Lions of Al-Rassan is one of the best fantasy books I've ever read, and I say this even though I'm not entirely convinced it is fantasy.



Whatever its genre, it tells the tale of Moorish Spain and events leading to the Reconquista, but through the lens of the fantastical. The major powers and players are sufficiently mixed up and layered with new details to make it clear this is not earth (there are two moons in the sky!) and it's not a historical account , but things are also immediately recognizable, even as an American. Instead of Christians, Muslims and Jewish peoples, you have the Jaddites, Asharites, and the Kindath - with all the same customs, stereotypes, challenges, and desires. It's a little weird, to tell the truth, but more on that later.

Thankfully, it is much more than just a fantastical retelling of Cantar de mio Cid. At the heart of Lions of Al-Rassan are the lives and personal stories of impossibly powerful, emotional, and clever men and women. There's The Captain himself, Rodrigo Belmonte, a genius tactician and leader of the strongest band of Jaddites on the peninsula. Opposing, or allied, with him is Ammar ibn Khairan, an Asharite poet, advisor to kings, killer of kings, and lovable rogue. Finally there's the woman that stands between them, Jehane bet Ishak, a Kindath doctor whose life is defined equally by love, war, and medicine.

These three heroes are the pillars of the book, with themselves and the people that follow and love them serving as a metaphor for the mishmash of cultures and the inevitable conflict arising on the peninsula itself.

Al-Rassan is a ticking timebomb of external pressures and irreconcilable differences, but there is a compelling argument made by its characters that it doesn't have to be. There's a dream shared by many characters that conflict is not inevitable, that it is possible to blend disparate cultures (in some cases quite literally) to create something new, better, but fragile. This struggle is the source of its many emotional highs and lows.

I don't think I've ever read a more human book, especially in the fantasy genre. Characters frequently stop and appreciate beauty, celebrate companionship, weep at tragedy, and profess respect for their friends and rivals.

The key here is that, with few exceptions, there are no evil men. There are competing and incompatible cultures, religions, and political systems, but humans are human, and their shared likenesses are as important as their differences. These are crafty and intelligent men having crafty and intelligent conversations with each other, even in conflict. You end up sympathizing with everyone, even going so far as hoping, naively, that they somehow all get what they want.

They won't, of course. One of the greatest themes running throughout the book is that these men would be great and lifelong friends if not for just one small problem - the tragedy being that these "small" problems are often the most defining parts of their lives.

It is a nearly flawless book, though there are a few problems I couldn't get past.

I've read plenty of books that straddle the line between fantasy and historical fiction, but this is the first time it's been a source of distraction. Events and characters are so close to their real world counterparts - often with comically referential names, titles, or descriptions - yet at the same time are very clearly not.

I kept wishing that the book fully committed to fantasy or history.

Take the three major religions as example. Going by their descriptions, you'd likely say they are sufficiently fantastical: the Jaddites worship the sun as god, the Kindath worship the two moons, twin sisters of the sun god, and the Asharites worship not the gods but the stars and the human prophet who preached their glory.

And yet when you read of their cultures, practices, and so on, you'll quickly find they are literally Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Kindath (Jews) are called the Wanderers, valued for their skills and trades when times are good, but immediately blamed, persecuted, segregated, expelled, and labeled as sorcerers and baby eaters when times are bad. It's not subtle!

It's also not a bad thing, necessarily, because the fantastical framing is as good of a teacher as any historical drama would be. And yet... it remains distracting, taking me away from its world and putting me back in my own.

More distracting are the names of its characters: Rodrigo "The Captain" Belmonte is of course El Cid himself, Rodrigo "The Lord" Diaz. The character of Ammar ibn Khairan is based on a man named Muhammad ibn Ammar. A major city in the book is named Silveness (Seville), ruled by the khalifate (caliphate), which eventually falls and is replaced by the Almalik (Almoravid) dynasty.

Both book and reality contain a Sancho the Fat, yet they are different people... sorta?

On more mundane annoyances, there are a number of writing 'tricks' that Guy Gavriel Kay goes back to a few too many times.

Often - too often - there will be a scene in which an important event is viewed through the perspective of one of the characters. It will then end on a cliffhanger - like a character's death, not yet named - and then the perspective shifts. Sometimes the cliffhanger is resolved, but more often than not this trick happens a 2nd or even 3rd time, or the time frame jumps suddenly and you're left to infer what happened before the book eventually just tells you.

