Book Reviews

History Is All Around Us

Guy Gavriel Kay (Author)
Ysabel. Viking Press
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Reviewed by Gernot R. Wieland

For years now, Guy Gavriel Kay has delighted his readers with his hybrid novels which meld history and fantasy. His newest novel, Ysabel, follows in the footsteps of his earlier works such as A Song for Arbonne (1992), The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995), The Sarantine Mosaic (consisting of Sailing to Sarantium [1998] and Lord of Emperors [2000]) and The Last Light of the Sun (2004) but with a difference: whereas the earlier novels all were set in thinly disguised fictional countries such as Sarantium (= Byzantium) or Al-Rassan (=Spain), Ysabel does not attempt to veil the geographic location. The second line of the first chapter takes us right into the gloom of Aix-en-Provence’s Saint-Sauveur Cathedral, and we remain firmly rooted in Provence throughout the novel. The soil of Provence, however, is saturated with history, and it is not long before this history beckons, captivates, at times imperils and overwhelms the protagonist of the story, the 15-year-old Ned. Ned accompanies his father, a famous photographer, on his travels through Provence as he takes pictures for what is to become a coffee-table book. In order to pass the time, Ned wanders into the cathedral, more intent on the tunes of his iPod than on the building surrounding him, and stumbles into a menacing history that by far pre-dates the cathedral.

An ancient historical cycle is played out in Ysabel, that of the native struggling with the newcomer who will eventually settle in the land. The winner in this struggle takes the land and Ysabel—a pattern Kay may have consciously or unconsciously taken over from Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas receives both the Roman heartland and Lavinia after he has defeated Turnus. In Ysabel, the story unfolds around the feast of Beltaine—the last day of April, when ghosts rule the night. Ned gets drawn into the ancient struggle when Melanie, his father’s able assistant, transforms into Ysabel, and he is the only one who can bring her back from her new identity. There is no time-travel here. Kay works on the principle that “history is all around us,” and some people have more, and some less sensitivity to it. Despite being a thoroughly twenty-first-century 15-year-old who enjoys all the technological gadgets the twenty-first century has to offer, Ned has this sensitivity, and has it in spades. He cannot cross a field on which a battle took place more than two thousand years ago without being sickened by the blood that seeped into its soil; he sees ancient Celtic rites performed, and is drawn into the vortex of the conflict between the native and the newcomer. And when history releases him from its fierce grip, he googles, sends text messages and listens to the tunes stored on his iPod—just like any teenager.

Kay captures the cadences of teenagers perfectly. While not everyone may agree with their approach to the language, nonetheless Kay deserves to be complimented on his keen observation. It cannot have been easy for Kay to provide the necessary historical information and to do so in a language not his own. Let me give an example: “They [=the Cimbri and Teutones] came back again and decided what they really wanted was land around Rome, and they decided they were going to kick ass there.” Or: “So, like, if he [=Marius] hadn’t beat them, they’d have taken Rome?” “Kick ass,” “beat” instead of “beaten,” and the intrusive “like”: not an academic’s favourite expressions, but well reproduced from the living teenage language.

Kay also deserves to be complimented on a gripping story. While any reader of his previous books will have little doubt that Ned will escape the conflict between native and newcomer relatively unscathed and definitely wiser, Kay does keep us in suspense about Melanie/Ysabel. Her fate hangs in the balance, especially since Ysabel is so much more than Melanie could ever hope to be. Will Ned get to her in time to break the vicious historical circle? And if he does, will she consent to go with him or will she prefer the power and the beauty she experiences as Ysabel? The answers to these questions are anything but certain, and they definitely are not answers this reviewer can provide without giving too much of the plot away.

One slight lapse should be noted: the officials of Aix-en-Provence give Ned’s father two uninterrupted hours in the morning “to capture the facade of their cathedral.” Very few photographers would be particularly pleased with this since cathedral facades in general, and Saint-Sauveur’s in particular, face west and would therefore glow in red-golden hues in the evening and not in the morning when the backlight from the eastern sun would frustrate any photographer’s endeavour to capture much detail on the facade.

This one slight lapse aside, Kay’s Ysabel is a wonderful read for lovers of historical novels, and has all the qualities necessary to turn teenagers on to historical novels, and to history. Kay has prefaced Ysabel with the following quotation from Robert Graves:

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

The “one story” is that of the newcomer and the native fighting each other for possession of the soil and the woman symbolizing it. Kay set this particular story in the Old World, but as a Canadian he is surely aware that this is also a story that can be told about the New. But maybe that will be his next novel . . .

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #195 (Winter 2007), Context(e)s. (pg. 153 - 155)

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