Fantasy Book Club discussion

Please use this thread to post Song for Arbonne specific questions you would like Mr. Kay to answer.

As an additional point to this post, I'd love to see ANY question for Mr. Kay regarding either his upcoming "Under Heaven," future novels OR previous works. I am doing a book review of "Under Heaven" now and hope to be allowed to interview him afterwards. I'd love to be able to include questions from others. :)

Hello to all. Having been lured hither by Laurel (hard to say no to another Winnipegger, especially while basking in a generalized Canadian glow this week) I have promised to check in at intervals, though will appreciate indulgence as it is about to become a very busy late winter and spring for me.

Victoria asks about questions on other books. I'd say it is only fair if those who received ARCs (advance reading copies) of UNDER HEAVEN didn't twist the knife for others who have to wait, and any queries would be inherently spoilers, so let's try not to go there. It is too soon for me to start talking about it, anyhow. Give me till April? I'll have to start saying a great deal then ...

Same for earlier titles, as to spoilers. I'm not going to say 'no, never' to questions about other books here, but please be kind to your fellow readers and remember not everyone will have read other books of mine. The issue of spoilers is always a delicate one - I did a journal post on it last week, at brightweavings.com.

In any case, thanks for the invitation. Hope readers here enjoy ASfA ... treat it, in part, as a love song to Provence. (The framing of the novel is a hint to that effect.)

GGK

Actually, I wasn't speaking so much of spoilers - I hate them and try not to spoil things for others.

One question I've wanted to ask for a long time is, why do you switch between tenses? My apologies if you've answered this before and I haven't seen the answer!

Victoria, that actually has different impulses and underlying reasons for each book and, for me, becomes yet another example how how glorious our language is for enabling nuance and subtext. I admit I worry (sometimes a lot) that some readers are losing the sense of pace and rhythm and tone that can take a book out of the 'just tell the story' mode that films and a lot of pop fiction cultivate or encourage. When authors push their language, by implication they are also pushing readers.

In ASfA I was using present tense in good part to work with the intensity, the fierce presence of malice and threat from the north. Evil shown as immediate, made more vivid. I had in mind the celebrated line from Yeats, 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.' (I quote this line a lot, in life.)

Mr. Kay,

Wow. Laurel had told me you would be popping in but it was still a pleasant surprise to see you here in our humble forum. I'd like to personally thank you for taking time to interact with our members. We have a fun group here!

Victoria beat me to my question, and your answer makes a lot of sense. I had wondered the same thing while reading. I will also note that while I noticed the switch in tense, it only took a sentence or two for my brain to adjust and flow with it. Those scenes in the north are some of my favorite.

I will say that my absolute favorite (so far, as I'm not quite finished) scene is that where Ramir of Talair gets the attention of the revelers in the tavern by singing Anselme's song of being away from Arbonne. "I told you I would not sing one of Anselme's songs of love. That is not true, on reflection. I did sing a love song after all."

Wow. That really hit the spot. I felt captivated by his song, and his passion for Arbonne. As were the foreigners that had up until he came out disputed the place in the world of Arbonne's joglars and troubadours.

To my question, then. The music in A Song for Arbonne is a central and crucial part of the story. Was there a specific musical and/or lyrical inspiration that you had in mind while writing this?

Thank you! Now I have to return to every book you've written and dedeuce why you're using present in each situation. This will be fun. ;D That challenge to the reader is one of the main reasons why I enjoy your books, by the way.

Hello Mr. Kay!

I'd like to know if you have any musical background or play any instruments? Your poetry is very vibrant and I'm wondering if you just think in words (if I can say it like that) or do you compose melodies (as opposed to humming like I would do) for your poetry and songs to help the process.

A Song for Arbonne was wonderful and I am anxiously awaiting Under Heaven!

LOL. I stole Chris's idea and Simkine stole my next one. I've wondered the same thing. You use music and poetry in a number of your books and I've wondered since Tigana if you have a musical background.

I used to half-joke that I wrote about music so much as a partial way of compensating for NOT being musical. (Music comes into the new book, too.) I have a response to music (though not a sophisticated one) but no talent for it. I do write lyrics and poetry, my first published work and awards were for poetry.

