Under Heaven (2010) by Guy Gavriel Kay

In late December 2024, Debestewife was at Barnes and Noble, asking me if I wanted anything. I haven't bought a book in around a decade, preferring to patronize libraries instead. If I was getting a book, I wanted it to be one I knew and loved and would want to represent on my shelf - which got me thinking about The Dandelion Dynasty, Ken Liu's masterpiece, and arguably my favorite read of the last half decade.

She wasn't able to find a good set at that location, but that set me off Internetting around for something similar. I'd read a fair bit about Guy Gavriel Kay being a great fantasy writer, and with Under Heaven cropping up as a standalone book (and not a commitment to an epic and/or unfinished series), I quickly shelved any hesitance about the "white-guy-writing-Asian-world" thing - hey, at least someone is writing Asian-influenced worlds - and decided to take the plunge.

Overview

Set in a country that evokes dynastic China, Under Heaven primarily follows the story of a young man named Shen Tai. Tai begins the story in self-exile in the western part of the country Kitai, but the queen of the neighboring country awards him two hundred fifty warhorses, a massive gift that would immediately put a target on Tai's back.

The story follows his surviving a trip back to the country's capital, his life at court, and his observations on massive political upheaval. It weaves in love stories of his past lover and his present bodyguard, friendship with a legendary warrior-poet-wanderer, and family drama with a brother deeply involved in court intrigue and a sister who has been married off to the horse-nomads of the north.

More Detailed Overview/Synopsis

Shen Tai is the second son of a general who passed nearly two years ago. Since the death of his father, he must withdraw from society (where he was in the capital, studying for exams to gain civil rank) for two years. He has chosen to spend that time in isolation at lake at the foot of mountains in the west, site of the bloodiest battle in Kitai's border wars with the west-neighboring steppe nation twenty years ago, where his father served. Tai spends his time there burying bodies alone. Soldiers on both sides are superstitious of the ghosts there and thus do not bury the bodies, but they aid him with supplies.

One day near the end of Tai's solitude, the foreign soldiers bring him a scroll from their queen - a former princess of Kitai, whose hand in marriage was part of the peace dealings that ended the war. Kitai is awarded two hundred fifty "dragon horses," whose caliber exceeds that of any that can be raised in Kitai. As the friendly foreign squad leader advises him, such a gift is incredibly difficult to transport home, and even more so without being robbed or murdered. That very day, his friend from the capital arrives with a message, but is murdered by his bodyguard - a woman of the Kanlin warriors, an apolitical, quasi-religious group. The bodyguard then turns her attention to Tai, but the spirits of the dead rise up and pin her to the wall, where the western soldiers kill her. The western squad leader then advises Tai to leave the horses here and promise them to the emperor, who should then secure his safety in order to retrieve the horses.

From there, Tai journeys back to the capital, seeking who wants him dead. Everyone along the way seems to want a piece of him - another Kanlin woman becomes Tai's bodyguard; military leaders of minor fortresses want to attach their names to him, even sending their soldiers to corral him; one governor tries to honey-trap him with his daughters; even prostitutes find him attractive, including one he sleeps with. Tai is a huge fan of the poetry of the era and winds up befriending the greatest poet of the time, Sima Zian - who also happens to drink everyone under the table and wield a big sword. Before Tai reaches the capital, a former-outsider-turned-general-and-adopted-son-of-the-new-favored-concubine, Roshan, asks kindly for his horses and hints that he's about to start a civil war.

Tai is also haunted by his past, which includes a military stint. During this stint, he went north of the Great Wall and led a fight that led to horrific, cannibalistic violence. The trip also ended with the comatose heir of the northern tribes rising from his coma and stumbling off into the distance.

Before ever reaching the capital, Tai already feels many conflicts and intrigues. Why did someone want to kill him even before the horses were delivered? Is his brother, the right-hand man of the new prime minister, involved? And for that matter, the PM happens to have taken Tai's former lover sex worker (a blonde foreigner) as his personal concubine. Tai finds himself somewhat torn between this long-lost love and his budding attraction to Wei Song, his tiny but deadly bodyguard. And of course, he learns that his beloved younger sister has been stripped from her serving of the queen, outfitted with an honorary title as princess, and sent off to the northern border tribes as a bride.

