is his brick wall.

On a more serious note, my one genuine problem with this book (and the reason it's four stars, not five) is the prose. There was a time when Kay was a master of flowing, precise, beautiful prose to complement the plot, place and character. Here, as with the previous book, he has fallen into the fast writer's trap of the subjectless sentence. Grounded himself in an absence of semi-colons. Become wedded to unnecessary brevity. And massively overused the conjunctions at the start of a sentence. It's a great pity and it smacks of a writer who's reached the point of invulnerability to editors, which may be reasonable - except that when you're one of the best, the internal editor should be picking up the sloppy writing. With luck, it will be cleared up in the next one. In the meantime, this is still one of the best - buy it and enjoy a weekend at home.

Belting book
The first book had a brilliant structure, with the scaffold at the start and end arranged symmetrically about the unearthly forest-god scene (bit like "A Scarlet Letter" in that respect...). This volume was a tad less 'perfect', lacking that centrepiece, but there are amazing scenes and heart-rending episodes. GGK is head-and-shoulders the most literate fantasy writer (unless you rope the immaculate John Crowley into the genre) and seems to be tragically underread. Everybody: read everything by Guy Gavriel Kay! Don't say you haven't been told.