A Song for Arbonne
Guy Gavriel Kay
To win wars, practice peace
Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne is a about a war between two fantasy nations, Arbonne and its northern neighbor Gorhaut. As usual with GGK's fantasies, it is more about real history than fantasy. Arbonne stands in for Southern France, now Provence. Gorhaut represents much of the northern half of modern France. In fact, the novel is based on The Albigensian Crusade, when France invaded Provence to stamp out the Cathar heresy.
The real fight in A Song for Arbonne has even deeper historical roots. Gorhaut is ruled by Hard Men -- men for whom military honor and glory and domination of others is the only value, and this is reflected in their religion -- they worship a warlike male god, Corannos. Arbonne is a softer country -- it is famous for its troubadours. It also allows women to rule and is, at the time of this story ruled by a Queen, Signe. They worship Corannos and his consort Rian.
It is an old, old argument: who is better at war, militaristic nations ruled by Hard Men who glory in war, or nations ruled by peoples who glorify the arts of peace? History answers this question clearly, and the answer is not the obvious one. Militaristic nations are bad at war. There are not so bad at war that they always lose. In the short term, they may dominate. But in the long run peaceful nations survive. I will outsource this argument to historian Bret Deveraux, and at greater length here. You may want to skip down to the section entitled "Liberalism At War." Here is the nut:
...over the last two centuries and change, one autocratic regime after another has assumed that liberal ‘nations of shopkeepers’ with their diverse ‘mongrel’ populations would prove weak in war because they did not conform to the autocratic vision of false strength. Go look for them now.
The verdict of history is not so indisputable as to make it impossible to find specific places and times in which Hard Men dominated for a while. Wanna-bee Hard Men love to tell you about these people, because it suits their political purposes.
This question is pretty explicitly what A Song for Arbonne is about. Here are the thoughts of one of the chief Hard Men of Gorhaut
The men of Arbonne are cowards, they are woman-mastered, cuckolded as a matter of course by their own musicians and barnyard servants. What, Galbert de Garsenc asks, what will such soft men do when they come face to face with the assembled might of Gorhaut sweeping down upon them with the power of the god?
I was reminded of the rhetoric of the American Civil War. The Hard Men of the militaristic South derided the industrial north as a nation of "pasty-faced mechanics." In his narrative history of The Civil War Shelby Foote remarked that the South discovered what it meant to fight pasty-faced mechanics when the North put a fleet of armored mechanized gunboats in the Mississippi River.
GGK makes a great story of this fight between Hard Men and Poets. His hero Blaise de Garsenc, is a scion of one of the chief families of Gorhaut, the son of that Galbert de Garsenc quoted above, in fact. That is, the hero of A Song for Arbonne is one of those Gorhaut Hard Men I've been talking about. I hope this makes it clear that the story and its outcome are not simple or predictable. I will not spoil it.
It's an exciting story. As always, GGK writes beautifully. Highly recommended!