For ASfA, there's a pretty specific music association. We were living just outside Aix en Provence, while I was researching the book; there happened to be a concert in the Palais de Justice in town, as part of a festival. The programme was of troubadour music, sung by a woman I'd never heard of. Her name's Esther Lamandier, she was stunningly good, and evocative (we've corresponded a few times over the years) and sent me straight from the concert to buy her CDs and various other period recordings of music from Provence at the time of the troubadours. There are many gifted artists working in this vein: Joël Cohen and Camerata Mediterranea are terrific (a CD called Lo Gai Saber), so is Anne Azéma (who also sings with Cohen's group), and there are others.

This isn't a push for people to chase them down (though it isn't such a bad idea) since the music's an acquired taste in a major way, but it did inspire me, listening to Esther that night. It fed straight into the emerging image of what I wanted to do.

For the audiobook version of ASfA, the producer and the reader (Euan Morton does the reading) worked with a historian of music to come up with renderings of all the songs in the book. I was worried at first, but Morton's a Broadway and West End musical performer, and he does the songs beautifully, to my mind. For this particular book, it made sense to sing them ... even the silly one sung on the isle, early in the book!

Guy wrote: "Victoria, that actually has different impulses and underlying reasons for each book and, for me, becomes yet another example how how glorious our language is for enabling nuance and subtext. I admi..."

This is one of the choice things I truly love about your work - that you dare - the lyricism of the prose and the use of language is not dumbed down, but made the beautiful tool to extend the book's reach, mood and atmosphere. Please keep on with this! It takes more courage to be individual, but there are readers who have the appreciation to enjoy the style.

I found it very daring that you chose present tense - this is not easy to do, and is considered 'breaking the rules' (why, I will never know) - but the effect was well handled and seamless. Thank you for taking the chance.

Also, thank you for mentioning the musical roots - I was quite unaware of that facet - and it's added a richness to my appreciation.

Janny is a musician herself, as many here probably know. She's one of the people who can 'do music' from within, in her work. So is someone like Charles de Lint. I come at it, as I said, from a different angle, and I do the same thing for other art forms, as well: mosaics and chariot racing, say, in the Sarantium books.

Guy, I know you are extremely particular about what story ideas you choose to pursue. Also, you bring an enormous amount of thought and cultural experience to bear on the fantasy settings and people you create.

Would you mind telling us more about what inspired you to write this book, and how the ideas evolved as you worked them? In particular, I'm curious about what aspects came to surprise you - what areas opened up and gave you the good kind of astonishment.

As I told Laurel when she invited me here to hang out a bit in March, one of the ironies of these discussions with an author is that readers are often VERY fresh to the book (read or re-read) and the writer is reaching back a long way! I researched and wrote ASfA in the early 1990's and an awful lot of reading and writing have intervened!

So it is very hard to reach back to specific inspirations (and I always caution readers or listeners to take them with a grain of salt anyhow, from anyone, because we writers often describe things after the fact as logical or planned when they were intuitive).

Having said that, I know I became interested in the Albigensian Crusade and the 'conquest' of Provence by northern France. I was reading about the troubadours (including a book by C.S. Lewis), about the history of the time, about the Courts of Love and Eleanor of Aquitaine (many books appearing about her this year, including one by the splendid Cecelia Holland).

And I wanted to live in Provence for awhile! (Had written much of TIGANA in Tuscany, it felt like a very civilized modus operandi.) Once we got there, what caught me (this is part of the surprise Janny asks about) was the intensity of the sights, sounds, smells, the presence of the past ... and this all returned, by the way, many years later when we went back and I was ambushed by the idea for YSABEL.

I think the main 'new thing' that infused ASfA was this falling in love with place, and being there (we went twice, once to research, then again to write it ...) to register details, let the book be steeped in them.

This is also the book, really, where my ideas about fantasy as a way of exploring history started to take shape, though I didn't begin writing or speaking about those concepts formally for several years.

So Arbonne was really a pivotal book for you, though you may not have realized it at the time?

It isn't always the case that we know when we're making major shifts of ground. I did know with TIGANA, because that was a very conscious decision to do something dramatically different from FIONAVAR. ASfA was subtler as a change, and it is fair to say that some looking back was involved in realizing the change it represented.

