Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780061059902
ISBN number: 0061059900
Label: Eos
Manufacturer: Eos
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 560
Printing Date: January 01, 2000
Publishing house: Eos
Release Date: January 05, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 508045
Studio: Eos
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Crispin is a mosaicist, a layer of bright tiles. Still grieving for the family he lost to the plaque, he lives only for his arcane craft. But an imperial summons from Valerius the Trakesian to Sarantium, the most magnificent place in the world, is difficult to resist.
In a world half-wild and tangled with magic, a journey to Sarantium means a walk into destiny. Bearing with him a deadly secret and a Queen's seductive promise, guarded only by his own wits and a talisman from an alchemist's treasury, Crispin sets out for the fabled city. Along the way he will encounter a great beast from the mythic past,and in robbing the zubir of its prize he wins a woman's devotion and a man's loyalty--and loses a gift he didn't know he had until it was gone.
Once in this city ruled by intrigue and violence, he must find his own source of power. Struggling to deal with the dangers and seductive lures of the men and woman around him, Crispin does discover it, in a most unusual place--high on the scaffolding of the greatest artwork ever imagined....
Amazon.com Review:
Sailing to Sarantium is a small story. Its hero, Crispin, is unassuming as heroes go. He's a skilled mosaicist, an artist who makes pictures with decorative tiles, and responds to a request from a distant emperor to travel to the imperial capital and work on the new sanctuary there. Hardly the makings of high adventure. But then again, Guy Gavriel Kay could write about a peasant going to pick up a pail of water and you'd probably hang on every word.
If you don't know Kay, you should. His pedigree is impeccable, starting with a well-loved fantasy debut, the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road), and a compilation he did with Christopher Tolkien called The Silmarillion. Sailing to Sarantium, the very first half of the Sarantine Mosaic series, evokes his other historical fantasy titles, such as A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan, and is a well-researched analog to the Byzantine Empire and fifth-century Europe--with all its political and religious machinations.
Despite its seemingly prosaic cast and quest, Sailing to Sarantium is a charmer, another Kay classic. As usual, the character descriptions are subtle and precise--the mosaicist, Crispin, is a shrewd, irascible, and intensely likable man who is fiercely devoted to his art but troubled by guilt and loss. Reluctantly surrendering to events, he agrees to travel to Sarantium to work for the emperor. ('Sailing to Sarantium,' we learn, is an expression synonymous with embracing great change.) As Crispin moves from roadside quarrels to palace intrigue, Kay gracefully shifts perspective from character to character, moving forward and backward in time and giving a rich sense of the world through the eyes of soldiers, slaves, and senators. --Paul Hughes
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Rated by buyers -
Sailing to Sarantium is a lush novel from Guy Kavriel Kay, whom I consider to be the finest modern writer of fantasy. I highly recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed Kay's other works. For readers who have not yet sampled Kay's vibrant fiction, first, shame on you, and second, read The Lions of Al-Rassan or Tigana before you read Sailing to Sarantium. They are more accessible and serve as a better introduction to Kay than Sailing.
The most intriguing aspect of Sailing is its structure. Ostensibly, it is about Crispin, an artisan who must travel to Sarantium to create a legendary mosaic. In my opinion, in an effort to connect story and structure, Kay composes the novel as a mosaic with the Sarantine Empire as his subject. I think that Kay is enamored with his setting and he writes the novel around it. Interestingly, he reveals his setting through character. In this novel, setting is character. We learn about this world by glimpsing character's lives, thoughts, and dreams. Often these characters are peripheral or even irrelevant to the main storyline; however, by presenting these people, Kay illustrates his world more deeply and fully.
In regard to style and language, few fantasy writers can match Kay. I marvel at his lyrical prose. In Sailing, he does display a penchant for portentous phrasing but it is forgivable because he writes with such elegance. Furthermore, it is even apt. If I am correct that Kay structures his novel as a mosaic, then his dramatic, solemn words and phrases are the novel's tesserae.
