Where Kay Wipes Me Out. Again.

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ysabel stands out a bit among Kay's works; unlike virtually every other one, it is not set in a secondary world ("Well, actually..." someone might say, but let's not stop for that now), and the main character is a young teenager. It could be marketed as YA, and would work in that category, as Ned and Kate make great YA protagonists, but it isn't really aimed that way. It's also an urban fantasy, set in modern France rather than medieval or ancient sorta Italy or sorta Spain or Sorta Constantinople or sorta China like most of his books. (I love Tigana and Lions of al-Rassan and those other sorta-Europe and sort-Asia books, btw.) And even though it charts a different path, it's still Kay and still wonderful.

I usually rank books--sincerely but somewhat self-consciously for an old literature teacher--according to how much fun I have reading them. And this book, like the others, *is* fun. But more than that, and like all of his books, this taps genuine emotion in a way that a lot of literature cannot, forcing a deeper response, one more like the pain and pleasure of nostalgia, of fondly remembered loss, and that jumps it up a level. (You have to be ready to read a Kay novel. I love them, but they always cut. IMO, Tigana hurts the best, and I'm half afraid to read it a second time.) I really don't know how he does it, and I'm looking, mind you, but he tells a story that makes you see things a different way--the passage of time, the movement of humans through history, the significance of individual lives, the meaning of human connection--and at the end of the novel I'm not sure if I'm a bit happier or a bit sadder, but I feel like I may be a bit wiser.

If that's a sign of genius--which I think it is--a lot more people should be paying way more attention. And if it isn't, if he's tricking us all, and it's just sleight of hand, it's a whole different kind of genius and I'm still gonna applaud. There's always something about things ending, things changing... It gets me every time.

What I didn't know until halfway through was that this novel is technically a sequel to his fantasy trilogy, the Fionovar Tapestry (which is a secondary world fantasy, or really a portal fantasy, so the "Well, actually..." goes here). It isn't relevant to this story, which stands on its own, but when I recognized the connection (and then googled what I should have known all along) the realization took me back to college and my early twenties when I read those books, and it kinda freaked me out. I had a whole career between the trilogy and this. It was like remembering a dream you had years ago...

Ned travels from Montreal to southern France with his father, who's working on a book of photography, and while he's visiting ancient sites gets involved in something inexplicable, finding himself tied into the very real and ongoing story of a love triangle going back more than 2000 years. In some way, Ned himself is connected to the story, and before long it involves his family and everyone around them. The juxtaposition of the strange and the everyday, of the unremarkable and the menacing, is so adroitly managed that it's still cool and eerie and weird all the way to the end, not flattened and normalized.

With high stakes, well managed pacing, an amazing sense of place, and Kay's always-excellent character development, I found that Ysabel works very well as a fantasy or action novel, but it's the deep history of the Greeks and Romans displacing the Celts, and the love triangle of Ysabel, Phelan, and Cadell--a story that Ned and the others get dragged into--that supplies the poignant, sentimental, nostalgic feel that permeates his work, like happening on a faded polaroid of your 1972 Cedar Point vacation, where loved ones long gone smile forever on a sunny day.

Like I say, you've gotta be ready for that. It cuts a bit.

Recommended.

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