Two books, but best considered as one long book. I devoured the first one but became annoyed and pissy about the second, and took months to finish it. When I hit last few pages, it recontextualized why the hell the story was the way it was, and I grudgingly respected it more.
There are several reasons I got pissy about it. One is the prose. You have the simplest plots (e.g. a very straightforward false flag operation) conveyed in baroque, portentous, multi-pov ways. Kay can’t resist saying shit like “she would think upon this moment for years to come…” or “he did not yet know…”, foreshadowing ‘reveals’ that happen a few paragraphs later. He’s also horny for most of his characters, which I’m fine with, but expresses this horniness by using side characters to look at them admiringly (“she was not aware how she appeared to him in that moment”, etc), which I’m not. And finally, Sarantium is such a fucking shaggy-dog story in its generalities and particulars. In the particulars: you have these disconnected character arcs that go nowhere. In general: why is our protagonist in Byzantium anyway, being clever and heroic but utterly inconsequential as Stuff Just Happens?
The last one in particular did get resolved for me, and unexpectedly. (The others never did and are just annoying forever.) Spoilers ahead.
The protagonist is a mosaicist called down from fantasy Italy to fantasy Byzantium to work on the fantasy Hagia Sofia. He witnesses but does not influence historic events.
If you didn’t know who commissioned the Hagia Sofia: it’s Justinian I, of Justinian and Theodora fame. This is the Roman emperor who married an ex actress – actress here meaning prostitute also. The degree and nature of real-life Theodora’s sex work is hard to determine because the main historic source on her is, uh, defamatory.
Theodora and Justinian were clearly a love match; it caused major scandal and did not advantage him politically. She was clever woman, serving as a major advisor to Justinian. They never had children. Real life Theodora died from illness decades before Justinian passed; fictional Theodora outlives him, fleeing Byzantium upon his assassination.
In the book we know of at least one ex-prostitute who is infertile due to sexually transmitted disease, and it’s hinted early that book Justinian and Theodora are also heirless because of her sex work earlier in life. This is explicitly overturned late in book 2, when a doctor examines her and says the issue is probably on his end, not hers.
Our protagonist, Crispin, hangs around Byzantium working on his Hagia Sofia mosaic and sleeping with just about everyone. He has throuple vibes with fantasy Justinian and Theodora, and hooks up with the powerful woman who is responsible for Justinian’s death in the climax of book 2. Uh, there are other random women who are in love with him also.
He impresses all of these people with his cleverness and principles – the scene when he comes to court is one of the best in the duology, both well executed and self indulgent. Kay, in fact, goes to great length to show how clever and principled Crispin is. But it was unclear what for. I wondered if he was being set up as a successor for the heirless emperor even though this was so implausible, just because the vibes were so… ‘proving this guy is worthy’, explicitly in a mirror to Justinian. But he never becomes a major player, and after Justinian is killed, even his mosaic of the Hagia Sofia is undone because the new emperor has religious objections to his design.
Crispin returns home – wealthy, laden with memories of powerful people who died, whom he knew briefly but intimately, having lost his great work but also having saved one temple from the religious purge: a classic mosaic that inspired his Hagia Sofia design. The new emperor spared it as a favor.
So he comes home, and you’re like, okay, big ups and down for our guy Crispin, but what the hell was all that about? Some of the big-picture conflicts are resolved, others aren’t, and overall it’s unclear what this story of Sarantium existed for.
In the very last pages – like the last 4 pages – Crispin is home working on a new project. About a year has passed since he returned from Byzantium. And Theodora comes in. She’s been in hiding for the past year, since her existence threatens the new regime. And she makes it known to Crispin that she would like to spend the rest of her life with him. The second to last line she says that she would like children.
Ah! Okay! Why is Crispin the protagonist and primary narrator of this story? Because he is what you get when you work backwards from the problem of what kind of person is shaped to give Theodora-without-Justinian a happy ending.
Crispin had to be someone out of the way – not someone with political ambitions or deep involvement in Byzantium. He had to be someone with his own domain of mastery and status. He had to prove his intellectual and moral character, but not in a way that entangled him deeply in the Byzantine drama that Theodora has to completely escape at the end. He has to be a weird mixture of involved and not-involved.
Why does he come to court in Byzantium and impress people, collecting cachet that never gets used to make plot altering decisions? The only thing he does with it is saving that one provincial temple mosaic. (Which, to be fair, is emotionally quite significant to him.) The thing it’s all for is convincing Theodora and the reader that it would be great if she spent the rest of her life building a family with this man, once she’s deposed.
And you know what? I like it. I like it a lot.
The book that comes immediately to mind as a comparison is Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen – also kind of a nothingburger of a book, but was unique in its focus on a great woman embarking on the next phase of life, after a transition that would have closed the page on her in most stories. Cordelia is seventy, and Theodora about thirty five, when they pivot from a very full political career to have a family life.
I think Sarantium structurally suffers somewhat from having started out from this seed – any book where the protagonist is excellent, yet not ‘allowed’ to leave much of a mark on the narrative is working with a tricky constraint – but less than one might think. The Lymond series is a great example of an author telling the story of a heroic figure who cannot affect real history even though he’s serving and maneuvering kings all the time. Sarantium suffers more from the bad prose, which bloats what could have been one thick, but dense and striking, book.