Rated by buyers 
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If you are looking for a thrill a page action/adventure, keep looking. Guy Gavriel Kay writes character driven novels of remarkable depth. His characters are complex, flawed and very, very real. That's not to say that the novel is slow or a simple character study. There is enough tension and plot twists to satisfy most, but the plot is driven more by political intrigue and by living, breathing characters than by blood and guts.
Sarantium is a fantasy version of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire set about the time when Rome was failing. I don't know how much of the background is based on historical characters but the problems of empire and emperors saturate the story. We get the story of Sarantium via a mosaicist who is commissioned to create a great public work and who gets pulled into the plots and affairs of the powerful. It's brilliantly done. Kay's mastery of plotting, character and description lift this book out of simple genre pulp and put it on the par with any modern fiction.
Rated by buyers -
I've just re-read both volumes of The Sarantine Mosaic. The two taken together are deeply moving and memorable. A number of reviewers comment on the books' "slow pace" but this misses the point. Character is front and center here, brilliantly revealed and explored, from the very first paragraph (which ends, unexpectedly, commenting on the character of historians!) to the last word.
Surely Kay is accessing his own temperament to give us an artist-protagonist. When the mosaicist Crispin speaks of art, he is convincing, expert, and driven. As the lens through which we see the poverty of his declining city of Varena, the spirits in the wilds of Sauradia, and the sophistication of Sarantium, Crispin is observant, intelligent, and emotionally responsive. He is also a highly tempermental artist, frustrated by the lack of resources in Varena, and embittered by the death of his family in the plague. I was intrigued from the outset to see how this complex character would evolve in the world Kay casts him into.
The world-building of this series is rich, and I found it rewarding. I disagree with reviewers who felt that the secondary areas of plot and character are unessential. The charioteers, for instance, are showmen and celebrities, their effect on public sentiment and therefore on royal policy is crucial to the society, as it is with today's celebrities. And they are artists, too, in a pair of novels devoted to exploring the motivations and character of artists. The Introduction sets the large plot of the whole duology in motion, and elements introduced there are not resolved until the very end of the second book. When you look back, the Introduction seems not only essential, it's worth re-reading to see how thoroughly Kay has set the plot's groundwork in place.
The character of the royal figures is especially fascinating. Kay has given us truly regal leaders. They earn their leadership by huge personal and intellectual effort. I found it tremendously moving that, in Kay's world (like ours) these efforts and resources are in a way insufficient to what the world requires. There are several effective tragic elements in these books, and the inadequacy of even brilliant leaders is one of them.
Finally, this is quite a stunning love story, actually several love stories, all intertwined. Kay's capacity to describe mature love, with its passion, affection, physicality, and emotional depth often, in these books, can have an impact deep enough to force the reader to stop reading and feel the emotions as though they were his (or her) own.
Admirable, enjoyable, and thought-provoking work.
Rated by buyers 
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Guy Gavriel Kay came very highly recommended, so I was quite excited about reading the very first book in the duology. Doubly so because I've always been fascinated by the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and Sarantium is Byzantium with the serial numbers filed off.
Others have mentioned the very long, and I have to say insufferable, introduction. It was exceedingly long and tedious, but I persevered as I have something very rare these days, an actual attention span. Even though the introduction becomes relevant later on it could easily have been cut down to four or five pages.
When we meet the main character I have some sympathy for him, I think he's a bit of a jerk, and your typical "reluctant hero". Nevertheless the machinations in the beginning of the story are somewhat interesting. The reasons why he finally accepts the offer to go to Sarantium is also fairly well played, as is the visit to the alchemist.
I found it tedious, but I will grant that it was in a sense well written.
It's hard to give more details without spoiling the story but I will say that the hero struck me as an insufferable moron. Yes the character is consistent; he was consistently a moron whose sharp tongue got him into a lot of trouble. His supposed wit only seemed to get him out of problems that his own stupidity had gotten him into.
However that's not necessarily a deal killer, once more that's fairly stereotypical. So is the fact that the hero has lost his entire family in the plague (I'm not really giving anything away, it's revealed very early on). I could live with that.
