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From Fantasy to Slipstream

Review by Rick Kleffel for the Agony Column. Reproduced with kind permission.

There are a lot of very talented writers who have worked for many years in the fantasy genre, toiling away for a fairly large and generally appreciative audience of genre fiction readers. To my mind, most of these writers – those who are not on the bestseller lists with their fantasies -- are better than most writers who are on the bestseller lists with their mainstream literary and especially historical fiction. There's a level of detail that is required to even get in the gate of the fantasy world that I think is a perfect way for writers to hone their skills to a razor sharpness.

One of our sharpest fantasists, Guy Gavriel Kay, (The Last Light of the Sun) is making the cut to mainstream fiction, but in honor of his fantasy past, we'll call it slipstream, so as not to alienate his current readers. His new novel Ysabel (Roc / Penguin Putnam ; February 6, 2006 ; $24.95) is the kind of book I have been hoping to see from this talented writer. It offers him the chance to create a work that is utterly, immediately accessible to a much wider audience than he might normally reach. Encompassing current day thriller, current day romance and current day horror, with enough of a historical infusion to bring his talents in this realm to life, Ysabel seems ideally suited to spread to a wider-than-genre audience. Now, one never knows if this will happen, but at least a book like this suggests that it can happen. But really, that's all beside the point. This contemporary novel with overtones of the fantastic from a fantasy writer would be on my short list in any event.

The real question for Ysabel is pretty familiar. Where will it be shelved? The premise offers it the opportunity, at least to be put right alongside mainstream fiction novels. 'Ysabel' unfolds as Ned Marriner, in France with his father, explores the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral in Aix-en-Provence. Like many a fictional guy on vacation in Europe, he meets a girl. (Actual guys on vacation in Europe hoping to meet girls are more likely to meet bedbugs.) Ned and Kate explore the ruins and find themselves face to face with an odd-looking gent carrying a knife, and before you can say 'Mythago Wood', they're embroiled in a legend that is playing out in a place where the deep past and the wounded present collide. It's not uncommon that conflicts from the past play out in the present, it is the nature of all wars to repeat themselves; old battles with new flags. But romantic conflicts don’t have that kind of open history of repeating. Nor do they generally involve the invasion of the present by the past.

What makes Ysabel so exciting to me is that it gives Kay a chance to deploy his considerable world-building chops in the service of building a vision of our world infected by the past. Of course, our world is already infected by the past, but not quite in the fantastic manner that Kay depicts here. His deep knowledge of how history creates societies and societies create individuals gets put on a stage and in a novel that any reader might pick up and enjoy. Not that any reader wouldn't probably enjoy one of his fantasies, but they’re shelved, over there with the books that got elves on 'em. With luck, we'll see bookstores shelving 'Ysabel' next to titles by Dean Koontz and Stephen King. It bears more than a passing resemblance to titles by both of these authors, though the intent here is not to scare the reader but rather to enchant with possibility. As for me, I'm just enchanted that Kay decided to move in this direction. I'm pretty certain his sizable fantasy fan base will follow, and those who read this column should both be aware that his novel may not get ghetto-ized and be happy that it may not get ghetto-ized. They ain't no sissy elves in this book. Just, well, if not manly men, at least guys who wear blue jeans. Guys who might buy a book like 'Ysabel', not because it is or is not of some genre or fits some pre-conceived notion of what a book should be. Guys and gals for that matter, who would buy this book because it looks to be well-written, tinged with imagination. A book you can read and get lost in.

Interleaving reality and fantasy

Review by S.K. Slevinski for the Alternative Reality Web Zine. Reproduced with kind permission.

Ysabel is, at once, not what fans are accustomed to seeing from Kay, and yet everything that devoted readers have come to expect. Magic, modernity and truly compelling character conflict make this novel the first must-read of 2007 for anyone who loves to get lost in literature.

Main character Ned Marriner has accompanied his father on a photo shoot in the south of France. It's a mildly-educational excuse to get some time away from school, and a chance for Ned to see the world, even with an iPod ringing in his ears. But lurking in the back of his mind is an uncomfortable truth—Ned and his father spend their days in relative safety, waiting for evening phone calls from Ned's mother, who is stationed in a war zone for Doctors Without Borders. Ned's task of keeping himself distracted is helped along after meeting Kate, a well-spoken and unapologetic self-professed "geek", an American student on an exchange program in France. Their friendship is quickly cemented by a peculiar encounter in the church where Ned's father's photography crew is shooting—they happen upon a man in the ancient layers of church cellars who doesn't seem to "fit" in their time period. As Ned and Kate attempt to unravel the mystery of this encounter, Ned comes to realize that he has been affected more deeply by the experience than he first thought—unexpected sensory powers are awakened in him, surfacing in particular locales in increasing intensity. When, finally, Ned is contacted by his mother's estranged sister, he discovers that the strange happenings may be part of a family legacy.

