The novelist Milan Kundera fed my emerging theme of oppression and survival with his musings about the relationship between conquered peoples and an unstable sexuality: what I called 'the insurrections of night.' The underlying ideas, for me, had to do with how people rebel when they can't rebel, how we behave when the world has lost its bearings, how shattered self-respect can ripple through to the most intimate levels of our lives. I wanted to start a book about subterfuge and deception with an outright lie — and the first sentence of chapter one does that. I wanted to work with music, the mobility of musicians in a relatively immobile society, and to re-examine the mage-source bond from Fionavar, showing a darker side to such a link: and that wish found an outlet in Alessan's binding of Erlein. I hoped to explore, as part of the revolt the book would chronicle, the idea of the evils done by good men, to stretch the reader with ambiguities and divided loyalties in a genre that tended (and still tends) not to work that way.
The debate between Alessan and Erlein is intended as a real one, not a plot device. The assertion made by the bound wizard that the roads of the eastern Palm are safer under Alberico than they were under Sandre d'Astibar is meant to raise a question about the legitimacy of pursuing one's quarrels — even one's quest for a people's obliterated identity and past — by using others as unwilling instruments. By the same token, the same is true of the rage Alessan's mother feels, seeing her son coolly attempting to shape a subtle, balanced political resolution for the entire peninsula, where she sees only a matter of hatred and blood and Tigana's lost name.
These are ambitious elements for what was always meant to be a romantic adventure. They intimidated me as they began to emerge, even recording them now I find myself shaking my head. But beneath them all lies the idea of using the fantasy genre in just this way: letting the universality of fantasy — of once upon a time — allow escapist fiction to be more than just that, to also bring us home. I tried to imagine myself with a stiletto not a bludgeon, slipping the themes of the story in quietly while keeping a reader turning pages well past bedtime.
It is a matter of gratitude and pleasure for me to have a sense, on this tenth anniversary of a generously received book, that it might have happened that way: those first ideas and images and wishes becoming the foundation pieces of the novel, the themes sliding in, people awake into the night. This is how I like to remember it, at any rate.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Toronto, 1999.
GUY GAVRIEL KAY
Guy Gavriel Kay was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, on 7 November 1954 to Samuel Kay, a surgeon, and Sybil (Birstein) Kay. He has two brothers Jeffrey and Rex, who are, respectively, a lawyer and a psychiatrist. Kay himself trained to be a lawyer, earning his LL.B. from the University of Toronto after his B.A. in philosophy from Manitoba. However, he now earns his living as a novelist. Kay currently lives in Toronto with his wife Laura and their two sons.
Kay's love of literature came early since his parents, both readers, read to their son regularly. Kay's introduction to fantasy came through reading Greek myths, fairy tales, and later, authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, E.R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, and Fritz Leiber. As an adult, he is an omnivorous reader, consuming large amounts of non-fiction as well as fiction. A few of the fiction writers Kay particularly respects are Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Thomas Flanagan, Shirley Hazzard, Cormac McCarthy, as well as the earlier works of Dorothy Dunnett, Updike's "Rabbit" novels, and George Garrett's Elizabethan historical fiction.
Despite this literary childhood, as a teenager Kay had at least three quite distinct career aspirations: to play right wing for the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team; to become a lawyer; and to become an author. A critical development in Kay's career as a writer came from his acquaintance with Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien's son, when Kay was a student of philosophy at the University of Manitoba. When Christopher Tolkien was named literary executor after his father died, he invited Kay to Oxford to assist him in editing Tolkien's fragmentary and uncompleted The Silmarillion. Kay accepted; as he comments, "Who in their right mind would NOT have been interested in the project?" Kay worked on The Silmarillion for a year, from 1974–1975.
The year that Kay spent working on the Tolkien project reinforced his interest in writing, but at the same time he became aware that it was not a profession to be relied on, especially for someone young and inexperienced. Not expecting to be able to make money as a writer, he returned to Canada and earned a law degree at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1978. His interest in writing did not disappear, however: after finishing his degree, he went abroad to write his first, unpublished, novel.
Kay received his call to the Bar of Ontario in 1982, but never actually practised. He turned immediately to writing, this time in a different medium. He had become friends with criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan, who was developing (with writer/producer George Jonas) a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio series, The Scales of Justice, which was to dramatize real Canadian legal cases. Kay became Principal Writer and Associate Producer for the program and continued to work for the series until 1989. The series was highly successful, including an award in 1985 for best media treatment of a legal issue from the Supreme Court of Canada and the Canadian Law Reform Commission. Kay still writes for television or film at times, between novels.
1984 marked two important events in Kay's life: his marriage on July 15th to Laura Beth Cohen, a marketing consultant, and the publication of The Summer Tree, the first volume of the trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry. Kay produced the two following volumes in fairly rapid succession over the span of two years. In The Fionavar Tapestry, Kay started his career as a writer and as a fantasist by consciously working within the traditional boundaries, both in content and technique, of the branch of fantasy literature that Tolkien founded. In part, he was paying homage to Tolkien, whose writing had inspired him personally, and in part he was working to revitalize the genre. Kay comments that in The Fionavar Tapestry, he consciously chose "to work squarely in the Tolkien tradition while trying to allow room for character development and plausibility that I tended to find missing in most post-JRRT high fantasy. In a way it was a challenge to the debasing of the genre".
The first of Kay's standalone novels is Tigana (1990). The detailed, authentic feel of the world is due in part at least to the fact that it was written in Tuscany, following what was by this point Kay's typical practice of writing his books while abroad. The novel shows careful research; some of the influences that Kay acknowledges in the final product are Carlo Ginzburg's Night Battles and the work of Milan Kundera, Gene Brucker, Lauro Martines, Jacob Burckhardt, Iris Origo, and Joseph Huizinga. While the setting is modeled on 15th century Italian geography, politics, and culture, the themes that Kay works with are clearly 20th century. One of these is the nature and importance of cultural identity, and the effects of the cultural obliteration often practiced by conquerors in our own world, as in the old Soviet Union, Ireland, China, and in Native American reservations in the United States. Another major theme of Tigana is how oppression is not merely political, but affects all aspects of personal interactions, including sexual relationships. The working out of this particular idea in the novel was inspired by Kay's reading of Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves.