I'm still trying to figure out why I love that about Tigana, but it irked me here. I think it's just I saw more clearly what he was doing here - either because I'm a more experienced reader now, or because he doesn't do it as deftly. Rebekah commented too on how often he does the dramatic announcements of what a certain day or moment would mean to a character, or how often he/she would remember it. There's another element that feels perhaps even cheaper, and that is the misdirecting. The scene of Velaz's death. We see a dead body, and Jehane shocked and devastated about it. First assumption is of course that it's Rodrigo, which is proven wrong soon enough. Then Kay has his little game where he starts eliminating other possibilities (my next thought was Alvar, so then we see that it wasn't Alvar either) and then finally makes the dramatic reveal: it's Velaz! I don't know, it seemed kind of in bad taste to me, if that makes any sense.

The atmosphere really works, though. It's kind of hard to know - as I said, tainted judgement - how much of that is his descriptions, and how much my own knowledge of the period filling in the gaps, but I think most of the credit is his alright. But here too I'm in conflict - I kind of feel he went overboard in accelerating the Reconquista from a four centuries thing into taking all of twenty years, and happening in its entirety during Ammar's lifetime. You may wonder how that's relevant to the atmosphere - the relevance is that it's overdoing the "end of an era" feel, and making the whole thing more dramatic than it needed to be. I think I would've preferred a more historically correct ending, albeit with Kay making clear that the days of "al-Rassan" were counted.