Written on the Dark: Feels like Kay’s most elegiac work

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

In Written on the Dark (2025), Guy Gavriel Kay returns to his “quarter-turn from our own” world, here shifting time and place to a late-medieval “France” (Ferrieres in Kay’s universe) ruled by a “mad king.” When the king’s brother is killed by the powerful Duke of Barratin and left on the streets of Orane (think Paris), tavern poet Thierry Villar finds himself embroiled in the politics and intrigue of a world he’d never imagined himself part of, as Ferrieres tries to avoid civil war while also attempting to fend off an exterior invasion by the king of the island nation across the channel.

Let’s just get the easy part out now. Written on the Dark is a wonderful read — classic Kay in its elegant warmth, masterful use of POV, careful twisting of history, and admixture of the sweet and sorrowful. If you’re a fan of his work, you should absolutely read it. If you haven’t read his work, you should absolutely read it (though perhaps not first). And if you have read his work and are not a fan, I’m not here to shame you — books are never for all readers — but will respectfully suggest you should also absolutely read it so as to realize the error of your ways and then correct said error by going back and reading his other works.

Among the historical analogs that form the background are the Hundred Years War between France and England, Charles the VI’s mental problems, Henry V’s invasion, Joan of Arc, the battle of Agincourt, and the Duke of Burgandy’s assassination of his cousin, the king’s brother. Kay has always used history more as a guideline than a rule, switching up times and places and personages as needed for plotting, but it seems he plays more freely here, completely flipping historical events upside down rather than massaging them into place. I won’t spoil the impact of doing so by detailing those changes, so will simply note the effect is both stimulating in its unexpectedness and moving in its sense of “what could have been.”

Characterization is its typical strong point, beginning with our main character, Thierry Villar, loosely based on the actual French poet François Villon. Vividly conceived from the start, even better is how we see him grow in his many facets: poet, child, lover, lawyer, and a man “perversely excited … by unexpected proximity to power, to great events, however terrible.” We’re prepared early on for this growth, as Thierry muses that “He was still young, of course. He might grow into something different, someone different. You weren’t the same though the whole of your life, were you?” The answer, for him and many in the book, is no, they are not the same throughout their lives.

As a writer, he is introduced immediately as “a man who shaped lines in the dark … That defined him, he thought.” We’re not just told he’s a writer, however. Or simply presented with his work, though Kay does put on his poet’s hat to provide us several examples. Instead we’re shown how being a writer is not just what one does when putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards) but colors all one does. The way, for instance, that Thierry, despite facing a wholly unexpected life and death moment, turns his attention elsewhere: “Thierry blinked. There felt to be frost forming on his eyelids. An image for a poem?” Or how, as he thinks to himself, “Words one chose were a way of seeing, of understanding the world.”

When we first meet him, he’s already a popular tavern poet, improvising sharply biting poems in pubs, most in an “ongoing series of bequests he purported to make to various people”, such as a “strap-on device … to make up for [a] tavernkeeper’s own diminutive needle” or an “enchanted purse” to act as a “renewable maidenhead” for an aristocratic woman who had wronged him. His work is “amusing and harmless” in the words of one character, “not for the likes of” the higher class as he himself says. But later he crafts a “sequence of poems … different from anything he’d ever done before” and that, as the omniscient narrator informs us, “marked a demarcation, it would afterwards be said, in what Thierry Villar had to say with and through his work. And perhaps also in who he was.” And still later, in keeping with the idea that one is continually changing, in a different time, a different place, he writes other poems that “became, for a number of readers (and scholars, afterwards) his defining works.”

Similarly, Thierry matures and deepens in his relationships with his stepfather (in a lovely and moving scene), his longtime friend Silvy who everyone save the two of them knows is destined to become his lover, and his mutual but sometimes fraught friendship with the sergeant then provost Medor Colle. All this while he moves unexpectedly from a useful tool in investigating the murder of the king’s brother to a man deeply involved in events and decisions that will dictate the future of the realm.