The problem is that I don't care about the main character, he keeps talking about his grief. He doesn't sleep with a young woman because of it. However I don't *feel* any grief, I don't feel like I'm watching someone who is deeply in grief.
Likewise the young woman (whose name I shan't reveal to avoid spoilers) doesn't feel real either. She's the Suffering Young Woman and the Victim, yes her sob story is described from her point of view, her being unable to go home, etc. It's presented in such a dispassionate way that I find it very hard to *care* about any of it.
The only character that actually seemed to come alive was the hero's bodyguard. His thoughts, actions, and behaviour seemed very realistic, and it was possible to relate to them.
Even if you disregard the characters the book isn't even all that exciting, we're constantly told that they can never recover from an incident on their journeys. I just didn't feel any grandeur, or mystery, or power about the incident or the aftermath. The fog and the crazy cultists were reminiscent of a cheap slasher film, nothing more cerebral than that.
All too often we see things like "And that is why I want you to do this" or "And that sent a chill down his spine," followed by an infodump to make us understand *why* this was such a horrible thing. As examples I offer the Zubir and the Empress' dolphins, neither of them inspired the awe and worry they should have.
The plot bounces up and down the chronology, and between points of view, like a deranged jackrabbit. Over and over again we get a scene, then we skip back in time to a different character, and see his or her perspective on the events leading up to the scene. Sometimes we're then shown that the scene is really something *quite different*! The very first time this happened it was alright, the second it was a little annoying, the third, and fourth, and so on times...
Well it got very, very annoying, very fast. Nor was it effective as a story telling device.
Then there's the Jadite faith, which is meant to stand in for Christianity. I'm suppose to care about the different sects and beliefs thereof, or at least see why they're important. I don't. Mainly because the portrayal of religion is so shallow and half-hearted that I can't be bothered. I mean Harry Turtledove of all people did a better job of portraying religious and sectarian strife in his Basil Agyros / Agent of Byzantium series! And that is a series of cheap action spy thrillers set in an alternate Byzantium!
Perhaps it's worse for me since I recognised all of the Byzantine, sorry Sarantian, characters, and I know exactly what incidents he's referring to (and yes all the important Sarantians are based on equivalent historic figures, up to and including the charioteer). Perhaps I'm not able to enjoy it because I'm aware of what tribes and pagan gods he's referring to. Perhaps I'm troubled because I recognise where the Jadite faith comes from (a mixture of Sol Invictus and Mithraism unless I miss my bet).
Thing is that sort of knowledge should *increase* my enjoyment of the book.
One quick note, some people complain that the charioteering factions in Sarantium are too simplistic. That's unfair, since Guy Gavriel Kay ripped ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
I had suspected it before I picked up The Sarantine Mosaic but it was only after reading Sailing to Sarantium and the Lord of Emperors that my thoughts were confirmed. Guy Gavriel Kay is my absolute favourite author alive today. I've read every novel he's published to date and I think the two novels of this duology are his best ever. I admit I was hesitant at first. I asked myself how a novel about a mosaicist could possibly be intriguing. If it was any other author I may have even passed. But this was Guy Gavriel Kay so I had to purchase the two books. To say that I was not disappointed would be an understatement. Caius Crispus and his journeys (both physical and mental) were so absorbing that I was all actually sad when the ride was over. Other than the protagonist, for me the most satisfying characters were the women of Sarantium. Alixiana, Styliane, Shirin, Kasia, Linon, Gisel, etc. were not only central to the plot but were each fascinating in their own ways. I've read all of Goodkind, all of Jordan, and have tried many new fantasy authors over the years but all pale in comparison to Kay. Are there major battles scenes, powerful wizards/sorceresses, an evil spirit trying to destroy the world? No. If this is you cup of tea do not waste your time. That's not to say that there is no action, murder, court intrigues or fantasy elements. It's just in these novels, they are not the core of the story. If you're interested in being transported to ancient history and becoming involved in a journey of self discovery, I cannot recommend these novels enough. Trust me, you will not be disappointed.
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