The early parts of the book are largely told in third-person limited, centering around Tai, but they sprinkle in brief, one- or two-shot POVs of other characters to flesh out the world as their intersect - the Taguran captain who befriends Tai, Tai's sadly doomed friend, a low-born watchman on the military post, a foreigner prostitute who has no taste for Sima Zian's poetry that so captivates Tai. Once it's revealed what has happened to Tai's sister Li-Mei, we start seeing her perspective as well, and her chapters are almost as regular as Tai's from then on.

Li-Mei, north of Kitai, is being escorted by a bunch of that northern tribe to wed their leader. But along the way, they encounter a lone man with a pack of wolves, who takes her with him on a solitary journey. Turns out this is Meshag, the comatose dude that Tai kinda helped to save before, and he's paying Tai back by rescuing Li-Mei. He's no longer quite human and is bonded mostly to a wolf, with some skinchanging/mind-melding abilities, but due to his change (and the fact that his brother is the one who put him in a coma to become heir of the tribes) Meshag wants revenge. He helps Li-Mei evade his brother's guys for weeks and eventually leads her back through the wall, where she spends some time with the Kanlin and then goes home to mom and baby bro.

The palace contains much of its own intrigue. The septagunarian emperor has recently sent his queen away from the palace, instead taking up with a new concubine, Wen Jian, who is described as the most beautiful woman alive and who exerts considerable sway over the emperor. It is due to being the cousin of Wen Jian that Wen Zhou has become prime minister. Wen Zhou fears Roshan, who has gained favor in the court, and (it turns out) sent the assassin after Tai. Wen Zhou's POV shows him being a fairly simple man who mostly enjoys his power for the ability to do things like casually ordering Tai's death. Meanwhile, the crown prince is depicted as somewhat of a party animal, but with the emperor aging, he needs to rise to eminence and assume the Mandate of Heaven. Spring Rain, Tai's ex-lover-now-Wen Zhou's-concubine, is not involved in courtly politics, but she also has a role, as she is the person who financed Wei Song as Tai's bodyguard.

When Tai reaches the capital, shit hits the fan. Roshan has already gone off to start his rebellion, and at Wen Jian's behest, Tai observes as Prince Shinzu - reputed to be frivolous - dresses down Wen Zhou and exposes his attempted assassination of Tai. But it's too late - Roshan's Rebellion (off-screen mostly) sweeps through and conquers most of the strongholds in the northeast of Kitai and invades the capital. The rest of the story is spent as Tai flees the capital with the royal family, and along the way his brother, Wen Zhou, and Wen Jian all die to peasants and military men who believe them to be responsible for the rebellion.

The narrative zooms out during this last arc tells us in broad strokes that the rebellion takes decades to fully quell and claims tens of millions of lives. The scope of the rebellion greatly exceeds the story, which returns to Tai as he finally retrieves the horses and declines imperial office, returning to his hometown. Wei Song and Tai profess their love to one another, and Tai finally is reunited with his sister.

Thoughts (incomplete, tbc)

Wolves theme is underdeveloped.

Love a lot of the worldbuilding otherwise, including use of different POVs, commentary on the political situation is enjoyable, putting us into a world where the empire has been expanding and struggling with internal struggles and external struggles for centuries.

Omniscient voice sometimes positive but often a negative.

Fun feeling of almost-gothic horror during the flashback sequence.

Was it really necessary to have every female character want to fuck Tai?

Good court intrigue, even with flat characters.

Wen Zhou being the assassin-sender was a flat reveal.

A lot of poetry is included, but it doesn't always particularly hit.

Tai mostly fades away in the story. It's realistic, but incredibly unsatisfying.

Li-Mei's story also just kinda disappears after a while, coming to no particularly interesting climax.

The "ending" to the story also just feels kind of random. It's the end of Tai's journey, but he spends the last third of it just as an observer - and the "real" story isn't over at all, but almost all of it is left "off page."

That one scene in the palace where the prince reveals his hand is easily the climax of the story. If the theme ultimately is that political games mostly just lead to destruction even when the bad actors are caught, it does come through. But it's not that satisfying following this character through it!

Read: Jan 2025