The Last Light Of The Sun, by Guy Gavriel Kay

By the time one has read five novels by the same author, one can understand pretty easily if one is going to like them or not, considering that authors tend to work with the same sorts of patterns and have a certain emotional range in their works.  Although this book is certainly different in what it focuses on compared to the other novels by the author I have read, it has a great deal of similarity with most of the novels and exists in the same shared universe and thus has the virtues and flaws that Kay’s other novels do, more virtues than flaws to be sure, but some of both it must be admitted.  A great deal of this work depends for its emotional resonance on the relationship between fathers and sons, and that is a subject that I can deeply relate to in terms of my own life, and it is fascinating to see the two main father and son relationships that we see in this book, between a Viking hero turned murderer and exile on the one hand and his son, a servant who stole a horse and escaped death to seek his own way as a mercenary, as well as a lightly fictionalized King Alfred and his heir, burdened by having such a saintly father.

This particular book of about 500 pages takes place during the reign of King Alfred when the building of fortified cities in Wessex and the establishment of the settlement of Vikings in the Danelaw made England a less attractive target for Viking raids.  Throughout the course of this novel we see how Alfred deals with the Welsh kingdoms to his west, vikings who continue to attempt to raid and cause trouble, including by killing his officials, and also his own family drama and his struggle with his faith.  Meanwhile, the viking leaders themselves are seeking to consolidate their power and facing the pull of religious reform even as some people long for the social mobility of the good old days.  One sees a consistent pattern of people trying to recover from earlier mistakes and struggle over faith and how to live life in the face of a numinous world and also deal with how to achieve their goals and repair relationships that have been broken through error and folly.  It is a novel with a high degree of heaviness in how it portrays its characters and their struggles.

While the author’s emotional power and his ability to create an epic novel in terms of its scope while remaining deeply personal in its discussion of relationships and little incidents of great power is impressive, this book is by no means perfect.  One of the consistent aspects of the author’s writings that I find irritating and problematic even is the way that the author handles the matter of religion.  Here, as is common in the author’s writings, there is a great deal of unhealthy interested shown by the author and by some of the characters into mystical aspects of Celtic and other heathen religions, and the author himself seeks to show a common humanity without showing a coherent monotheistic faith to provide an overarching and universal morality.  This incoherence between the author’s desire to defend humanity on universalist grounds and his total inability to reflect a universal rule in heaven that could lead to universal peace and respect on earth is a consistent tonal misfire that one reads over and over again in the author’s novels.  The author clearly has a high degree of fondness for polytheism and a corresponding lack of ability to really understand Christianity for what it is, which is troublesome when he tries to write about Christianity so often and misunderstands it so deliberately and so lamentably.