Hello Mr. Kay! Thank you so much for being here!

I have two questions. First, I was wondering if you could recommend a book or two that would give an overview of the historical period that inspired you, for a reader unfamiliar with the history? I absolutely fell in love with Arbonne and would love to know more about Provence that it was based on.

Second, could you talk about how you decided when in the book to reveal the ultimate root of the feud between Talair and Miraval? With the caveat that I was in high school at the time and not a very mature reader, I remember the first time I read ASfA I was frustrated at being kept in the dark so long. As an adult who has re-read the book many times I can now appreciate more the slow piecing together of the puzzle with the final piece not being revealed until the very end. Was there a particular effect you were aiming for?

Thank you!

Hello Shel,

Hmm. Best books. I actually have a Bibliography section on brightweavings.com (not up to date enough, alas) where I mention a few of the books that helped for each novel. The one for Arbonne is here:

http://www.brightweavings.com/bibliog...

Since then, a really fine history of the Cathars and the crusade(s) against them has been published, a book called The Yellow Cross, by Rene Weis. This is not light history, but it is very well-done history. (There are other good books on the story, too.)

As I mentioned, this year seems to have a storm of novels on Eleanor of Aquitaine coming, but the Amy Kelly book about her is a non-fiction classic and the well-known Alison Weir has written a bio, too. (I haven't read it.)

There are so many good (and rather more bad) histories of the so-called Middle Ages. If you twist my arm and make me pick one I'll say the Heer book (The Medieval World). Montaillou, on the trials of Cathar heretics in a tiny town, is in every way a vital book - one of the books that changed how history was written in the 20th century. This realm of research and writing, looking for the lives of ordinary people, has had a major impact on my work, though I do NOT accept that you can only do history this way or only through great events and famous people. The key is to navigate back and forth. The battles between the approaches is silly, from my point of view. (It is a battle, and gets ugly sometimes.) It isn't, as I like to say, either/or. We can benefit from both approaches.

________

I don't think I had a very specific effect in mind for the ending, Shel (though I was smiling when I thought of, and wrote, the VERY ending, with Luth). I do believe that patience is critical for a writer and for a reader - though sometimes it only comes at a second reading! I place a lot of weight on the shape of a book, what I call the architecture, and that includes foreshadowing, timing, an opening rhythm that suits the story. An example? The long, complex Prologue of The Sarantine Mosaic IS a mosaic piece, and meant to have an effect along the lines of how mosaics are described in the book.

Thank you so much for answering our questions Guy! I "discovered" your books when one of my favorite authors, Jacqueline Carey, said you were one of her favorite authors and influences. When you aren't busy writing, and before you were published, who were your influences and favorite authors?

Thanks for answering questions. It has been a wonderful experience!

Morning, all. Jeanne, if you are asking (as I think you are) who my early favourite writers were, that won't be the same as current 'you have to read this!' books. When very young I read a lot of historical fiction - Rosemary Sutcliff, Geoffrey Trease, Mary Renault, then Robert Graves, Dorothy Dunnett - and loved all of those names. Tolkien I read at 11 or 12, and then he led me to some of his contemporaries and predecessors (more than to those who followed) such as Lord Dunsany, Peake's Gormenghast and the utterly unique E.R. Eddison (The Worm Ouroboros, Mistress of Mistresses). But I was also devouring widely different, very contemporary works as well. I read omnivorously, and without a whole lot of fine-tuned discrimination when I was young. And then there's poetry ...

Thanks Guy! That was exactly what I was curious about, sort of like the ancestry of my favorite authors' influences. Now I am going to move The Worm Ouroboros to the top of my reading pile. Interestingly enough, my family name is the same as the "R" in E.R. Eddison, which is why I bought the book in the first place, I was born a Rücker!

Guy wrote: "Morning, all. Jeanne, if you are asking (as I think you are) who my early favourite writers were, that won't be the same as current 'you have to read this!' books. When very young I read a lot of h..."

That's a wonderful list, Guy - we have shared a lot of ground, it would seem.

What about the poetry? I am curious...

Janny, I was trying not to stress out surfers with poetry early in the morning! If you get me started on this you need a rope to rein me in.

