alobear | Ysabel and Edge of Darkness reviews

I spent yesterday with my brother, watching the second half of a TV series from the mid-80s called Edge of Darkness (he came round with the first disc a couple of weeks ago, so this was the concluding visit). It was very well put together and, while not particularly jolly, it had some extrememly funny moments scattered in amongst all the doom and gloom. It had an excellent cast, but the best thing about it was the fact that it wasn't afraid to take its time and let the plot unfold bit by bit. There were several long sections where the protagonist just wandered around his house, which in most things would seem very boring and make the show really drag, but here it was all about slowly revealing details about the characters, and the pace was very effective.

Today, I spent most of the afternoon reading Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay. Back when I'd never heard of Mercedes Lackey, and was still years away from discovering the delights of Sharon Shinn, Kay was my favourite author. I remember The Fionovar Tapestry blowing me away when I first read it, and the Sarantium series being so rich in detail that I would lose myself in the narrative and forget to get off trains. I reread The Fionovar Tapestry not so long ago, and was disappointed by it - probably because it held such a deeply passionate place in my mind and I had read many other remarkable books in the interim. Still, I was excited by the prospect of a new Guy Gavriel Kay novel, and eager to read it. Unfortunately, I found it disappointingly unoriginal, and I felt that the contemporary setting (which he tried far too hard to establish at the start, with descriptions of the protagonist's iPod and painfully trendy adolescent internal dialogue) really jarred with the other-worldly aspects that quickly started to intrude. The fact that two of the characters from The Fionovar Tapestry turned up part way through and I couldn't remember their backgrounds didn't help much, either. Hey ho.