Other richly constructed characters (though not all get the same page time) include the aforementioned Silvy, Medor, and stepfather; Provost Robbin de Vaux, who brings Thierry in at the start to investigate; Medor’s uncle Gauvard, a gender-fluid seer of the half-world; and the courtly poet Marina di Seressa (based on Christine de Pizan). All are presented as supremely capable, a pattern across their personalities (one that extends to side characters as well). Silvy’s competence got her part ownership of a bar after she’d done such a good job managing it while the original owner had to leave town, and Thierry, missing her after long absence, imagines her, “patrolling the floor of the tavern, organizing everyone. Doing it calmly, unruffled by almost anything.” Meanwhile, De Vaux pushes the investigation of the murder despite knowing quite well the possible consequences to himself:

“You’d probably be safer to leave this alone, no?”

“I am quite certain I would be,” said Robbin de Vaux.

“Dog with a bone?” Thierry asked.

But after a pause the other man shook his head. “Provost of Orane. And the king’s brother was murdered last night.”

Had to respect that, Thierry thought

A thought he echoes watching Medor in action: “J’ad’s blood, Thierry thought. The captain of the serjeants was impressive.” Even the bartender gets a shout-out: “Le Futrier looked at him. Another capable man, Thierry thought.” And while Marina di Seressa is already a highly recognized court poet, like Thierry she finds another style that shows off more of her ability than sponsored poems for the nobility. Besides their shared competency, each is given an emotionally complex backstory and their own changing arc. We even get backstories for characters barely appearing in these pages, such as a guardsman. This has always been one of my favorite elements of Kay’s writing — the refusal to denote characters as “lesser” or “minor” and instead view them as characters in their own story that we’re just not seeing much of, though we get hints of just how equally rich their stories might be.

Another aspect of Kay’s style I enjoy is the move between micro and macro, as we shift between a tight third-person POV for most of the story but at times zoom outward via an omniscient narrator far less bound by space or time. Sometimes it remains tied to a character we’ve just been in tight with, a simple, quick in and out flash forward:

All his life, and he lived a very long time, and even saw Sarantium again, Gauvard Colle would remember that afternoon, that room.

Robbin de Vaux did blame himself for not finding her, however, all his life. Because of what happened. Because of what he believed he might have prevented …

Sometimes it’s to follow a character beyond the prime storyline as per the above point about secondary characters:

Angland refused to pay the ransom demanded [for their captured king]. King Hardan’s brother Jarl was, it appeared, in no great hurry to have his brother back and his own place on the throne surrendered … a different agreement was reached.

As it happened … Pons van Cové refused to kill the silver-haired cleric … He was also clever, like his father, and surmised he’d be killed himself, afterwards … He’d beseeched that he might be permitted to remain there, take vows … He was accepted in this request. He ended up having a different sort of life, however …

Sometimes it is to pull way, way back and show a more general impact on the world:

In the east, the star-worshipping Asharites took note of these events, and in those days the first stirrings of an intent, not just an aspiration, to conquer the golden city of Sarantium emerged. It would take time, but it would happen.

And finally, sometimes it is to throw a welcome bone to Kay readers and allow us to follow a thread connecting this novel to others he’s written:

Decades after that day, in a time after the world has greatly changed, another king of Ferrieres, the grandson of this one, will receive an emissary from the High Patriarch in Rhodias … A woman of no status at all will be present in the room, as she happens to be a part of the emissary’s entourage. She will discover, because she is clever and alert, a spy from a hostile country beneath the window …

Thematically, Kay brings in a number of subjects. A major one, and one I might argue is not much removed from the same concept above of no minor characters, is the way in which small decisions can have major impact, whether they be made by kings and queens and other “greats” or by those often overlooked by the history books: the tavern poets, the bartenders, the guardsmen. Or how mere chance also plays a major role. We see these “pivot points” again and again here. Sometimes the characters are aware of them, though usually in hindsight:

Thierry thought of Lambert Maar, who had spoken too freely in a tavern about a robbery being planned. Which had led to his being here. The things that could shape your life.

