A Brightness Long Ago Says Magic isn’t Required for Fantasy. It May Be Right.
What makes a fantasy novel a fantasy novel?
I know, and I apologize. What a stupid, pretentious question, right? We all know what makes a fantasy novel different from a work of historical fiction or science fiction or a standard coming-of-age tale/YA novel. We all read Harry Potter. It’s magic. Magic is what makes a fantasy novel truly a fantasy novel. Whether that magic is produced via wands and boarding schools like the aforementioned Harry Potter, or through color and light absorbed from the sun like the Lightbringer Series, or through the many complex rules of Brandon Sanderson’s various ‘hard-magic systems’, or through the strange mix of geothermal energy and spirituality of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, or the world itself is magic or there are magic people or magic objects or through a thousand other different variations of magic or supernaturalism finding its way into a story; magic is how fantasy distinguishes itself from other genres. Fantasy, as we understand it as a genre in 2020, requires magic.
A Brightness Long Ago, the most recent novel from acclaimed fantasy author, Guy Gavriel Kay, disagrees.
Set in an imaginary stand-in for early-Renaissance Italy named Batiara, A Brightness Long Ago follows the perspective of a young man by the name of Danio Cerra, an intelligent son of a tailor who rises far beyond his and others expectations to have his life intersect with some of the most important and most interesting people alive at the time. This cast of characters includes two rival mercenary army commanders with a deep, hateful, yet gratifyingly respectful history toward each other; an introverted and competent healer with a penchant for wandering; the hilariously spoiled son of a rich banker/new lord; and the willful, astonishing daughter of a fearful duke determined to make her own way in the world.
There are other characters, other lives, shown throughout the book as well, some undergoing massive personal changes that will greatly affect the world around them in many pages, others with tiny yet equally meaningful parts to play.
This is the real point of the book, the way everybody’s lives crisscrosses with everybody else’s, how a passing glance or a thrown away word or the simple small choice of where to stand in a room can change your entire life, can change the lives of everyone around you and maybe even the country you call home. It’s about memory and the way in which brief but important encounters can burn forever bright in our minds, no matter what has occurred since. It’s about the shapes we try to form for ourselves in the world, the lives we try to live that we think or know we need, and how the world responds and shapes us in turn. It’s a book about how the roles we play, whether official titles or something more internal, define us and limit us even if they offer real opportunity for advancement.
It is an absolutely gorgeous novel in which (to make sure I’m painting as complete a picture of it as I can) quite a bit more happens than beautiful reminiscing on big questions of life and choice and memory. Large battles and grim sieges each occur more than once. There are poisonings and assassinations and major coups, both attempted and successful. The greatest city in this entire imaginary world may fall. The fortunes of nearly every important family mentioned in the book hangs in the balance at one point or another. Duels are declared. Two intense, enthralling, and plot-relevant horse races occur; one of which may be the most engaging and genuinely moving depiction of such an event I’ve ever read (and I’m speaking as someone who read at least a dozen Black Stallion novels as a kid). A character by the name of Adria Ripoli (the ‘willful daughter’ mentioned above) may stick with you long, long after you’ve finished the novel as someone worth remembering as far as your own memory allows, even if she is fictional. This is a book with a lot to offer, is the point I’m trying to make.
What A Brightness Long Ago does not offer, not in any sense that traditional fantasy readers have come to understand it, is magic.
The world, as stated earlier, is a very clear analog for early-Renaissance Italy, probably sometime in the 1400’s if we go by real-world standards. It is an incredibly detailed and believable bit of worldbuilding, with character’s attitudes that seem exactly of that time, and even cities that are obviously supposed to invoke their real-world counterparts. There’s a Florence (Firenta in the novel), a Venice (Seressa), a Rome (Rhodias), and even what I guess is Constantinople (Sarantium). It’s all lovely and brilliantly realized but none of the land or politics involved could really be called magic. The worldbuilding extends to religion as well, with well-thought-out versions of Christianity (Jaddites), Judaism (Kindaths), and Islam (Asharites); but Guy Gavriel Kay doesn’t take the easy way out and allow those religions to be obviously true or effective just because this is nominally a fantasy novel. All those religions are shown to offer comfort, and peace, and maybe spirituality to those who seek it, but nothing obviously miraculous or magic, just as in real life.
