Sailing to Sarantium

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The Barnes & Noble Review

Art for Fantasy's Sake

Guy Gavriel Kay's career in fantasy began with his editorial contributions to J.R.R. Tolkien's posthumous epic, The Silmarillion. Since then, he has established himself as a remarkable and original fantasist in his own right, having published more than half a dozen large, ambitious novels in the last 15 years. His latest, Sailing to Sarantium, is the first in a projected two-volume sequence called the Sarantine Mosaic, an intricate, richly imagined work that reinforces Kay's position as one of the finest contemporary practitioners of classical high fantasy.

In the manner of his previous two novels, A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of AL-Rassad, Kay has once again used an actual historical setting — the early Byzantine Empire under Justinian I — as the basis for his fiction. In his new novel, Byzantium is transformed into Sarantium, and Justinian is reimagined as Valerius II, ruler of a beleaguered empire surrounded on all sides by pagan and barbarian hordes, and threatened from within by a complex series of political divisions, religious controversies, and palace intrigues. Valerius — a shrewd, resourceful ruler — is driven by two equally grandiose ambitions: to restore the remote western province of Batiara to Sarantine dominion and to build a monumental new cathedral in honor of the reigning deity of Sarantium, the sun god known as Jad. These twin ambitions stand at the novel's heart, and they are the motivating forces behind all its most significant events.

As Sailing toSarantiumopens, a master mosaicist and Batiaran citizen named Caius Crispus — commonly known as Crispin — accepts an imperial invitation to travel to Sarantium to help create a mosaic for the newly constructed Jaddite cathedral. The invitation is actually intended for Crispin's partner, Martinien, who is old, settled, and unwilling to leave his home. Crispin, who has recently lost his wife and two daughters to an outbreak of plague, travels to Sarantium in Martinien's place, hoping to find, through the practice of his craft, a renewal of his lost sense of purpose. To complicate matters further, he is also charged — by Gisel, the besieged young queen of Batiara — with delivering a dangerous and desperate message intended for Valerius alone.

Crispin's journey takes him through lawless territories still dedicated to forbidden pagan practices. During the course of that journey, he rescues a young slave girl about to be sacrificed in an annual blood rite, encounters the earthly manifestation of a primordial god of the forest called a zubir, and is beaten senseless by the imperial soldiers sent to escort him to the emperor. Once he arrives in Sarantium, complications continue to accumulate.

Crispin, an outspoken, acerbic man with little left to lose, manages, in his first appearance before the emperor, to challenge a number of commonly held aesthetic assumptions, to secure the dismissal of the reigning chief mosaicist, and to alienate some significant members of the imperial court. Within days of his arrival, he becomes the target of two attempted assassinations and an equally dangerous attempted seduction. Caught in a web of conflicting agendas and incomprehensible intrigues, he must struggle to survive while simultaneously struggling to shape his vision of the mosaic he has been commissioned to create, a mosaic that, should he live to complete it, will be his own greatest legacy to the Sarantium of the future.

Kay enlivens and enriches his fictional portrait of the Byzantine world by showing us that world from the shifting perspectives of cooks, queens, slaves, sorcerers, soldiers, artisans, politicians, and charioteers. (His accounts of chariot racing in the Hippodrome are particularly vivid and well rendered.). Despite the deliberate lack of closure, Sailing to Sarantium is both absorbing and satisfying. If the second volume — which will, I hope, appear before too much time has passed — is as good as the first, then the Sarantine Mosaic could stand as a benchmark work, one that helps to raise the standards in a genre too often populated by the dull, the derivative, and the second-rate.
—Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. He is currently working on a book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub.
Barnesandnoble.com

Time Out

An enchanting, colorful fantasy adventure.

Lisa Goldstein

Compulsively readable...Once again, Guy Gavriel Kay has taken a period of history and transformed it into something magical, creating a multilayered society you can lose yourself in for days.

Toronto Star

"Sailing to Sarantium confirms, yet again, Kay's status as one of our most accomplished and engaging storytellers.

Calgary Herald

Kay's writing is of the literate, pageturning variety that is crafted with great care to weave together its underlying themes.

Evening Telegram

Sailing to Sarantium is simply one of the most beautifully written books I have read in ages. indescribably elegant, a pleasure to read.

Booklist

The characterization is up to Kay's usual high standard, and he has adapted real-world history so well for his world-building purposes that even those who know what he is borrowing from will admire it.

