It took me a long time to get back to this book, which doesn't entirely surprise me given the themes involved.
Kay's sixth novel, and his first that is significantly less high fiction and more historical fiction with the serial numbers filed off, is set in a world that draws heavily on the Iberian Peninsula in the time of El Cid and the reconquista. He is deeply interested in conflicts of faith and how people of different faiths and cultures either manage to bridge those divides or fail, and the consequences of those relationships can have for both individual lives and nation states and society as a whole.
The analogues for Christianity, Islam and Judaism are extremely clearly drawn, and there's a love triangle in the middle of this novel that in another author's hands could be extremely trite and obvious. But it's so beautifully developed and drawn out, and the tragedy of the end is the utter impossibility of a future that doesn't destroy something that will be mourned. I couldn't quite get through this book again in the fall of 2023, but I finally did this winter, and rediscovered all over again that I cannot read this book without crying, even 25 years after the first time I read it.
Grade: A
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