Hippoi Athanatoi

Written on the Dark, the new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay, strikes me as a meditation on narratives—how we shape the stories of our lives, and how, if we are important enough or are caught up in significant events, others may reshape them.

This is hardly new territory for Kay; over the course of his career, reflections on the nature of storytelling have become increasingly more central to his writing. “You can die at the margins of a story as easily as at the centre of it. Or just be a glancing comment in another tale.” he writes at one point, reminding us again that a book (like life) is a tapestry of interwoven narratives. Someone who appears only briefly in one story, perhaps even dying there, remains at the heart of their own.

Ever since The Fionavar Tapestry, Kay has occasionally paused the main narrative to briefly follow characters who might otherwise be mere footnotes. Over time, these asides have claimed more space—and perhaps influenced his choice of protagonists. They are no longer the epic, larger than life characters of the early novels, but instead they might easily have been those marginal figures in one of his earlier works. While it is true that anyone, no matter how important, can be a passing mention in someone else’s story, it is much harder to imagine a character like Ammar or even Crispin passing through a story without leaving significant ripples.

To continue beyond these initial musings on the novel, I need to venture into spoiler territory.

In All the Seas of the World, Kay returns once more to his most frequently revisited alternate history setting, where the stories often touch upon the tensions between the followers of the three major religions: the Asharites, the Jaddites and the Kindath. I have not consciously reflected on this before, but when reading this book, I started thinking more about the choice of having these three religions be celestial, worshipping the stars, the sun and the two moons, respectively. To me, it heightens the tragedy and futility inherent in religious conflicts that their objects of worship are essentially the same things, seen in the same sky.