There are three things to understand about Guy Gavriel Kay. The first is that he is a writer of sentiment, and his sentiment is heimweh, longing for home. In a broad sense, this makes him a postcolonial writer; all his works are about what Salman Rushdie called imaginary homelands. 

The second is that he is a lawyer. He has, so far as I know, never practiced, but he has a lawyer’s sensibility, insofar as all his books are fundamentally ethical dramas. Any long term reader of Kay knows his preoccupation with ethical choices and their consequences; there are a number of set pieces in every book, for each character. Many of his protagonists are rogues, and they are made so by unjust and oppressive laws. 

The third is that he is an historian manqué. His writing is deeply bound up with episodes in history and with identifiable, though disguised, historical characters. Mostly medieval and early modern European history, though in the previous decade he made a significant departure into classical Chinese history in Under Heaven and River of Stars. These were not my favourite of Kay’s books and I am glad to see him return to his more familiar western European territory in Written on the Dark.

Here he returns to the alternate European sphere he devised more than twenty years ago in the duology known as the Sarantine Mosaic; suffice it to say that Sarantium is roughly equivalent to Byzantium, Ferrières to France, Batiara to Italy and so on. 

I’m not providing major spoilers when I say that this book primarily exists so that Kay, who has always been interested in poets, can finally write a book about François Villon. He’s been building up to this for years and his version, Thierry Villar, is compelling in a highly Kayesian way, that is, as a lowborn rogue whose poetic talent lifts him up into the world of aristocratic intrigue. 

Keeping us focussed on the heroic and boundary-crossing dimensions of poetry, something I have always liked about Kay, as a poet myself, he also includes a significant portrait of the fifteenth-century internationalist poet Christine de Pizan in Marina di Saressa.

 If you are not interested in poets, there are plenty of princes here, as well as a violent family drama drawn from the intricate and nasty politics of the house of Valois, which ruled the wealthy and spectacular court of Burgundy. Compared to the excesses of these princes, the English court through the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I is a trivial sideshow. 

A refreshing feature of Kay’s historical perspective is that it is not Anglocentric. If you have read Hella Haase’s 1949 historical novel In a Dark Wood Wandering or Johan Huizinga’s seminal The Autumntide of the Middle Ages, you will be on familiar ground. The dark emotional undertow of the latter must have been especially appealing to Kay, whose vision of history is melancholy, very much about the grinding succession of empires and the fallout they leave behind.

And yes, of course, Kay is a fantasy writer. There is magic in this book, though it is dialed down when compared to a work like Tigana, for example, hailed by many as his masterpiece, in which an entire kingdom is hidden by a spell. There is also religion, though this is the one area in Kay’s work overall that I feel is a bit of a cop-out. There are religious wars and atrocities in his novels, and there are groups that clearly map on to Christians, Muslims and Jews; what they believe, however, are variations on solar and lunar worship. This is a safe form of estrangement that prevents us from having to deal with the genuine shared horrors of western monotheism. For someone who writes about trauma, this has always struck me as a major sidestep and one in which he falls short of his own ethical standards. But maybe this just places him on the same plane as many of his protagonists, including Thierry Villar: as an individual struggling not to be overborne by problems that are too big for him.

Guy Gavriel Kay will speak about his new book at the Royal hotel in The Barlow Room on June 20th at 6:30PM. Written on the Dark is available at Books & Company.