Sorcerers are able to access an internal strength that is used, primarily, for controlling the minds of others: they dominate the Palm, ruling through force and fear, dealing in death.
There are two main groups of magic users in Tigana, sorcerers and wizards. Such magic is not externalized: the text contains no talismanic objects, staffs of power, or reforged swords to function as symbolic signifiers with ‘higher powers’. The magic depicted in this book exists in direct correlation with the psychological strength of those who are able to harness it: it responds, impartially, to the will of the wielder. This is also a world, like those of Tolkien2, Eddison and Le Guin (all discernible influences on this work), in which magic functions as part of the fabric of the universe, and is accepted as a matter of course by those who live with it. All of this is reflected in a richly complex social structure which recalls that of Renaissance Italy. This group encompasses a highly developed pre-technological civilization whose inhabitants interact by sea and land: they conduct trade in cloth, wine, spices and so on using sailing ships and horse-drawn wagons their weapons are swords and arrows. The story is set in the various provinces of a land mass known as the Palm, together with its nearby islands. The secondary world of Tigana1 is a true world of High Fantasy, with its own geography, religion, politics and social systems.
Here, there are echoes and resonances as the familiar tales are woven into a self-contained fictional mythology that is an integral part of a sophisticated text which declines to offer the traditionally clear division between Good and Evil. Tigana represents a new, more subtle direction.
His earlier trilogy, the highly acclaimed Fionavar Tapestry ( The Summer Tree: The Wandering Fire: The Darkest Road) worked deliberately with myth, overtly drawing on a wide range of readily identifiable sources to produce a truly innovative re-interpretation of the archetypal battle between the forces of Light and Darkness. Guy Gavriel Kay is a writer for whom myth is of the utmost importance. First published in The Ring Bearer: Journal of the Mythopoeic Literature Society of Australia, Spring 1991, Vol 8, No.
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