At last the trilogy is over. The more I read of this third book in The Fionavar Tapestry, the more I was reminded of The Lord of the Rings, and certainly not in a good way (I am not a fan). Obviously Kay is a fan; he helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion, after all. But I think what he wound up doing with this trilogy, his first attempt at long-form high fantasy, was take his fan status too far. So much of The Fionavar Tapesty can be paralleled directly with events in The Lord of the Rings. There is the same sense of a world obsessed with the past, there is an ancient and beautiful/powerful race journeying to a land of their own in the West (the lios alfar in Fionavar, but plain old elves in Tolkien’s world). Each includes dwarves under the mountains and riders on the plain, a king returning to reclaim his crown and a young man journeying across enemy territory to confront ultimate evil alone, a thing of power in his hands. (Not to mention dead warriors called to aid the good guys, and a trip on a ghostly ship.) And of course, just one or two of the major characters die, and only a handful of the more important secondary characters. In Fionavar, the question was never if the good guys would win, but rather how would they would win. The Darkest Road was simply the wrap up of a long and tiresome example of thinly veiled Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and I’m glad it’s done, and glad that Kay moved on to better things with Tigana.
The Darkest Road was my ninth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is In the Place of Last Things, by Michael Helm.
