Review of All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

Several years ago I told myself I'm done with Guy Gavriel Kay. I'd read the best of his ouevre and the most mundane. And he wasn't showing any signs of getting out of the soft romance groove he seemed to have gotten himself into. But when he's good, he's great, and I always at least checked out a few sample chapters of his latest releases just to make sure I wasn't missing anything. With All the Seas of the World (2022) I just kept reading, until... the swarm of butterflies.

The reason I kept reading Seas is the patiently doled out opening scene. Paid to kill a caliph, a group of three assassins arrive on foreign shores with their mission before them. Disguised with a crafty plan, they implement a ruse that grants them audience with the caliph, there to put their terrible plan into action. But things don't always go according to plan. Decisions in the moment sway things, and from their decisions the butterfly effect of consequences spills across the world.

And there ended my interest. Beyond this opening scene, Kay slowly slips back into his soft romance groove. Seemingly every other page he laments the unpredictability of the butterfly effect. And who were they to know, that the fateful decision made by the Count that night would lead in so many years to such terrible moments that history has left us with. I wrote that line, but it was easy based on how many similar examples exist in the text. The reader is swarmed. A hundred times they will encounter such lofty artificiality. To be fair, Kay has often used the technique as a means to invoking “epicness”, and it works. But only in moderation. In Seas of the World, the reader is drowned (sorry).

The other problem with the butterfly-effect motif is that the book is quasi-historical fantasy. In other words, rather than unpredictable things happening in the narrative's present, unpredictable things are happening in historical hindsight. This is not inherently unpredictable. History, in theory, knows all. Rather than watching how one billiards ball caroms off a cushion into another, the reader is vicariously viewing the story through the novel's history—like listening to a bard telling a tale of the long ago past. There are no surprises for the bard. He knows how things turn out. And while the reader doesn't, that tone of knowing seeps heavily through; it will not be a surprise for the bard. And so while not entirely devoid of fate and fatalism, the novel's blade is dulled by Kay's choice of narrative perspective, which in turn makes the frequent reference to How could she know that the way the cards fell that night would effect so many of her family in years to come... so often pretentious.

I could not finish All the Seas of the World. While the book's opening scene generated a huge amount of interest, the constant washing of pretentious lamentations against the shore wore down said interest. Yeah, yeah, life is unpredictable, I get it. Any other profundities for me today? I still hold out hope Kay can produce another great novel. If you can get through the trees to the forest, there is a decent story here. Or maybe I need to go back and reevaluate his earlier novels?