- Title: Written on the Dark
- Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Penguin Canada
- Pages: 320
“I did that. I did that.” It’s not giving away much to open this review with the closing words of Written on the Dark, Guy Gavriel Kay’s tale of a tavern poet who finds himself caught up in court intrigue of the highest consequences. It’s important to cite these words, though. Kay’s novel of historical fantasy is an approximation and bending of medieval France, one that includes its own Joan of Arc, Duc D’Orléans and Fall of Icarus, and, above all, a story of deeds.
It’s Thierry Villar, the tavern poet, who is drawn into the rise and fall of powerful men and women. There’s been a murder. A man of great consequence has been slain and Villar is just well enough placed in the hierarchy of tavern crawlers to get in and out of the conversations that might shed some light on who committed the deed. Meanwhile, the mad king sits in his castle and a foreign kingdom threatens to invade. From here, an epic story spins out, of war, faith, love, charity, art; of makings and unmakings; of beginnings and endings. We encounter kings and queens, dukes and counts, soldiers and clerics, inn keepers and passersby.
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The tavern poet is the unlikely star – the sun – around which they all orbit. Villar’s unexpected central role in the drama that unfolds is a bit reminiscent of Alais, mistress of King Henry II in The Lion in Winter. “Kings, queens, knights everywhere you look and I’m the only pawn,” she says. “I haven’t got a thing to lose. That makes me dangerous.” Villars, a compelling and fun character, isn’t so much dangerous as he is consequential. But consequences can be dangerous, too.
The brilliance of Written on the Dark is its capacity to be many things at once. It’s a great story, or series of stories, moving from murder mystery to court drama to war epic to tale of love and loss and beyond, like a song changing keys. And it works. You’ve just wrapped your head around the story when it changes, transforming to tell another, interlocking one part of the tale to bind the previous one to the next. In the end, it all sits together and makes sense, the happy bits, the sad bits, the triumphs, the failures. Maybe that’s the least realistic thing about this novel of fantasy, that even for the mysteries it refuses to explain, it makes sense. But that’s comforting. Especially right now.
As much as Kay’s novel is a medieval story, it’s utterly Greek – wrapped up in the philosophical and literary embrace of antiquity. Wondering what might be done with an assassin if caught by authorities, the king’s provost, Robbin de Vaux, reflects that justice “was not always obvious” insofar as one could “pursue it dutifully and lead a country to ruin.” The ancient Greeks would appreciate this insight as much as we do.
Kay places ironies – such as de Vaux’s concern that doing the right thing may be the wrong thing – throughout the novel. In one case, an army is undone by its insistence on an ostentatious killing of an enemy by burning them in a bonfire. It succeeds, as expected and desired, only to subsequently bring about its own destruction when its opponents see the smoke. At the same time, Kay tells the stories of the deeds of men and women who know they are shaping the world for what they see as the better, even at great cost to themselves. These are stories of deeds and duties. Accordingly, the case for classifying Written on the Dark as a Greek story as much as a medieval one grows. Thinking of Villar’s story as that of a man who would be remarkable not by choice, but by fate, the case is made. Kay’s work, published in the year 2025, would be well understood by Sophocles, Euripides or Aristophanes, a bridge travelled across two-dozen centuries.
Written on the Dark is equally as impressive for its accessibility and its density, qualities that may seem to be at odds, but aren’t. The story is easy enough to follow, which can’t be said of every book in the genre. But its accessibility doesn’t undermine its insightfulness, which is to say that a lot happens in the novel that reveals both something about the world in which the story unfolds, and our own. It’s quite an achievement.
Those pages are a gift, a tale told to a cold, weary traveller sat down at a warming fire in a roadside inn.