Silvy said. “Quick, go get your drink.” It was too late, though. She thought about that, too, after. If they hadn’t kept on talking, if he’d just gone to Eudes when she’d said to … Life was full of such moments, she decided later. And held to that idea for the rest of her life

And, rarely, they might have a sense in the moment:

He said, from by the window, “If I walk towards you, it feels like so much changes.”

Whether these pivot points tilt the character, the situation, the world to good or ill varies. Life, after all, both gifts us with joy and burdens us with sorrow, and Kay’s characters across their spectrum and often across their individual lives get their fair (or unfair) share of each. That joy might be a shared love (even if one long delayed), deep friendship, or warm familial relationship. It might come via art, both the observing and the making of it. It might be the offer of a simple fire, both the promised warmth and the offer itself — “The kindness of ordinary people, even amid their own sorrows and hardship, Robbin de Vaux thought. Not for the first time.” — or support from an unexpected quarter: “He did nothing wrong!” cried Fermin Lessieur. Which was, Thierry thought, unexpectedly brave. People could surprise you.” As we’re told after the revelation of one particularly moving moment of joy: “We can be given such gifts sometimes, if we are deeply fortunate.”

Of course, the flip side of life’s joy is inevitable, given our mortal nature. And Kay has always been a writer of loss as well as happiness. Sometimes one follows on the other, sometimes one balances one character’s experiences with another’s. Sometimes they are deeply intermingled, as in one instance where Kay twists historical events to provide an unexpected happy ending, but one that comes via the poignant sacrifice of someone else. If our lives, our loves, come to an inevitable end, so too does another of our joys, for art too is often lost. Not always, not all of it, but still too much. As Kay writes, “So much uncertainty lies in art, and what endures. Where and when the lightning flash of brilliance will strike. What is valued in a given time, or over time. And what is lost, forgotten.” Still, we can take some comfort in what remains: “Surviving through time is a victory for art.” And for us as well.

This mingling of joy and sorrow, the pleasure of the moments we exist in and their inevitable end is conveyed through a running theme of “interludes”:

It seems to me that most moments in a life can be called interludes: following something, preceding something. Carrying us forward, rising and falling, with our needs and nature and desires, as we move through our time. It also seems to me that it is foolish to try to comprehend all that happens to us, let alone understand the world.

The book itself I’d argue mirrors this concept in its structure, the way it pauses for a while to focus on a time, then jumps ahead to detail another period, skipping over whatever intervening months/years took place. The story, therefore, is not a seamless narrative but more a series of situations (“vignettes” or “moments” conveys a shorter time than is often covered). Personal responses to this structure will of course vary, but I for one found it effective in its pacing but more so I loved it for how it mirrored one of the novel’s major themes. A theme laid out overtly when Thierry recalls that “Someone had written that life was an island of light between darkness and darkness.”

I’ll confess here my ignorance as to whether Thierry is directly quoting an actual person (maybe even the poet he is based on?), but it called to my mind Nabokov’s line that “common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” Apologies to Kay if I missed the allusion (an even stronger apology if it references his own work), but either Thierry’s direct quote or Nabokov’s quite similar concept obviously mesh well with a book titled “Written on the Dark” that focuses on “interludes.” Beyond the title and Thierry’s recollection, the idea makes its presence felt through the imagery of light and dark that runs throughout the novel.

• The mad king of Ferrieres “entangled in a furious darkness of the mind” but who also experiences times (interludes) of lucidity.

• A description of chance and fate working their influence: “What takes place, what does not: so many forks and branches along the twisting roads of time, so many wheels of fate turning, turning, lifting and lowering, one person, another, into light, into darkness“
• Thierry rising “shape lines in the dark “ via the light of a candle (art its own form of light amidst the darkness)
• Window lights shining in the night, the presence of life in the darkness
• Two men walking together, “their lives, long or short, brightly lit or dark-ensnared, lay ahead of them.”

