A Brightness Long Ago is by far and away the queerest of Guy Gavriel Kay’s books. I’m going to say that right off because it was sudden and clear in its approach on that front — delightfully so, for someone who often feels like one must choose between well-written, descriptive fiction that is grossly heteronormative on the one hand, and very queer-friendly but extremely shallowly written fiction on the other hand. With what I’m sure are some unpleasant exceptions I’m forgetting (probably something in the early works connoting, on the part of one culture observing another, the “effeminate” nature of Culture 2’s men with sinister motives or something), it isn’t as though GGK’s fiction makes a habit of frowning on the [admittedly, rarely non-straight] sexual preferences of its characters. The most meaningful relationships and the characters having those relationships, though, tend to be straight.  So to see, very early on, such a bisexual statement made, and then made again, and then brought up repeatedly not as the centerpiece of the novel but as an accepted undercurrent, a fact no less real than the love that has run through the characters in his other books…it was, frankly, startling and wonderful to see, as a bisexual woman well-used to seeing positive portrayals of straight and gay characters, but less so bi ones. That wasn’t why I picked up this book — at all — but it was a very much appreciated surprise. I feel so seen, I thought, not long into the novel at all — and I’m not generally someone who feels the need to feel seen. But there it was anyway.

The book is smaller, tighter, than GGK’s last, Children of Earth and Sky, but perhaps feels contained in a way that book did not. I wanted more, after that book — a whole book’s worth more. “What about X, and Y, and Z? What happens to them later on?” I wondered. Here, perhaps because of the frame more than anything else, what we were allowed to see felt like enough.

The frame may not appeal to everyone, I grant you. I embrace it because it is composed largely of direct address statements to the reader, from a character far advanced in age looking back on the events of the story. Because I trust this author more than most, and cling to these direct address statements where they appear, much more rarely, in his other books, I was more than willing to accept a frame that let them come at me en masse. If you don’t implicitly trust the author, such a frame may not be your cup of tea.

If that isn’t your thing, I understand. If you haven’t come to love and so very much feel spoken for by other characters in the past…Ammar and Rodrigo, Crispin and Alixana…you may have little interest in being told, point-blank, things like this. It may chafe. Maybe it would have chafed when I was younger, when people are more in the habit of telling you how things are, I don’t know. But there is precious little advice — valuable advice, anyway — on offer as one ages, much less from a source one trusts, and I soak up any of it offered in GGK’s fiction like a sponge. Yes, even when the text itself acknowledges its own fallibility:

I don’t mind that, precisely because I’ve read every other book he’s written, and rightly or wrongly am 100% interested in any advice he has to offer. When you can create characters like that and be as gentle with them, whether or not they deserve it (especially if they do not!), as he is…I will listen to what you have to say. I will be very interested in what you have to say.

The book just came out, so I don’t want to go into too much detail on the plot. I’m being very careful in my quote screenshots. But I will say that I appreciate — in a way that is maybe too quickly maligned in, say, pop culture — the degrees of loss we are shown, and how we must also see the afterward. We don’t just sunset on loss, we are forced to watch the living-through and the attempt to, if not make it fade, at least make it manageable. It could easily grow messy, this effort, leading to a book feeling unfinished, clunky, or too long — depending on how much of the afterward we are given. But again, because of the frame, the weight of it seems right. I want to reread Children of Earth and Sky now, both because the worlds of the two books are closely intertwined and because I am curious if it was my compromised state of mind at the time that book came out that made me desire the kind of closure Brightness gives. (The day after it released, I had to move my mother into an Alzheimer’s care facility, so forgive me if I do not entirely trust my readerly mind at the time. It was fractured into a dozen painful pieces — of course I longed for the kind of frame we see in Brightness, that solidity, that sense of someone knowing something that could ease burdens.)

The bad news is that now the book is over. I had waited for this for months and now…nothing. I want to reread so many of the others, not just Children but also the entirety of the Sarantine Mosaic…I want to see if there were other sexualities, other kind moments I missed, or just forgot about. But I don’t want to rush that rereading, either, because, like tapping a keg, that lowers the amount of a very good vintage I have left. And I have to let it sit awhile, to age between rereadings.

So I frittered away time at Barnes and Noble, filtering through fantasy first by women authors (after the horror of the “women here just happen to walk around topless and in loincloths” dinosaur knight book, I’m still tapped out on men I don’t know writing suddenly much-lauded fantasy) and then by whether or not they have a map in the front (while in no way guarantors of depth, maps at least suggest the one-time dream of building worlds with enough substance to want to sort them out geographically on a page), and still I ended up abandoning my choices and fleeing to historical fiction, to the same Italian Renaissance period discussed in Brightness, in fact. Historical fiction writers tend to pack their books with detail, not to create a world from scratch but to prove they did their research, and they tend not to disappoint in the way the Shades of Magic series, for example, did — all people and no world; all heavy breathing and no way to know where this breathing was occurring; what the world around it was like. It is why I’m torn when I push GGK on people; I want them to know there is history that weights the texts, gives them substance — but also that he feels free to invest meaning and earnestness into characters whose real-life analogues historians and academics more broadly base careers off of dissecting, analyzing, in ways that do little to move the mind and less the heart.

It still feels, moving on, like I am bound to be let down, but I suppose that is to be expected when you’ve just finished a book by your favorite author.