Star Toronto

For Kay, such familiar devices as the telepathic whisper or the lumbering monster are not intended as the main course. They're the potent spices Kay adds judiciously to heightenour appreciation [of] his tale's richer tastes and motifs. Sailing to Sarantium confirms, yet again, Kay's status as one of our most accomplished and engaging storytellers.

Winnipeg Manitoba

Sailing to Sarantium is an intricately plotted, fascinating historical novel and a moving story. Kay's distinctive prose style always flows smoothly and sometimes reaches strikingly beautiful depths.

Alberta Edmonton

For some time now, Canada's Guy Gavriel Kay has been recognized as one of the finest writers of high fantasy in the world. Now, in Sailing to Sarantium, Book I of the The Sarantine Mosaic, he has achieved one of the finest works of historical fantasy I have read in years. Kay has constructed his novel as a literary mosaic of great intricacy and delicacy.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Heavy of character and light of plot, Kay's (The Lions of Al Rassan) new series opens with the heady scents of sex, horseflesh and power. In the Holy City of Sarantium, the wily, murderous new emperor, Valerius II, stiffs his soldiers of their pay in order to build a fabulous monument to immortalize his reign. To adorn his temple, he summons a renowned elder mosaicist, who entreats his brilliant, younger partner, Caius Crispus of Varena, to make the journey to Sarantium in his stead. Crispus, who lost his zest for life after his beloved wife and daughters died of the plague, makes the journey under protest. His besieged country's young queen forces him to carry a dangerous, private message to the emperor, the contents of which could cost him his life. En route to Sarantium, Crispus becomes involved with mystically souled mechanical birds created by the magician Zoticus; encounters an awe-inspiring pagan god; saves the life of a beautiful, enslaved prostitute; and demonstrates that decency brings out the best in hired workers. At his destination, he learns to trust his own instincts, especially where knife-wielding assassins and powerful women who use their sexuality as a weapon are concerned. Kay is at his best when describing the intertwining of art and religion or explicating the ancient craft of mosaic work. The slow pace of the novel and the sheer volume of its characters (if ever a book cried out for a listing of dramatis personae, this is it) are dismaying, however, and don't augur well for future installments in the series. Rights: Westwood Creative Artists. (Mar.)

VOYA - Rayna Patton

Established craftsman Caius Crispin reluctantly answers an imperial summons to work on a mosaic in the new Sanctuary in Sarantium. Before he begins his journey Crispin is entrusted with a message for Emperor Valerius II by the embattled Queen of Batiara, and an aging alchemist gives him a small mechanical bird animated by a human soul. During his journey Crispin interferes with a human sacrifice, saving a young girl. Upon his arrival Crispin finds an imperial city that is colorful, bustling, and alive with intrigue and not a little crime. As on his journey, Crispin makes potential enemies in Sarantium and twice narrowly escapes death. He also makes friends, however, and his quick intelligence and evident talent engage the interest of Valerius and his brilliant and beautiful Empress. At the end of this first volume in the Sarantine Mosaic series Crispin has begun work on the mosaic, the young queen of Batiara is fleeing to Sarantium, the soul of the little bird has been freed from its metal prison (along with those of her sisters, save one), and the alchemist has voluntarily paid the penalty for the birds' imprisonment. This is a world that is not our own (it has two moons), but that has a distinct resemblance to the Roman Empire at the height of its power. A ruthless and gifted Emperor and his equally formidable wife; an outspoken craftsman with a knack for finding and escaping danger; a great empire threatened by political intrigue from within and military attack from without-these are only some of the facets of this well-crafted novel. Kay, a fantasy master revered for his Arthurian trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry (Arbor House, 1985-86), has created believable characters who comfortably inhabit his complex world. Fans of fantasy will quickly become engrossed, and will be waiting impatiently for the next volume. VOYA Codes: 4Q 2P S A/YA (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses, For the YA reader with a special interest in the subject, Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12 and adults).

BookList

The characterization is up to Kay's usual high standard, and he has adapted real-world history so well for his world-building purposes that even those who know what he is borrowing from will admire it.

The Toronto Star

For Kay, such familiar devices as the telepathic whisper or the lumbering monster are not intended as the main course. They're the potent spices Kay adds judiciously to heightenour appreciation [of] his tale's richer tastes and motifs. Sailing to Sarantium confirms, yet again, Kay's status as one of our most accomplished and engaging storytellers.