It’s a wonderfully subtle use of structure, imagery, and POV, all of them working toward the conveyance of a bittersweet theme and honestly is worth the price of admission alone in my mind.

As is so much more. I’d love to spend time talking about Kay’s intricate plotting. The way he sets the reader up for scenes to come, the slow accretion of detail that reveals an important moment in Thierry’s life, the way characters and moments circle around to meet or echo past events. Or his use of the “half-world”, the light touch of fantasy that lies atop this grittier world of politics and murder and taverns. The various poems scattered throughout.

But this review is already getting quite long, so I’ll close with one final exploration. And in the spirit of the times, I’m going make a statement about Written on the Dark, that I have no idea if it’s true or not. Because while I don’t know this to be the case, Written on the Dark feels like Kay’s most elegiac work.

Which is saying something, given that his books, as noted, have always been a bittersweet mixture of life’s most wonderful and most mournful moments. Admittedly, to fully feel confident about my description, I’d have to go back and reread his prior works over a short period of time. Something I plan on doing anyway for the sheer pleasure, but not for this review. So why do I feel this way?

Honestly, it’s not something I can nail down. Partly it’s simply the sense of loss that pervades portions, particularly the closing of this book (and perhaps coming so much at the close the feeling lingered more strongly compared to other books). Partly I’m sure that theme of our lives being but brief periods of light between eternal darknesses. It’s possible a major part is that Kay feels more overtly present in this book as an author than in prior ones (though again, I lack confidence here since it’s been anywhere from a few years to 30 years that I’ve read any particular book by him, so perhaps I’m just forgetting).

Here, for instance, is a description of Marina’s work:

That poem was Marina di Seressa’s truth superimposed on the absence of knowing what had happened. Or, more properly, it was her invented tale. Not quite the same thing. Not quite. But near enough to make such stories one of the things we use to carry us through the uncertainty of our own days.

Which could serve just as easily as a descriptor for Kay, who takes what we call “history” and invents what happens in our gaps of knowledge (or even changes history to suit his needs).

Or there is the seer Gauvard, the person granted occasional if partial access to the half-world, who makes a plea to whatever powers live there to save his nephew Medor. A plea that Silvy questioned him about afterward:

“What . . . what were the words you said?” she asked. “I heard them, but I didn’t understand.” “I don’t know,” he said, a hollow whisper. “I don’t remember any words. What did I say?” “You said Weaver at the Loom,” Silvy told him. “I don’t even know what that means!” Gauvard said.”

A phrase somewhat oblique, but that gains some added weight coming after an earlier vision by Thierry:

It was as if, he thought, someone was scripting all their lines, writing them down, assigning them roles. He pictured a man, bearded, blue-eyed, no longer young, evoking them all, guiding what they were to say, and do. Shaping and telling their stories, perhaps with compassion, perhaps even with love.

 Which is of course about as overt as one can get. I suppose this could all be labeled some metafictional elements or some cute insider joking, but maybe it’s that “no longer young,” maybe it’s the numerous references to his other works, particularly in the epilogue, maybe it’s the line musing about what art will last and which will be forgotten. Or maybe it’s this summative note by one of the characters:

And so, finally, at this leaving and this end, is truth, among all the interwoven tales: I knew love, had true friends, may have done good in the world in a time that threatened war. And I wrote some poems. I did that. I did that.

I don’t like reading characters as authors. Too often too much can go badly awry in doing so. And I’m absolutely sure that, as always, my reading is colored by my own experiences: moving into my 60s (having outlived the prior generations of the men in my family by several decades now), a son graduating college, a wife retiring, the sense of all that is good about our country being drowned in the creek out back. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that for whatever reasons internal and external, this novel left me with a deeper sense of sadness than usual and also with a sense of Kay considering his own legacy, his life’s work, his family and true friends.

That said, that sadness was more than balanced out by the sheer pleasure of reading a writer of such stylistic grace and elegance, such meticulous plotting, and who brings such evident warmth and empathy to his creations. As Thierry might say, he did that; he did do that.

