>>FEATURE
GUY GAVRIEL KAY
February 9
Knox United Church
Literary giant Guy Gavriel Kay’s new book is different from his previous writings. While the international bestselling author (who is also Canadian) is best known for his work in the fantasy genre, his new novel Ysabel (Viking Canada, 432 pp.) explores history on both a personal and grand scale.
Ysabel features a young hero, 15-year-old Ned Marriner, an adolescent knowledgeable about Coldplay and iPods, and unenthused about the prospect of homework. His story is that of an unlikely hero discovering old pieces of history playing themselves out and involving him within them.
"That was one of the major differences from previous books. I’ve built up some reputation for extremely complex narratives with a great many different points of view in the stories," says Kay. "I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if I focused it much more with this book. And most of the novel is told from the point of view of one teenage character. My research, reading and history have made clear to me that in different periods of the past, quite young people – men and women – would have significant roles in their society and culture. But in our society right now, to a significant degree, we leave young people almost marginalized."
Kay’s process with Ysabel included being submersed for a year in Provence, France.
"There’s no question that I was able to draw upon being there, to capture the feel of the flavour of the south of France," he says. "But I’ve done that before – I wrote Tigana in Tuscany, and it’s based on early Renaissance Italy. In the past I’ve found myself usefully influenced by being in a setting I’ve wanted to evoke."
Kay notes that while a writer can look out any window and evoke images of olive groves and vineyards, a writer may do even better by actually being in this sort of setting.
"I also wanted to show how the personal history of a family – the relationship between two sisters in events that happened 25 years before – could have just as powerful an impact upon them. I wanted to look at the idea of the past, or history on both a micro-level, from the individual family unit, and on a macro-level, which is to say the larger history of a part of the world," he says.
Kay began his writing career as many writers can only dream of – he began by assisting Christopher Tolkien with fragments left by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (the history of the mythological world that informs the story of The Lord of the Rings).
"I was retained by the Tolkien estate to assist him in the editorial construction of that book, before my own writing career began. There's no doubt that the year spent doing this, in the English countryside, sharpened my own sense that I wanted to be a writer," Kay writes, adding, "Though I was 'Canadian' enough, and pragmatic enough, to come home and get a law degree before disappearing to a Greek island (very pragmatic, I know!) to write my own first novel several years later."
Kay notes he has written his narratives with a variety of voices. He argues part of being a writer is the ability to imagine characters in a variety of situations.
"In the past I remember I would read book reviews that were very generous about my female characters," Kay notes. "I used to be very flattered by that. Then I realized that sometimes the subtext would be: how the hell could a Y chromosome possibly understand a woman, this is astonishing. And, it worries me because if you follow that line of thinking far enough, the only person anyone can write about is ourselves."
As for the storyline, Kay has a sense of his characters before he writes the narrative. He argues a compelling novel will have interesting things happening to interesting characters.
"I never outline," he says. "As the novelist Graham Greene once said, he doesn’t outline his books because if he knew what was going to happen he felt like a stenographer. And that’s very much how I feel –I think the author’s sense of discovering the story as he’s writing it – it’s actually a subliminal element in the energy, the page-turning quality of the novel, which isn’t to say it’s the only way to do it. I do have friends who outline everything before they write the first page. My method has always been to try to sort out the theme, the setting and a general sense of the characters I want to work with, and let that shape the narrative. So I did not know exactly where I was going when I started (Ysabel)."
Besides drawing influence from European history and mythology, Kay’s work often draws on his unique outlook as a Canadian. Ysabel’s hero and his family are Canadians exploring Provence.
"Being Canadian has, in many obvious ways (and many that are internalized and subconscious) absolutely played a role in what I write and my worldview as it plays out in my books," he says. "It even affects how I deal with the book business. I think my own careful attention to (and interest in) foreign language markets for the books is a function of being Canadian. Being more aware of the importance of such markets and less absorbed exclusively with my own." |
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