It seems strange to me that there are people out there who have never read any fantasy. What I mean by fantasy is a genre of writing that is distinct from all others in that it describes events and things that could not happen in our mundane world: magic, dragons, wizards, and the like. Fantasy is not all cute little hobbits and big bad Dark Lords; the genre contains some stunningly original and … well … magical writing, from the indescribably beautiful John Crowley to the dark and depressing Stephen Donaldson. If you haven’t read any of it (and I envy you, because you’ll get to read some great books for the first time), Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana is a good place to start.
Tigana is the story of a province that was invaded by an empire from across the sea, and was wiped out, not by genocide or by mass destruction of property, but by a spell put on the whole of the country so that no one can now say or remember the name of the province. The book describes the efforts of a small band of expatriates to overthrow the tyranny that they live under, and restore the name and glory of their province, Tigana.
It is a big book: over six hundred pages. It is also a very quick read, with the kind of page-turning energy that makes the reader want to find out what happened next. The characters are well developed and interesting, and the setting is well thought out and carefully drawn.
It’s not a perfect book; more sophisticated fantasy readers might feel a certain lack of depth in the world and the characters because of the flatness of the language. Kay is not much of a stylist; he tells good, entertaining stories, but without the kind of literary sophistication present in other writers. This is, however, only his fourth book, and it will be interesting to see what he comes up with next.
Guy Kay is also the author of The Fionavar Tapestry, an epic fantasy trilogy that received a great deal of acclaim. He worked with Christopher Tolkien on editing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillon in 1974-75. Originally trained as a lawyer, Mr. Kay now devotes his time to writing. The Varsity spoke with Mr. Kay last month.
The Varsity: Are you conscious of yourself as a specifically Canadian writer?
Guy Gavriel Kay: I’m very conscious of being Canadian … I don’t, while writing, project myself from a nationalistic viewpoint. I do a great deal of my writing overseas, in Europe. There are a whole bunch of biographical reasons for that: simply, a strong interest in the continent that was engendered very early, a fascination with history … the depth and texture of the cultures in Europe are what I try to evoke pretty much in my fiction.
It’s been said that no one but a Winnipeger could have evoked the winter of The Wandering Fire [a book in Kay’s first trilogy] [laughs] … If you haven’t lived through it, you can’t depict it. Some of my friends who grew up down the block from me said, “All you did was take a typical Winnipeg winter and made it mythological.”
The Varsity: Do you have plans for a sequel to Tigana?
Guy Gavriel Kay: The book that I’m currently working on is not a sequel in any way; it’s not part of the structure or the characters or the narrative of Tigana.
What I am doing again is following a method I evolved for Tigana that is my departure from the trilogy. In Tigana I wanted to evoke the flavour and the ambiance of Renaissance Italy, for a couple of reasons: one, because it’s a fascinating period, I became extremely interested in some of the themes and motifs that emerged for me from extensive reading in the period. The other is because it is a very accessible period … rather than a totally alien world. I wanted to create a world that had some anchoring for the reader. We all have images of the Renaissance. We may have got them from Hollywood, but we’ve all got them, and we all have some way of visualizing how people looked and moved, and what the landscape looked like. I’m not recreating the Renaissance period; I’m evoking the flavour of the Renaissance.
In the new book, I’m trying to do the same with Provence, in the troubador period. So that’s the method I seem to have discovered, or stumbled upon, which is to do a great deal of research on a period of European history, then go there to write. I wrote Tigana in Tuscany, and I’m writing the new novel in the south of France, which my friends accuse me of doing simply as an excuse to do something self-indulgent, only a partial truth because it is helpful to be there.
There may be writers who can look at the Bathurst streetcar going past their window and evoke all the groves and vineyards, but I do better if I’m looking at all the groves and vineyards.
The Varsity: From The Fionavar Tapestry to Tigana there seemed to be a more naturalistic feel to the magic that’s happening, and I’m wondering if that was deliberate?