There are really too many to name. The newest name I push on people these days is Lawrence Raab, a collection called What We Don't Know About Each Other. And a brilliant Canadian poet named Don Coles. Find Forest of the Medieval World or Kurgan or The Prinzhorn Collection. He's superb.

In a real sense, the people who had the greatest influence on me were poets not novelists (I didn't read short fiction as much, though John Cheever was and is godlike for me). When I was young, it was Dylan Thomas and Yeats. Yeats goes on and on, he's without end. After high school I discovered George Seferis, the Greek Nobel Prize winner, and he (along with his countryman, Cavafy) are templates for me, though in different ways. Cavafy for his tone, his use of obscure corners of the past to illuminate 'now', and Seferis for the way he GREW during WWII and after, through the tragedy of Greece in those years. I always used say I wanted to be good enough to at least aspire to a 'we' as large as Seferis's. There's a level of compassion and humanity in his best work that gets to me deeply and it was the war that changed him from a clever, skilled Symbolist into something much more. I also go back to Robert Lowell all the time, that tormented man, and I join a long list of writers slightly obsessed with Rilke (I always ask others why they are so fascinated by him, because it IS fascination, and a lot of it is the life of a selfish, unpleasant man. But read 'The Spanish Trilogy' if you are a writer, and tell me he doesn't nail something stunningly well, and movingly. Stephen Mitchell's translation is my favourite, by far.)

I suppose 'to the point' right now, with UNDER HEAVEN about to appear, I have been immersed in Tang Dynasty poetry the last four or five years. I can count thirty or forty books of translation on the shelves, in addition to the ones I pulled from libraries. The first people to chase down are Li Bai and Du Fu.

Interestingly, perhaps, for people here, Patricia McKillip's husband, David Lunde happens to be an award-winning translator of Chinese poetry! Pat and I have known each other a long time, but this particular connection with Dave was only made at World Fantasy Con last fall. We very likely bored a group of people in the hotel bar, going on and on about the giants of the Tang. (I had one eye on the World Series game, I confess. Derek Jeter is very much like Bai Juyi. Alex Rodriguez is ...

No. That way lies madness!

Guy - thank you for sharing this!

There are the familiar names, and a lot that tantalizingly, aren't!

It's really amazing to see the enthusiasm as you discuss these sources. I too, was exposed to a lot of poetry, very young (mostly poetry readings, on a bi weekly basis, all through the summers I was growing up). The power of words to stimulate the imagination is immense, and in your case, has given us all that sense of richness.

You have an amazing list, here.

Janny,

And isn't it just too cool that Pat's husband is an established figure in Tang poetry translations? Talk about coincidences...

Off the wall question for you, then: Do you really believe in coincidences? ;D

Yes, but not all coincidences are coincidences. In this case it was someone who was at the first reading I ever gave from Under Heaven, at that convention, who knew David and mentioned the overlap of our (current) interests. So it was no coincidence that he came over in the bar (during the 7th inning, I think it was!) and we started talking.

It just feels like a coincidence that he's the spouse of a writer in my field that I've known and spoken with at conventions for years and years.

How's that?

LOL It'll do. Just curious. ;D

Guy wrote: "Janny,

And isn't it just too cool that Pat's husband is an established figure in Tang poetry translations? Talk about coincidences..."

Guy, yes, that IS cool, about Pat's husband. Shouldn't be a surprise, however - she's another (like you) with an exceptionally poetic turn of phrase. Both of you make reading fiction a gorgeously beautiful experience. It also isn't surprising that we've met pat, and never knew - Pat is such a quiet, unprepossessing person. Lovely to meet, but unlikely to be effusive. I was (quietly) marveling over this. (gawping, really!) The connections in this field are truly very rich. Thank you for sharing this, it lends yet another level of appreciation for Pat's work, too.

If I hadn't said, she's another (like you) that I've bought everything she's done - probably first edition, in hardbound. Some author's works are too tasty to leave for a moment, don't call me patient.

I've never understood the people who rant that there's no room for beautiful use of language, in story telling...my favorites have always been writers who can evoke powerful, emotional response, spin a satisfying tale, AND write with the full scope and depth of astonishment the language offers. A book that can travel in all these areas enriches the wonder.

