Novelist Guy Gavriel Kay
History informs novelist’s urge to delve into fantasy
If you’re only interested in the same things at 60 that you were at 30, you haven’t grown. If you’re an artist and serious about it, there should be changes.
Guy Gavriel Kay is chatting about how to activate a curse: You must carve a “curse tablet” in wax and, after baking and hardening it, cast it into the grave of someone newly dead.
He learned about this while researching the culture of sixth-century Byzantium for his bestselling pair of novels known collectively as The Sarantine Mosaic.
A moment later, he’s matter-of-factly talking about “the ancient Chinese belief that unburied ghosts haunt the place where they died.”
And then of course there’s that moment in Kay’s latest novel when a dead woman contemplates her own mortality.
Grist for the mill of the fantasy writer? Well, yes, but there’s a complicating factor when it comes to trying to place Kay in that niche. He doesn’t quite belong there — not when his books are so anchored in history. And not when he believes it imperative for today’s reader to understand that the fantastical was once an accepted component of everyday life. To Shakespeare’s audiences, the witches in Macbeth were not a playwright’s invention but a real possibility.
“There’s an almost inevitable tendency in many people to feel whimsical or patronizing or superior about these ‘silly beliefs’ of the past,” he says. (Kay is charitable enough to refrain from taking a swipe at those among us who shudder when a black cat crosses our path.)
“What I want to do is give value to those beliefs,” he says. “If the people I’m writing about thought something was so, I’ll write about it.”
He says this is not just playing narrative games, it’s to let the reader more fully comprehend the world view of people living it in the past.
Kay — who Time magazine once described as “a global phenomenon” — is in his publisher’s office to discuss his latest novel, A Brightness Long Ago. Evoking the high drama of Renaissance Italy, it’s a thundering saga of revenge, retribution and redemption. But a significant portion is also a delicately executed memory piece filtered through the prism of a tailor’s son named Danio Cerra who finds himself plunged into the world of two rival warlords who are headed for a deadly showdown.
“I’ve never done first-person singular before,” Kay says, and he sounds a bit surprised over having done so.
“My cranky old agent says that this may be my most elegiac book,” he says, again with some wonderment. “But I resist the idea that it’s because I’m getting old.”
On the contrary, he says, it has to do with continuing artistic growth. “If you’re only interested in the same things at 60 that you were at 30, you haven’t grown. If you’re an artist and serious about it, there should be changes.”
In conversation, Kay reveals an intriguing capacity for self-examination. For example — his refusal to prepare an outline before he begins one of his intricately plotted novels. He prefers the excitement of “discovering” where the book wants to go. “I’m like Graham Greene, who once said, ‘I never outline, because if I know where the book is going, I get bored writing it.’”
Kay also wants to make one thing clear about the riveting opening chapter of his new novel. It deals with the bloody disposal of a monstrous sexual predator known as The Beast. “It’s tailor-made for the #MeToo and post-Harvey Weinstein era,” he says, “but I will tell you that I wrote that opening eight months before all those stories started breaking.”
There’s also the mixture of discomfort and weary resignation he shows over being placed in the “fantasy” genre — a designation dating back to his triumphant debut at the age of 29 with The Summer Tree, a mythic spellbinder that was the first volume in a much-loved trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry.
“You’re putting your finger on some of the most challenging, interesting, difficult aspects of my having been a stubborn Prairie kid all my life,” says Kay, who was born in southern Saskatchewan and grew up in Winnipeg. “We’re a categorizing species … and I’m difficult to categorize.
“If you begin in a certain genre and achieve recognition and some degree of prominence in it,” he says, “the odds are that unless you go wildly away from it, that will continue to be how you’re perceived.”
His frustration is understandable. After that career-making trilogy, Kay embarked on his own highly individualistic path, immersing himself in history to create parallel fictional universes for Byzantium, China’s Tang dynasty and Islamic Spain. In the case of this new novel, A Brightness Long Ago, his inspiration is the turbulence of early Renaissance Italy, its city states and warlords.
Fellow novelist Robert Wiersema once defined Kay’s uniqueness this way: He specialized in “history with a quarter turn.” It’s a phrase that Kay embraces.
“I’m not doing straight historical fiction,” he says. Yet his novels are steeped in history, reflecting Kay ’s own particular quest for truth.
“I don’t want to write a book in which I suggest to the reader that I know Henry Vlll’s favourite position in bed or what Justinian and Theodora’s relationship was like when no one else was in the room with them,” Kay says. His method is to write a novel in which the world of Byzantium becomes the world of Sarantium or in which the city states of Renaissance Italy can be reimagined as Firenta, Mylasia and Seressa. In that way he and the reader enter a shared relationship: “We’re inventing the freedom and moral comfort for me of not having to impose thoughts and feelings on real, historical people.”
In the latest novel, his fictional characters achieve their own focused reality in a world where such disparate events as a bloody assassination and a fixed horse race provide stunning commentaries on the power politics of the time. The two warlords, Teobaldo and Folco, driven by their hatred for each other, are memorable presences, but so are other members of Kay’s gallery — among them a strange and enigmatic female healer named Jelana and a young woman of courage and tenacity named Adria.
Kay is a greying 64 now. Yet there’s still a boyish enthusiasm when he talks about his work. As for his firm belief that he’s still on a learning curve creatively, the explanation for that probably goes back four decades to when he was a young Canadian who found himself in Oxford, England, assisting J.R.R. Tolkien’s son, Christopher, in editing The Silmarillion, his late father’s monumental history of Middle-earth.
Archival exposure to the Tolkien world had a huge impact on Kay.
“I learned some really important things,” he says. “I learned patience. Tolkien was inexhaustibly slow and patient in developing his narratives. He rewrote endlessly — and I rewrite endlessly.”
Kay also learned the importance of humility.
“I saw early drafts, the scribbled notes to himself, the doodles on a piece of newspaper. Famously he began The Hobbit on the back of an exam paper. And I learned that even famous writers have false starts and lame drafts, and make outright mistakes.”
Kay is a firm believer in what he calls “Fortune’s wheel” — the element of chance in life. It informs a novel like A Bright Long Ago, and it informs his own memories of having the good luck to become immersed in Tolkien’s creative world and finding reassurance as a young aspiring novelist in the discovery that “even Tolkien screwed up in his early drafts, had infelicitous phrasing and bad plot direction. That was an enormous gift.”
It’s because of Tolkien that Kay refuses to be rushed. Eighteen months of intense reading were required before he felt ready to start A Brightness Long Ago. And as he presides over its launching, his prime emotion is gratitude.
“I’ve had such good fortune — this stubborn Prairie kid being allowed to write in a way that doesn’t fit into boxes, slots, categories in any convenient way ... to be published around the world while being allowed to write the books I want to write at the speed at which I want to write them.
“For 35 years that’s been a gift from my readers,” Kay says. “To be able to do that — I look back with gratitude.”