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Real fantasy >> Guy Gavriel Kay's sail to success by JULIET WATERS
One could say this is the situation for Caius Crispus. Crispin, as he's informally known, is a master mosaicist from the West who's been summoned by Valerius, Emperor of Sarantium, a fantastic but strangely real land based on the Empire of Byzantium during the reign of Justinian. But one couldn't really say this of Crispin's creator Guy Gavriel Kay, author of Sailing to Sarantium. Success is something he's already achieved. There are over a million of Kay's books in print in 14 languages, and he's managed to achieve international critical success with mainstream reviewers and readers. Kay is a remarkably grounded man, considering his vocation as a master fantasizer, and extremely careful about not risking failure. Even at the tender age of 20, when an acquaintance he'd formed with J.R.R. Tolkien's son, Christopher, led to Kay editing Tolkien's final book, The Silmarillion, Kay never abandoned reality. "I had the classic adolescent dream that I'd like to be a writer," says Kay. "But I was sufficiently pragmatic to be aware that the likelihood of being able to support myself and my family writing fiction was exceptionally remote. So I completed a law degree as your classic 'something to fall back on.' Then I went to Crete and wrote a novel." The rejection letters he got were "wonderfully encouraging." But rent had to be paid, so he started using his legal training to write for CBC docudrama series Scales of Justice. Still, because the series only ran for seven to eight months a year, he was able to spend a good chunk of time working on his fiction. By the '90s, with the critical and financial success of six novels, Kay was well past any creative or financial precipice. But his start on Scales of Justice is somewhat ironic, considering that his radical departure from docudrama may be a large part of his success. "One of the things that's happening in the response to my fiction is that I'm being seen as a little bit of an antidote to the increasing trend towards what people are calling 'faction,' or fiction using real people. It's almost as if novelists today are taking the view that anyone is fair game, that you can write about anyone living or dead, long-dead, famous or obscure and tuck it into your fiction. You can put words in the mouth of Jackie Gleason, as Don Delillo did [in his latest novel Underworld], or Paul Bernardo. Or you can use Liz Taylor as a character in a book because she's so famous. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm a little bit uneasy, in the Bill ClintonMonica Lewinsky era, about the implications for the separation of public and private. "Perhaps one honourable way of dealing with people in the past is to be quite up front in saying, 'I don't know what the Emperor Justinian thought or sounded like. I don't know what his favorite sexual position with his wife was or what he did with his mistresses or if he had them. Nobody does.' But because I'm using fantasy, I'm not making any claims to really understand him." In many ways, Sailing to Sarantium is a relief from the plotless and often thematic sloppiness of recent fiction that re-imagines history. But while Kay does try to deal with adult and political themes, his main goal is, and will always be, to write escapist literature. "Fundamentally, what I'm trying to write is intelligent entertainment--I want you to be turning the pages. I like the image of a stiletto rather than the image of a sledgehammer. I want you racing through the book at three o'clock in the morning and then discovering that, a month or two later, or a year later, it's still with you. That's my own image of success as a novelist." Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking, hc, 438 pp, $32
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"To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune--or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something too vast for his capacity."