Keep on sticking to your guns, please!

A 'table' bought from Walmart is NOT the same as a lovingly carved, hand made piece of furniture! Mass production can never replace the beauty of a fine wine, or an individually crafted piece. So it is with fiction - the true master of the craft works with all facets. One 'word' or turn of phrase is not 'equal' to another - there is room for all varieties, each serves its niche, but I have a special place for works that perform with aesthetics as well as function. The individual voice is important, particularly when it can be raised to answer to more than just one value.

Janny's generous comment put me immediately in mind of a favourite poem (both as to style and thought, which is her point, actually), and I am going to test the patience of GoodReads surfers who have innocently wandered here, by sharing it. This is Richard Wilbur's 'Junk', which he wrote (with purpose) in a style to evoke Anglo-Saxon verse. I fear I'm not adept enough to keep the proper formatting - imagine every second line heavily indented (as the Anglo-Saxon verses were)

An axe angles
from my neighbor’s ashcan;
It is hell’s handiwork,
the wood not hickory,
The flow of the grain
not faithfully followed.
The shivered shaft
rises from a shellheap
Of plastic playthings,
paper plates,
And the sheer shards
of shattered tumblers
That were not annealed
for the time needful.
At the same curbside,
a cast-off cabinet
Of wavily warped
unseasoned wood
Waits to be trundled
in the trash-man’s truck.
Haul them off! Hide them!
The heart winces
For junk and gimcrack,
for jerrybuilt things
And the men who make them
for a little money,
Bartering pride
like the bought boxer
Who pulls his punches,
or the paid-off jockey
Who in the home stretch
holds in his horse.
Yet the things themselves
in thoughtless honor
Have kept composure,
like captives who would not
Talk under torture.
Tossed from a tailgate
Where the dump displays
its random dolmens,
Its black barrows
and blazing valleys,
They shall waste in the weather
toward what they were.
The sun shall glory
in the glitter of glass-chips,
Foreseeing the salvage
of the prisoned sand,
And the blistering paint
peel off in patches,
That the good grain
be discovered again.
Then burnt, bulldozed,
they shall all be buried
To the depth of diamonds,
in the making dark
Where halt Hephaestus
keeps his hammer
And Wayland’s work
is worn away.

Guy, that is terribly sad! Reminds me of the way Thoreau treated that axe he borrowed at Walden Pond. The horror of a good tool badly abused.

Wow, Guy, that is awesome!
thanks for sharing.

Sad, but uplifting, that they should rise again as reworked diamonds. ;D Love it. Thanks for sharing.

This week was spring clean-up week where all the residents are allowed to pile up all the junk they want to get rid of that doesn't fit in normal trash cans and the city workers will come around with a skip loader and large dump trucks to carry it all away. This poem makes me view these piles of junk in a whole new light. Thank you for sharing it, Guy.

Guy, I think it would be interesting to know how you shifted your gears, between your first trilogy that began with The Summer Tree - and the later works.

I personally loved it just as much, aware that you drew from some extremely old, archtypal mythic legends to create that story base. Then everything changed, with Tigana. I've heard every sort of speculation about why your thrust shifted. Be curious if you could lend a clue, at least to a longtime admirer.

Sorry for being away a couple of days, as we near the end of this encounter here. Under Heaven is now shipping in Canada, the interview/media process started ramping up last week and this one, and the next while will be really busy - though this is hardly a complaint for an author! I've enjoyed the chance to spend a little time here chatting - and I appreciate your questions and patience! I even inflicted poetry on unsuspecting strangers!

Janny, you'll know yourself it is always hard to reconstruct the inward processes that led to an outward shift in work - for any kind of artist. I know that even back then I didn't want to repeat myself, or write what I called 'a four volume trilogy'. All power to those who write and read the major multi-volume works (including your own!), but it was never my interest.

So I treated Fionavar as my 'statement' in high fantasy, an attempt to graft elements of characterization to the form, moral and psychological ambiguity, adult sexuality, while still embracing the underlying myths, legends, devices, even forms (trilogy!) of the emerging field.