The Edmonton

For some time now, Canada's Guy Gavriel Kay has been recognized as one of the finest writers of high fantasy in the world. Now, in Sailing to Sarantium, Book I of the The Sarantine Mosaic, he has achieved one of the finest works of historical fantasy I have read in years. Kay has constructed his novel as a literary mosaic of great intricacy and delicacy

Calgary Herald

Kay's writing is of the literate, pageturning variety that is crafted with great care to weave together its underlying themes

The Evening Telegram

Sailing to Sarantium is simply one of the most beautifully written books I have read in ages. indescribably elegant, a pleasure to read.

Bill Sheehan

Art for Fantasy's Sake

Guy Gavriel Kay's career in fantasy began with his editorial contributions to J.R.R. Tolkien's posthumous epic, The Silmarillion. Since then, he has established himself as a remarkable and original fantasist in his own right, having published more than half a dozen large, ambitious novels in the last 15 years. His latest, Sailing to Sarantium, is the first in a projected two-volume sequence called the Sarantine Mosaic, an intricate, richly imagined work that reinforces Kay's position as one of the finest contemporary practitioners of classical high fantasy.

In the manner of his previous two novels, A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of AL-Rassad, Kay has once again used an actual historical setting -- the early Byzantine Empire under Justinian I -- as the basis for his fiction. In his new novel, Byzantium is transformed into Sarantium, and Justinian is reimagined as Valerius II, ruler of a beleaguered empire surrounded on all sides by pagan and barbarian hordes, and threatened from within by a complex series of political divisions, religious controversies, and palace intrigues. Valerius -- a shrewd, resourceful ruler -- is driven by two equally grandiose ambitions: to restore the remote western province of Batiara to Sarantine dominion and to build a monumental new cathedral in honor of the reigning deity of Sarantium, the sun god known as Jad. These twin ambitions stand at the novel's heart, and they are the motivating forces behind all its most significant events.

As Sailing to Sarantium opens, a master mosaicist and Batiaran citizen named Caius Crispus -- commonly known as Crispin -- accepts an imperial invitation to travel to Sarantium to help create a mosaic for the newly constructed Jaddite cathedral. The invitation is actually intended for Crispin's partner, Martinien, who is old, settled, and unwilling to leave his home. Crispin, who has recently lost his wife and two daughters to an outbreak of plague, travels to Sarantium in Martinien's place, hoping to find, through the practice of his craft, a renewal of his lost sense of purpose. To complicate matters further, he is also charged -- by Gisel, the besieged young queen of Batiara -- with delivering a dangerous and desperate message intended for Valerius alone.

Crispin's journey takes him through lawless territories still dedicated to forbidden pagan practices. During the course of that journey, he rescues a young slave girl about to be sacrificed in an annual blood rite, encounters the earthly manifestation of a primordial god of the forest called a zubir, and is beaten senseless by the imperial soldiers sent to escort him to the emperor. Once he arrives in Sarantium, complications continue to accumulate.

Crispin, an outspoken, acerbic man with little left to lose, manages, in his first appearance before the emperor, to challenge a number of commonly held aesthetic assumptions, to secure the dismissal of the reigning chief mosaicist, and to alienate some significant members of the imperial court. Within days of his arrival, he becomes the target of two attempted assassinations and an equally dangerous attempted seduction. Caught in a web of conflicting agendas and incomprehensible intrigues, he must struggle to survive while simultaneously struggling to shape his vision of the mosaic he has been commissioned to create, a mosaic that, should he live to complete it, will be his own greatest legacy to the Sarantium of the future.

Kay enlivens and enriches his fictional portrait of the Byzantine world by showing us that world from the shifting perspectives of cooks, queens, slaves, sorcerers, soldiers, artisans, politicians, and charioteers. (His accounts of chariot racing in the Hippodrome are particularly vivid and well rendered.). Despite the deliberate lack of closure, Sailing to Sarantium is both absorbing and satisfying. If the second volume -- which will, I hope, appear before too much time has passed -- is as good as the first, then the Sarantine Mosaic could stand as a benchmark work, one that helps to raise the standards in a genre too often populated by the dull, the derivative, and the second-rate.
--Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. He is currently working on a book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub.
Barnesandnoble.com