This novel gives Guy Gavriel Kay a chance to show his talent for a variety of writing styles, carrying readers swiftly along with an economical modern style, delving into patches of beautifully wrought prose worthy of any of his historical fantasies, and finally braiding the two styles together when needed. It is partly in this way that he balances the modern and magical/historical sequences in this book, both where they coalesce and where one intrudes upon the other. In many ways, this is a novel of contrast, but Kay makes it equally a novel of continuity. The backbone of this story is its main character's conflicts. It is Ned, the choices he makes and the people he cares about that drive this novel. Kay does an excellent job of keeping Ned's motivations "on the page" even when their presence is implicit. The highlight of this novel is Ned's labor of love for a person he never expected to care about.

With Ysabel, Kay strengthens his canon of literary fantasy, but with the same stroke, opens the door to readers who might otherwise have been reluctant to try fantasy. The real world, modern day milieu and characters are a perfect vehicle for transporting the uninitiated into the imagination of fantasy. While this approach has certainly seen a fair bit of use—Kay's Fionavar has been among those to travel this road before—Ysabel renders it with the fresh perspective of a unique character.

It's swell, Ysabel, swell

Review by Rob Wiersema for the Globe and Mail. Reproduced with kind permission.

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.

Book Hungry

Review by Jeremy Jose Orbe-Smith for Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show website. Reproduced with kind permission.

Come to think of it, if I saw a vision of an entire mountainside soaked in the blood of two hundred thousand people, I'd be a little nauseous too.

For Ned Marriner, however, it's just one of many signals that he's stepped into the middle of a recurring, centuries-spanning, semi-reincarnation of a love triangle -- one that usually ends in a rather lot of killing.

Kay is known for such sprawling epic fantasy series as the Fionavar Tapestry and the Sarantine Mosaic; with Ysabel, he scales way down and brings us to the present day.

We meet Ned, an endearing fifteen-year-old track and cross-country runner, in France with his father, a famous Canadian photographer. When he wanders away from a photoshoot in the middle of an ancient cathedral, he quickly meets Kate, an American exchange student. Even as they become fast friends, they come upon a mysterious man . . . crawling out of a hole in the ground. Not a particularly comfortable sight in itself, the appearance of an ancient knife certainly doesn't give much hope for a happy ending.

This stranger, who turns out to be neither benign nor quite malevolent, is actually one of two warriors battling for the love of Ysabel, a spirit who will take possession of the body of an unlucky woman on the eve of Beltaine. This is the night when the Celts believed that the gates between the living and the dead were open after the sunset, and she will give herself to whichever man is able to track her down at the end of three days. Their story has been played and replayed over and over again as the centuries roll on, with the only difference being which man is able to find her first.

Unfortunately, Ned's father's assistant Melanie is the unlucky woman chosen to be the surrogate. This is as painful for us readers as it is for the characters, because before she is enslaved in her own body, she is made endearingly, heartbreakingly real. When she is lost, we are too; we grieve for her even as she sets off the race between Ned's family and the two warriors, all of them struggling to locate "Ysabel" while keeping the other "teams" ignorant of their attempts.

An entire bookcase full of artsy and angsty introspection couldn't compete with the amount of character revealed in five pages of Kay's tightly-written ensemble sections. As we work with Ned's family and friends through the clues surrounding Ysabel's disappearance, we gradually learn how Celtic and Roman history is still shaping the forces at work around the characters. Indeed, Ned even begins to acquire ancient powers, so that he is able to see visions from the past such as the one of the blood-soaked mountain. Kay makes even the history lessons both relevant and surprisingly entertaining, and the past weaves with the present until they're so entwined that we're hardly aware of where one leaves off and the other begins.

This is no Dan Brown mockery of depth; Kay is the real deal, interposing the bones of a relatively simple historical thriller with both an epic romance and a wrenching family drama. Ned unearths the long-denied connection his family has to the locale and the three resurrected spirits, and in the process simultaneously sets his mother and aunt on the pathway to reconciliation. The inevitable romance between him and Kate is also made fresh with the details of how their personalities connect and fulfil each other -- and thankfully, they actually behave like the awkwardly chaste adolescents they are, rather than the usual mini-adults that populate these sorts of stories.

In fact, that might be the greatest strength of this very strong book; Kay is able to make the experience of the modern day teens, in all their hormonal, Ipod-enhanced youth, as equally compelling as the fantastic elements that crash around them. I also especially liked the fact that Ned's parents were both important and deeply real -- deeply good -- characters, a relative rarity in this genre. The story is as much about them as it is about Ned's maturation from naive youth to thoughtful young man aware of his place in history.

In other words, read this book the first time to race to the end and see how all the strings of the past come together in a powerful climax.

Reread it in order to revel in the depth of the deceptively-simple characterizations Kay gives us with the utter clarity of his prose.