~Bill Capossere

Guy Gavriel Kay

On a bitterly cold winter night, Thierry Villar, an infamous “tavern poet” in the vivacious city of Orane, slips from his favorite haunt, daring to undertake a task that should change his fortunes and the course of his life. As he emerges onto the street, however, he finds another task awaiting him. Another fortune. Another life.

Beyond that, I hesitate to discuss the plot of Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest (standalone) novel, Written on the Dark. That could be a disservice to those who’ll read it. And I hope many of you will. I rarely publish book reviews now. My own writing takes priority, and as I’ve grown more familiar with fantasy literature, it’s harder to find books I love. But for a Kay novel — and if I haven’t declared it before, I confess Kay is my favorite (fantasy) author and an inspiration — I’ll always make an exception.

I’ll comment first for those who haven’t read Kay. Here’s why I read Kay. His unique niche is this: he identifies a time and place ripe with possibility, in this case medieval France in the third phase of The Hundred Years’ War, two or three decades before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (coincidentally, the same year the War ended). He then transports it into the realm of the fantastic, another world, like ours but enchantingly illuminated by the light of two moons, white and blue, a world closer to (perhaps less blind to?) the “half-world” of faeries and spirits just beyond most mortals’ sight. And in this world, through the gifts of vividly drawn characters; their wise or foolish, often conflicting, desires; and elegant, insightful prose, we can find — by the light of the second moon — that our humanity and lives are more magical than we tend to remember. Kay reminds us that they are.

For those who have read Kay, you’re going to buy or borrow this novel. Of course you are. Set in the same world as his recent novels — Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago, and All the Seas of the World — Written on the Dark offers a glimpse of that world’s divided France before the cataclysmic fall of Sarantium (Kay’s Constantinople), introducing us to Thierry and his peers as they navigate paths between myriad, competing interests and powers: commoners and nobility; Ferrieres (France) and Angland (England); rivalrous dukes; church and state; masculinity and femininity; their world and the half-world and whatever may wait beyond both. And you’ll certainly want to meet a legendary French saint.

“How does Written on the Dark compare to Kay’s previous works?” a seasoned reader might wonder. I wondered, too, because it struck me as different in some aspects. Most obviously, it’s shorter. My advance copy was some 300 pages, as opposed to my hardcovers of the abovementioned novels and early epics like Tigana, which contain 500-700 pages. With this length and the prose — still lyrical but perhaps more spare; the novel opens with a sentence fragment — the distinction may be this: if Kay’s earlier “French” masterpiece A Song for Arbonne is like a massive Bayeux tapestry, or a baroque painting with starkly contrasting colors (sun-gold and heartsblood-red against a night-black field), Written on the Dark is more impressionistic. Less paint, perhaps, but with images no less memorable. Also noteworthy is the prominent role of LGBTQ+ characters, not that their identity and sexuality solely define them or their deeds. They’re fully realized characters — people — like those who occupy our world. Imagine.

Written on the Dark consists of three distinct parts, with an interlude between the second and third. Written on the Dark itself could be viewed as an interlude between Kay’s earlier, high-fantasy epics and the intricate, quasi-historical works of recent years. (Again, it chronologically precedes the fall of Sarantium in this world.) I loved Thierry’s poignant musings at the end of chapters. I loved the references to events in other novels (even those as seemingly distant as THE FIONAVAR TAPESTRY), as well as — I refuse to say too much — a breaching of the fourth wall. I’ve no doubt this is a novel I’ll reread with fondness.

With its release on the cusp of summer, a season marked by vacations and other interludes, I highly recommend taking Written on the Dark with you. In an airplane or airport, if you’re forced. But if you find yourself on a sun-bright beach, stepping into a brutally cold winter’s night, or beneath the glow of your favorite lamp with a glass at hand, I promise you an abundance of both humanity and magic — the magic of humanity — in Written on the Dark.

~Rob Rhodes