Ysabel
By Guy Gavriel Kay
Penguin Canada,
417 pages, $34
Toronto writer Guy Gavriel Kay has hewn a unique path over the course of his writing career, defying easy categorization and segregation.
Kay made his debut, and secured his reputation, in the early 1980s with the traditional (and impressive) high fantasy and alternative worlds of The Fionavar Tapestry. (By the way, now is a perfect time to reread Tapestry. And if you haven't read it, I envy you the experience.) He has spent the 20 years since the conclusion of that trilogy, however, in simultaneous defiance and embracing of the tropes and techniques of the fantasy genre.
Each subsequent work, it seems, has contained less and less of what many readers would consider the fantastic. In these novels, rooted in the historic (although "alternative historic" might be a more accurate term), magic itself has become a rarity. At the same time, however, Kay has continued to write with narrative approaches that typify fantasy, with outsize characters, bold gestures and grand storytelling. Although the lack of the fantastic would seem to preclude the inclusion of his later books on the fantasy shelves, his sense of honour and of heroism, the timelessness and mythic resonances of his stories, makes it impossible to consider shelving them anywhere else.
At first glance, Ysabel seems to be something of a departure for Kay. Rather than rooting the novel in a revision of a particular historical period, the new novel is set in contemporary Provence -- where Kay recently spent time living with his family, and where the book was written.
Fifteen-year-old Ned Marriner is a fairly typical teenager. Accompanying his celebrated photographer father and his crew on a six-week shoot in France, Ned's main concerns are with savouring the French experience, getting his assignments done for school back home, and worrying about his mother, a physician working with Doctors without Borders in the Sudan.
This being a Kay novel, all of that soon changes.
While exploring the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral in Aix-en-Provence, Ned meets a pretty young woman named Kate and a mysterious man with a knife.
From these seemingly accidental meetings, Ned is drawn into a world in which there are no coincidences, in which a love story that has played across a backdrop of thousands of years takes life in the modern world, bringing with it a legacy of bloodshed, death and magic.
Ysabel gains impetus and force from the blood-soaked soil of Provence itself. With its Celtic and Roman histories and mythologies, the region is fertile ground for the style of mythic storytelling that readers associate with Kay, and the land almost becomes a character in its own right. In Kay's hands, the tourist-friendly veneer is lifted away, revealing hills that run red with blood and memory, ruins that form the backdrop for ritual bonfires on Beltaine, and caves that sing of a love story that must play itself out, generation after generation.
With this sort of fantasy writing, it is essential to establish a level of verisimilitude, a foundation of reality from which the reader is comfortable departing. Kay achieves this with a deftness of characterization and context for the main characters.
Ned is well-drawn and realistic, with enough hints at subterranean depths that Kay is able to avoid becoming mired in the hormonally earthy realities of a 15-year-old boy's inner world.
His relationships with his father and the members of the photo crew ring true, with shifting levels of comfort and candour. The family dynamics are intricate, threaded through with worry and love.
The reality of the relationships is important, not just for the fantastic elements of the novel, but for later developments on a more personal plane. The arrival of Ned's aunt -- his mother's estranged sister -- and her husband partway through the book could have completely derailed the narrative, but the complex reality of the family relationships allows for their absorption into the storyline. (That being said, their arrival is breathtaking on several levels, none of which it would be right to discuss here.)
Kay is as comfortable, and as skilled, with the complex mythic storylines as he is with the domestic scene-setting. There is a breathless realism to his handling of the story of the love triangle between Ysabel, Phelan and Cadell that has lingered for hundreds of years, an immediacy that should be at odds with the seeming predestination of the age-old relationship, but isn't. This is, after all, not merely another iteration of a love and a tragic loss: For Ned and his community, struggling to save one of their own, this is the iteration of that story, the one in which everything might, and must, change.
Of course, the same could be said of every iteration of this story, and it is in the realization of this fact that Kay is at his finest. His approach to this sort of mythic storytelling, whether here or in The Fionavar Tapestry, is so compelling because of his recognition that the reason these stories continue to work, to appeal to readers at a visceral level (rather than as the stuff of mere academic study) is that they are alive in every retelling, in every new generation of storytellers and story-listeners.
The reason stories like those of Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere (in Fionavar) and Cadell, Phelan and Ysabel (in the new novel) continue to so affect readers is not only that they are familiar, but that this very familiarity will be tested in every retelling. The dynamic between knowledge and novelty, between familiarity and freshness, is at the root of the reading experience, and nowhere more so than in the realms of heroism and honour, of love and death.
There are many writers who have shown us the gods walking among us, the age-old stories alive in the modern world. Rare are those able to demonstrate that those gods, those stories, live within us, and are as essential to our existence as oxygen. Guy Gavriel Kay is one of those rare few, and Ysabel is a splendid addition to his body of work.
Robert J. Wiersema is a Victoria writer and bookseller. His first novel, Before I Wake, was published last year.