What would you do if you were offered the opportunity to go to another world for a short time? Chances are you would think the person telling you this was a complete nutcase, and with good reason. But what if it was true?

This is the opportunity that is presented to five young people in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree, which is the first of a trilogy called The Fionavar Tapestry. Obviously they take the offer, or there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell, but I am getting ahead of myself.


Plot Summary

This novel starts out with a brief introduction to the five characters: Kimberly Ford, Kevin Laine, Jennifer Lowell, Dave Martyniuk, and Paul Schafer. The setting is the university of Toronto at the beginning of May, and these five people are attending the “Second International Celtic Conference”, and the organizers of the event have managed to convince a particular person to give a speech at the conference. This man is the so-called “reclusive genius”, Lorenzo Marcus.

Without giving away too much of the plot, I can say that Lorenzo Marcus is really a mage, Loren Silvercloak, from another world, Fionavar. He and a friend of his, a Dwarf, Matt Sören, approach the five friends after the speech and ask them to go back to Fionavar with them. Loren and Matt tell them that in their land, it is the 50th anniversary of their High King’s reign, and during the celebration, they wish to present him with five strangers from another world. It would only be for two weeks, and Loren promised to have the five back on earth just a few hours after their departure. He manages to convince them he is telling the truth by showing them an image of the castle where the king lives. Surprisingly, that is enough to convince Kim, Paul, Jennifer, Dave and Kevin that he is telling the truth and they agree to meet Loren and Matt the next night to leave their world and enter the world of Fionavar.

Now, I found this a bit strange. It would take a lot more than a single image of a castle to convince me to put my trust in two strangers who say they are from another world. But this is what the five characters do, and with very few questions, arrive the next evening, ready to go.

Loren has them form a circle, everyone holding hands, with Kim in the middle. Loren begins to chant, and the magic begins to take effect, but Dave becomes nervous (finally!), and says “Hey! I need a promise I’ll be back!”. When he is ignored, he pulls his hands from the people beside him (Jennifer and Matt). But it is too late to turn back, and Kim knows this and grabs Dave’s hand at the last moment. This action saves Dave from being lost between the worlds, but it also has him arrive in a different place in Fionavar than the others. His friends arrive in a room in a castle, only to discover that Dave hadn’t arrived with them.

As they would soon find out, though, this was among the least of their worries. Fionavar, for all its promised glory, is a world in trouble, and the five characters soon become tightly woven into it’s events.


Miscellaneous Musings

There is so much story to tell that I can’t possibly even begin. For such a short book, there is a lot that is told. It is quite an easy read after reading so many books that try to spend more time describing the backgrounds than focusing on the story at hand. The reader learns the history of Fionavar as it is told to the characters. And this is Guy Gavriel Kay’s strong point; he has created a land with histories almost as rich as those Tolkien created with Middle-Earth. Fionavar actually feels like it is a real world, and Kay gives the detail right down to children’s games and superstitions. There are other authors who have accomplished this, but I have yet to find another who can keep it as short and sweet as Kay does. Instead of becoming bored with sub plots that most authors succumb to, I found myself unable to put this book down, because it stuck to the point.

The Summer Tree was published in 1984, so it was written and published long before many of the fantasy novels most people read today. By this point there had been other major fantasy series already in publication (Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Brooks’ Shannara series come to mind), but this is still fantasy in its infancy, and this is really good. Even though it does have it’s similarities to other fantasy novels before it’s time, it is refreshing because the author hadn’t been subconsciously drawing from many other novels he had previously read.
He does seem to be highly influenced by mythology, particularly Greek mythology in that there are Gods and Godesses, and many of the Gods have fathered children with humans. These half-God, half-human children are called the andain, and these sorts of characters are also very popular in Greek mythology. It is interesting how Kay can take old ideas and somehow make them seem new.

Kay even made up some of his own races. The lios alfar are described in such a way to make me think of them as a mixture of Tolkien’s elves, and Tad William’s Sithi (from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn). I think Williams may have been influenced by this trilogy, since The Fionavar Tapestry often reminds me of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, which was published four years later, in 1988.

The Summer Tree is just the beginning of a trilogy, and it just seems to be setting the stage for larger things to come.


Who Is This Book Appropriate For?

I am not sure how many die-hard fantasy fans would feel about this book. Many fantasy readers enjoy long, involved stories like those such as Robert Jordans Wheel of Time series. Compared to that, The Summer Tree is short and fast paced. It also seems like it would be a book that would be enjoyed more by younger readers, or newcomers to the fantasy genre. But when I think about the success of Harry Potter among adults, I also feel that this book could also be enjoyed by an older audience, but perhaps not so much those who are set on reading long, involved epics. Having said that, this is not a book for children. It contains many adult themes, including sexuality (though nothing explicit), as well as a lot of potentially frightening scenes involving different sorts of monsters. I wouldn’t really suggest this book to anyone younger than 13, unless they were very mature for their age.


Inconsistencies, and Potential Problems

There are certain things that came to mind while reading this book, things that just didn’t really make sense, but were not explained. For example, why is it that the people of Fionavar just so happen to speak English? They also use the same names for many animals that are also present on earth, such as hawks, horses, and owls, but they also have their own names for many animals as well.

More description of certain creatures would have been welcome. The svart alfar certainly seem like frightening creatures, but the reader is given few descriptions of them. I think this may have been intentional, to allow the reader to create their own image of these beasts.


Afterthoughts

I certainly don’t think I’ve done this book justice in this review. I cannot possibly convey all the details of this book in this short space. In my plot summary, I just described the first two or three chapters, without really going into the fine detail of what really happens in Fionavar.

I feel that Guy Gavriel Kay is a highly underrated author. When most people think of fantasy authors, they think of Tolkien, Jordan, Eddings, Williams, Feist, and a few more. Rarely is Kay’s name among those listed, yet I feel he deserves some more recognition for what he has created. I feel he is just as good, or even better than some other well-known authors. He seems to understand that people want to read something substantial, not just filler.

~~~Thanks For Reading!~~~





Recommended: Yes