The Last Light of the Sun

The Last Light of the Sun

Guy Gavriel Kay

Roc: NY, 2004

4 polychromatic galaxy skulls

One of the more impressive elements of The Last Light of the Sun is that it manages to maintain multiple narrative threads, shifts in perspective, and historical motifs without spiraling out of control.  When the stories of the Anglycn, Erlings, and Cyngael (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Welsh, respectively), ranging from war, politics, love, and spiritual practices, get wrapped up, The Last Light seems to be a surprisingly short 490 pages.   

Kay is one of the more eloquent voices in contemporary fantasy.  His are not plot-driven epics between the forces of good and evil but rather character driven meditations on man’s fate in historical settings.  He writes eloquently, lets perspective shift from minor to major to minor characters with an abandon always on the verge of getting out of control.  It is a testament to his skill as a writer that the perspective never does get out of the control.  Choosing the miller’s view of a battle, rather than the king’s, prince’s, or priest’s, actually satisfies a thematic and historical subtext of the novel.  These kind of unpredictable meanderings are the literary risks that make The Last Light rewarding.  

It is also an entertaining lesson in history.  The basic plot corresponds to the reign of King Albert (849-899) and views his attempts to fend off and limit Viking raids from the perspective of 2 generations of Vikings (pre and post King Albert), the King and his friends and family.  Interwoven into this plot, and just as important, is the historical shift to Christianity.  The major Welsh character consorts with a fairy.  The “sun” in this case being Christianity and Wales the last place it reaches.  Everyone, apparently, interacts with fairies, though often in denial.  At the same time everyone is being converted to Christianity.  This is perhaps the most rigorous attempt I’ve encountered of trying to understand a pre-Christian world, where the forests really are enchanted, from a historical perspective rather than fantasy one.  It’s refreshingly lacking in melodrama.

This is “literary” fantasy—a writerly rather than readerly text.  The form of the novel performs and the reader will either interpret or get fed up.  As I mentioned, Kay writes complexly with charm.  His anxiety manifests in repetition, however, in a fear that the performance needs constant commentary.  The narrator is constantly reminding us that “small things, accidents of timing and congruence” form the structure of our lives (308).  Not just our lives, but history and novels too.  One might get a bit tired of this kind of philosophizing; one might also wonder how sentimental and Hamlet-like men and women were in late medieval period, were they really the first existentialists?  In the end though, reading The Last Light, one will be compelled to recognize beautiful and intense historical fantasy.