Guy Gavriel Kay: Very much so. I think that what happened was that Fionavar was my statement for the time being in the High Fantasy epic-class mode. I very deliberately picked up as many of the trappings of that form as I could. Part of the reason was that it was a somewhat conscious throwing down of the gauntlet to the barbarians in the Temple …
I stopped reading fantasy … in the later ’70s I suppose, after The Silmarillion year … I used to feel for a while that I had an obligation to keep up on what else was coming out, and I found it so increasingly frustrating, what was happening to the genre, I just stopped. Then a few years later, it started to feel like a cowardly act to just abandon the notion of fantasy, because I’ve always seen such richness in the field. So I sat down to do my own, and in the process of doing that, I very consciously wanted to say: High Fantasy has potential, and depth, and range that it’s not even being asked to explore by the people working in it now, doing the derivative spin-offs.
Consistent with that, I embraced many of the totemistic, archetypical elements of fantasy: the enchanted swords, the jewels with magical powers, the whole structure of the epic quest. The trilogy! The fact that it was blocked out as a trilogy … it’s like a sonnet … one of the rules of High Fantasy is that you do it as a trilogy.
With Tigana, I’m a long way from that. I’ve said what I had to say on light-and-dark, good-and-evil issues. Tigana is a mortal scale conflict. That, I think, is the single biggest difference. It’s about men and women against men and women. It’s not about mortal man against the renegade demiurge, which is one of the other standard formulas of High Fantasy. This one is a political novel, in its essence. It’s about themes of freedom, and conquest, the struggle for independence, the implications of tyranny, working right down to things like sexuality and family life, how those oppressive elements filter their way down to the smallest nuance.
The Varsity: This book has a lot of very interesting and erotic sex in it. Was that a deliberate choice?
Guy Gavriel Kay: You make conscious decisions to try to incorporate certain themes in your writing, but then the book gets going; it takes over to a certain degree.
I was reading Milan Kundera in the period before I started writing Tigana … The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Laughable Loves, the short stories there explore—among other things—what I call “The Insurrections of the Night”: the notion that when your daytime freedom has been taken away, when your mobility, and your creativity, and your opportunities for independent action are taken away in the daytime by oppressive, totalitarian regimes, one of the things that seems to happen is an increasing decadence at night, in the sexual sphere, and there are two elements to that. One is that it becomes a kind of symbolic, if meaningless, assertion of your independence; the other—and I have a dialogue in Tigana that spells this out because I wanted to be as clear as I could—if we accept the almost cliched psychological assertion that in order to have a happy relationship we have to respect ourselves, and I do believe that, then if you look at the situation of people who have been conquered or dominated and are allowing that condition to persist, the levels of self-respect in such people must, inexorably, begin to drop. And their belief that they’re worthy of healthy, nourishing sexual-emotional relationships must diminish. And that is one of the themes of the novel
The Varsity: Do you see yourself as being a fantasy writer for the rest of your life, or do you intend to go in different directions?
Guy Gavriel Kay: What I would like to see happening in part as a result of my fiction is a blurring of borders. What I’m more interested in doing is breaking down a tendency towards categorization which we all seem to have. There’s fantasy over there, there’s science-fiction here, there’s mystery there, and here’s mainstream … our reflex seems to be to slot things rather than assess them, rather than look at the individual work, our first instinct is to categorize it, even if it doesn’t fit easily into the category.
People seem to be recognizing that Tigana is a legitimate move to broaden the horizons of what fantasy has been asked to do, and to deal with themes that can legitimately be called those of serious mainstream fiction.
The Varsity: So you see yourself as trying to broaden the mainstream to include these fantasy areas.
Guy Gavriel Kay: Exactly.
The Varsity: Final question: do you have any tips for younger writers?
Guy Gavriel Kay: Only the most platitudinous one, the one which always irritates people because it sends them back to themselves … which is the honest truth that the way you are going to learn to write is by writing. You don’t learn to write by taking English courses. You learn how other people wrote, and that is of some use, you certainly want to be as well read as you can. But the other way I put it is that inspiration is vastly overrated as a source for writing, because it’s often more an excuse: “Oh, I don’t feel inspired today, so I will wait until the Muse is sitting on my shoulder.” You don’t write books, especially long ones, without trying to cultivate the discipline that simply means you sit down and you don’t get up until fifteen hundred words, or a thousand, whatever your speed, are done.
You may come back the next day and look at what you did before, and trash it. But it’s important to keep that rhythm of knowing that that’s what you’re going to do today, you’re going to sit down and write.
