Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel [Library of Babel]

I read Guy Gavriel Kay's newest book, Ysabel a while ago, but I've been dithering about what to say in the booklog entry. I've been dithering long enough, in fact, that Kate beat me to it, so now I have to post something.

Kay is best known for a set of very loosely connected pseudo-historical fantasy novels, which re-cast important bits of European history in fantasy worlds. My favorite of the lot is probably still Tigana, but the "Sarantine Mosaic," consisting of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors is probably the most polished of the lot.

For whatever reason-- he can't have run out of European history yet-- Kay returns to contemporary fantasy with this book. He also returns to his first fantasy series, the Fionavar Tapestry, as two characters from those books reappear. Don't worry if you haven't read them, or don't remember them well-- I didn't even recognize the characters in question, and it didn't really affect my enjoyment of the story.

Ysabel is the story of Ned Marriner, a fifteen-year-old Canadian who's accompanying his world-famous photographer father on a shoot in Provence. One morning, in the Saint-Sauveur Catherdral of Aix-en-Provence, he meets two people: an American girl about his own age, and a mysterious man in a leather jacket, armed with a knife. The girl offers to show him around, and the man threatens to kill them both, because they have "blundered into a corner of a very old story." It wouldn't be much of a novel if they heeded his warning, so soon enough Ned and Kate (the American girl in the book, not my wife) find themselves caught up in a series of mystical events that are bound up with the long and bloody history of the region.

This was a frustrting book in a lot of ways. There were a lot of tantalizing hints about a deep and dark history, but maddeningly few details about some aspects of the story. How often do the events in question repeat? One of the previous repetitions was obviously associated with the Albigensian Crusade, but do they all involve historical bloodbaths? When was the last occurrance? There are hints, but not enough to really figure out what's going on.

The bigger problem, though, is the voice. Kay's prose is brilliantly well suited to his usual subjects, who tend to be poets or bards or artists caught up in momentous events, but it tends toward the epic and melodramatic. This doesn't end up working all that well for describing the thoughts and feelings of a modern Canadian teenager. Once the mystical stuff gets going, it moves along pretty well, but the book takes a while to set things up, and those sections are a little awkward. I's not bad, but he's no Scott Westerfeld when it comes to presenting a teenage point of view.

It's really difficult for me to say what I thought of this book. The writing is very evocative, in terms of mood, and it did draw me in once things started to get weird. There are some things that don't quite fit, though, and I think they keep it from being as good as it might be.

In a way, this feels like it might be a transitional book-- like he might be moving toward writing more modern stuff, but hasn't quite gotten the historical thing out of his system yet. Or it could be a one-off experiment, a book that he wrote just to see if he could do it, and he'll go back to doing the pseudo-historical books that he's more comfortable with. Whichever it is, it feels like it's half in one world, and half in the other, which is oddly appropriate given the subject, but not really ideal from the reader's perspective.