Tigana was a book I was deeply aware of as 'risky' when I began it and during the early writing. Indeed, my agent at the time was so enamoured of it, he sent it out partway and didn't get a single offer - even from my existing house, where the editor was unable to persuade the financial people I would be able to 'deliver' on the conclusion of something so 'different'. (In fairness, the agent was asking for a fair bit.)

So I was in the midst of a massive, gamechanging book, and no one was even prepared to lowball! It was a challenging time. I just pushed on, finished it, revised it, and when the finished book was submitted, the auction took the buying price to many multiples of the sum no one would even discuss, halfway.

I learned a few lessons from this, but mainly an awareness of how ambitious I was being with that novel ... in terms of what the industry had been used to seeing.

In a real way though, my own major shift of ground (for me, maybe for the genre) was with Arbonne, since Tigana is deeply imbued with magic and magic-wielders, and so still holds to that possible 'defining' aspect of fantasy. Arbonne took this a long way towards history and away from the supernatural.

Since then, I've seen it as an ebb and flow. I use supernatural elements as and if they FIT the story and the needs of the theme. I won't plug them in just to ... plug them in.

And, in the final analysis, to get back to the question, I think all these shifts for a writer just manifest shifts in the person. We need to grow and change, as people, as artists. It may make commercial sense to stick with what seems to have 'hit' but it doesn't make creative sense.

And thank you for sticking to your artistic guns/intuition! It's meant I've come to expect the unexpected from you, which is a perilous seat to sit in, but you've never let me down. :)

Guy wrote: "Janny, I was trying not to stress out surfers with poetry early in the morning! If you get me started on this you need a rope to rein me in.

There are really too many to name. The newest name I pu..."

Victoria wrote: "And thank you for sticking to your artistic guns/intuition! It's meant I've come to expect the unexpected from you, which is a perilous seat to sit in, but you've never let me down. :)"

Guy - thank you for posting this!
I confess, I have always wondered. I discovered your work very early on - it was a little notation on the tab to be torn off the 'return' form for the SF book club that said, The Summer Tree was a noteworthy book by a new author - got it, read it, and you had an instant reader, for life.

I went out and replaced the cheap book club copy with the real first edition hardback, and have bought you on release, ever since.

Then came Tigana - and all the rest - and I've seen other reader reactions - all along the line, some preferred your later work - a few liked your trilogy - there seemed a split point in readership - sometimes the artist may not notice a definitive shift, but the readership picks it up quickly. (This wasn't like the last one, etc).

I got the connections to the wide range of archtypal mythos you used in your trilogy and the way you recombined and shifted vantage on the older material blew me away. Now that you tell us (from inside) what you were doing - 'the definitive statement' - then move on, it's lovely to see what you intended, and not have only your readership's guesses as to what was happening.

Bravo for moving ahead with your interests, too. It's all too common for a writer to put out one successful work and get pigeonholed - working the groundbreaker ahead of the curve is always a tough sell. How nice it must feel that you found your way. I know well, that sense of uncertainty, when something does not fit the times, and waiting for the right editor to come along takes a lot of courage. You've shown your honest colors all along, in that way, and fantasy literature is the richer for it.

Every writer has their niche and their strengths - knowing what length and what venue to choose for each specific story is an artistic choice that can make or break the finished result. You have been writing standalones for a long time against the trend, and every one of them works successfully. Also, you have known when to make a longer work - your The Sarantine Mosaic Ii (Untit required a larger format, and your instincts told you true.

Just because there is a fad for series does not mean every story should be written in massive format.

If a work is very long, it had better deliver on many many levels, with lots of facets, without dissipation and sprawl...or having a cast of thousands of characters. The proof will be in the pudding, as with anything else, some writers excel at some formats, and don't shine in others.

It helps to have a purposeful awareness of what the story requires, and also, I think, you shine because it is so very evident you do these works for the love of it.

Okay, I'm going to bow out gracefully now (or as nearly as I can manage) as the month ends.

Thanks for questions and good company and even indulging some poetry.

Best to all,

GGK

Thank you!

Thank you for participating! I really appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions.

I loved the poem. Thank you for sharing and participating. Hope to see you back soon.

Great to have you, Guy, and best of success with Under Heaven - I look forward to reading your latest with hot anticipation!

Thanks for answering our questions. It was a real treat to have you here as we read your book....