The start of a new regular feature, book reviews!
A roman soldier becomes the king of the eldritch city of Ys.
Poul Anderson is one of the all time great fantasy authors and it’s a shame that in the little fantasy revival his work has been mostly forgotten. He is not only a very good writer; he actually pioneered a grittier and very detailed style of fantasy that is fundamental for the evolution of the genre as a whole.
The king of Ys: Roma Mater is the first volume of the saga and is from the later period of his career, 1986.
It’s an extremely detailed and researched book. The mythic city of Ys is a real Celtic myth, we could call her the Celtic Atlantis and Anderson, with his wife Karen who get co authorship on this saga, create a very interesting historical equivalent to the fabled city. Everything is so carefully researched with the city, so carefully connected with a late Roman empire, so realistic that you could be forgiven for wanting to go in Bretagne to visit the real place.
The setting has been so carefully shaped that in the end it became the undoing of the book. Anderson became so enamored with the certainly fascinating setting that he researched and created that we spend 100 pages before getting to the actual city and countless more pages describing his inner working, his most important places and a very extensive cast that comprise the entire government body.
In the end we can partially forgive him, the government of Ys is extremely peculiar and therefore it certainly require a lot of explanation but not the less it takes too much time to get to the fun stuff.
Probably the point of most interest in this book is how unusual the story is. There are the usual tropes of the genre but the main point is the culture clash between our roman hero, a follower of Mithras, and Ys with her strange deities and her nine queen priestesses. The climax of the book is actually a religious ritual!
In the end it left me wanting for more and certainly I’ll get the remaining books of the saga.
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