There is exactly one (1) character in the entire book with the slightest connection to the supernatural. Her name is Jelena, the introverted healer mentioned above, and her “magic” (note the quotation marks) consists of a well-developed sense of intuition, one or two possibly helpful dreams, and single strange conversation in a graveyard about a decision she’d already kind of made herself. That’s it. That is the entire extent to which magic as most fantasy readers understands it, actually impacts a character or the story as a whole. And it barely does that, Jelena is a fantastic character, but what makes her fantastic and important to the story is her competence as a healer, her kindness and compassion, and her independence.
There’s more magic available in a Shakespeare play, or certain parts of David Foster Wallace novels (both The Pale King and Infinite Jest had ghosts of one sort or another), or certain Lauren Beukes stuff or Murakami stuff or that whole strange wasteland of Magical Realism that no one really understands.
Yet A Brightness Long Ago is a fantasy novel. It is. It is marketed as a fantasy novel, it is written by an affirmed fantasy author, it even won book of the year from fantasybookreview.co.uk. When you read it, if you are at all familiar with the feel of fantasy novels (like me), you will read it like a fantasy novel. That’s what it will feel like to you. Why is this? What makes this beautiful, moving novel a work of fantasy instead of anything else?
Fantastical events and worldbuilding have been a staple of literature for centuries. From fairy tales dating to the beginning of storytelling to the crazy epic romances of the 1600’s and 1700’s to stuff like Gulliver’s Travel’s and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein later on. But Fantasy as we understand it didn’t really happen as a genre until the publications of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; and the Lord of the Rings in the 1940’s and 1950’s. These set the standard of what the public thought of as the genre of fantasy fiction for decades. You can now argue that big series like the Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire started a movement toward change in the genre, with later books and series like the Broken Earth Trilogy mentioned above expanding the kinds of characters the genre cared about, differences in the worldbuilding and metaphors the magic represented, who decided what stories were important etc…
Acknowledging that the above is a horrendously brief and undetailed history of the genre that leaves out literally hundreds of important subgenres and writers and movements that happened and are still happening; what I believe all fantasy fiction from the forties up to now has in common are two (2) things.
The first is (obviously) magic. Supernatural events or places or people of some kind or another in a way that really affects the story. We’ve already discovered that A Brightness Long Ago is missing this, yet is still a fantasy novel. Which brings us to the second thing.
Timelessness. Or at least the feel of it in the writing. There’s a feeling when you read a truly great fantasy novel, like these exact words, this exact story, this imaginary world, have existed in the creative ether for all time, just waiting to be discovered. There’s an instinctive understanding (even if it’s false, even if it’s fiction) that these characters and the wars they fight and the decisions they make and the love they find are all just a little truer than true. That the stories they tell of ancient worlds that are literally impossible are as relevant in the Very-Online today as they would be in the fictional world you’ve joyfully tricked yourself into believing. That the lessons and themes it illustrates will resonate far beyond any one particular moment in time. That life may be complicated now but it was complicated then too, with or without magic.
This is where A Brightness Long Ago matches or even surpasses some of the best fantasy novels I’ve read. This is a story that feels, precisely because of it’s vague fantasy-worldbuilding-influenced tether to reality, something near and yet far, like it could change your life now. Just as it could have changed a readers life a hundred years ago if it had been published then, or a hundred years from now if we survive that long. The story of Adria Ripoli’s horse race echoes forever in the minds of the reader. That’s true timelessness. That’s what great fantasy can offer you. That’s what A Brightness Long Ago has in full and what makes it a true fantasy novel.
That’s also a kind of magic, I think.
If you enjoyed this article at all, please check out my New Adult Contemporary Fantasy Novel: Magic, Television, & Marijuana. Out now on Amazon.