The writing is very clearly aware that it's dangling the reveal in front of you, and it'll purposefully lead you down false conclusions to stretch out the tension even more. Once you notice the trick it's hard not to get impatient or even frustrated by it.

There are also a number of repetitive words and phrases that grate after a time - people can only talk about "dissembling" or "diverting" so many times before it becomes irksome - but they're minor.

Indeed, all of its problems and distractions are minor when compared with the work as a whole. They are primarily noted only because the rest of the work is so phenomenal that even the smallest error stands out of place.

It's a remarkable book, one that should be on the shelves of every fantasy fan, and it's made me a Guy Gavriel Kay for life. Just don't read it too close to taking a test or quiz on the history of Spain, because it will cause you to fail spectacularly. ( )

This book was quite fantastic. I would describe some of the slight issues I had with it, but in reality it compares so favorably to so many books I've liked in the past that I can't justify giving it less than a 5.

I wont write too much, since I think this review says most of it:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19603946

My answer? Rodrigo.

UPDATE: August 8, 2022

I finished a rereading of this today. I still enjoyed it (and had forgotten enough that the twists of the story were a surprise again), but perhaps not quite as much as I had the first time. I’m a bit more aware of the faults and heavy-handedness of Kay’s writing now, having read more of his books. That distracted slightly from the story, which itself is a bit less believable on a second read. But I’d still recommend this book to fans of historical fiction, who will almost definitely love it. ( )

A terrific adventure in a fantasy version of medieval Spain with lots of intrigue and violence. The main characters are brought together in a rather unlikely way, and become friends before being torn apart by the religious conflict. I didn't really buy the romance aspects, but there were a lot of terrific scenes, and I enjoyed the politics and other relationships between the characters. ( )

Beautifully done historical fantasy. Characters are heroic but not so heroic that they are completely unreal. ( )

One could be forgiven for mistaking Kay’s novels for historical fiction: they are meticulously researched, and offer the immersive believability rendered by skilled practitioners of the more traditional craft. The Lions of Al-Rassan delivers a satisfying fictionalization of the Reconquista - the difficulties with that term notwithstanding - during the period of El Cid set in a fictional Iberia of the 11th century. In a convincing portrayal, Kay restores the culture, architecture and politics of late al-Andalus, replete with characters who could have been a part. And romance, no, let’s not overlook the romance.

The novel is almost three decades old now. There were moments where I was shaken out of my reading engagement by a discovery. The intervening years have altered the experience of the book at least in a small way. Let me explain.

Why is it that Kay writes historical fantasy rather than historical fiction? The fantasy elements in his works are generally small ones, just enough to inform the reader that while the events may feel like the past of our own world, that is not actually the case. This world has two moons, not one. And a boy with some special knowledge, not particularly crucial to the plot.

Kay loves the description of his work as “history with a quarter-turn to the fantastic”. He has said he does this quarter-turn because he doesn’t like using real lives for his fiction. To The Guardian he said, “I’ve been calling it an epidemic of co-opting real lives, to do whatever we want to do with them. And as an artist, for my own process, I have a problem with this…..I’m happier not pretending I know anything about El Cid in Spain,” he says. “He’s a Spanish national hero. I’d rather invent a character inspired by him but clearly not identical to him. And then I feel liberated creatively. I steep myself in a period and then I twist it just that little bit to give myself the ethical and creative space that seems to work for me.”

Kay does his research and delivers fulfilling worldbuilding, but he is free to make things up, to get things wrong, to play with the history as he wishes. So why was I was periodically jolted from my reading? Memories of Salman Rushdie. Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa in 1989, the year after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s book is often called magical realism; apparently the realism was insufficiently magical. In the decades since the publication of The Lions of Al-Rassan and its narrative of the ending of Muslim rule in Spain, this thread of intolerance has not appreciably diminished. In numerous attentional interludes, I considered the safety of two moons and an alternate universe. What an affront to the imagination that such machinations may offer actual physical safety!

I like Kay’s work very much. This novel has a poignant beauty, as sympathetic characters committed to their loves, their people, their religions, teeter toward the inexorable end of a vanishing world.