Excessive Candour
Ysabella Kissed a Fella

Ysabel is beyond honed. It reads like a perfectly cut jewel of singleton, with not a single turn untold (but more on that later). It is the 10th novel in Guy Gavriel Kay's shapely career—an array of fantasy titles which since the early 1980s has gained him what one might call a stealth prominence in the field—and its polish is profound: no hair out of place, no bell untolled, no call unreturned, seemingly.

In Kay's native Canada, Ysabel has been released to the general market, but it is in fact a very fine example of the Young Adult novel—an artifactual category of fiction disqualified as literature, as far as those who dislike it are concerned, through the obsessive content control that, until very recently, fatally denatured most titles obedient to the rules. But Kay has turned the traditional shibboleths of the YA game to his advantage, because the extremely complex and disturbing story he has chosen to not-quite-tell in Ysabel would—rendered in all its literal stark nakedness—burn his cast to the ground. Because it is not just good clean natural sex that Ysabel dances dynaflow shy of: it is unutterable obsession: the world well lost: lovedeath. The really dark side of family romance. So every stretched tendon of control is mandatory. In terms of YA traffic control procedures, Ysabel makes Scott Westerfeld look dithery; it is very much like a great classic Hollywood film. Katherine Hepburn could have played the mother.

But first the son. We are in Provence, in the 21st century. Young Ned Marriner has taken off from school in Canada to spend time with his famed photographer dad Edward, a man who has earned his perks and is a good father, along with two competent helpers and Melanie, Edward's "tiny assistant, almost ridiculously organized" (fairly soon, we begin to understand that everyone walks the walk in Ysabel, that everyone has an honourable part to play in the unfolding story, that there is no absence of good in Ysabel: no evil: no villain). While Edward works on a large book commission, they all live in luxury in a sumptuous rented villa near Aix-en-Provence, whose cathedral Ned is visiting on page one, and the action starts.

He meets cute young Kate, who thinks of herself as a "geek" (Kay handles knowledgeably, but maybe mentions too often, the unmentionably banal terror teenagers feel at being detected being in the possession of any inherently interesting knowledge), and together they encounter a mysterious scarred bald stranger who has left a rose at the foot of the eroded but deeply evocative statue of a woman. She is officially identified as the Queen of Sheba, but we will learn very soon that she is in fact an embodiment of the goddess—or maybe a creature once human but now caught up in an immortal drama—whose name this time round is Ysabel. The stranger—his name will be Phelan in this round of the eternal drama he's bound to like Semele—warns Ned off; but an ire wells up within Ned, along with mysterious access to intuitions he may have been born to utter, and he refuses the warning.

Spelunking the hot cave of sex

The epigraph to Ysabel comes from one of Robert Graves' greatest poems, "Juan at the Winter Solstice" (1939). Kay quotes the first stanza, which evokes "the one story and one story only" to which all our mundane tellings and retellings of our human condition belong; if he were not dancing the dynaflow of YA he could have also quoted the final stanza, which ends with the deeply dangerous statement that "nothing is promised that is not performed." Just what avatar of the White Goddess Graves is prefiguring here may not much matter: what matters is the mortal stakes, at the heart of Story, to which his entire poem points: the pre- and post-Christian conviction that we are fixed to the wheel: fixated to the intrinsicate cleave of flesh to flesh, the hot cave of sex which continues the race: the pre- and post-Enlightenment conviction that the wheel turns us. So when Ned responds with chthonic ire to Phelan's warning, we fear that his flesh will scald to steam in the heat of liebestod.

Payment is indeed soon enacted. Phelan's adversary in this Provencal version of the long blood-dimmed dawn drama soon materializes as well. Backstory slides effortlessly into the text: As the Roman general Marius, Phelan had 2,100 years earlier sacrificed an earlier version of Cadell, partly to ensure Roman hegemony over Provence, partly as one particularly savage climax in the long seasonal drama of rivalry between the two, the victor sleeping with the goddess during or after a ceremony we are meant to think is contiguous with our own cod-Celtic Beltane. The conflict never ends; sometimes Cadell gets her, sometimes Phelan, sometimes (good anthropogy here) both do, in the dark. Like everyone else in Ysabel, Phelan (who resembles Keith Carradine with his hair off) and Cadell (Sean Bean) both do what they must, for they are bound to. Both separately warn Ned and Kate away, but the youngsters almost fatally visit the Provencal site where Beltane is celebrated annually, normally by muesli Druids, but this year for real. Darkness falls too soon. Ned calls for help on his cell phone. Melanie shows up, but as she walks toward them is transformed step by step into the goddess, from whom no mortal (we must think) emerges. She is gone. The kids escape.

From this point the cast thickens, as it must if we are plausibly to expect Ned and Kate to survive the centripetal abyss of the presence of the holy. Ysabel has tasked her lovers to find where she is now hiding; the first to find her will sacrifice the other: at which point Melanie will surely become forever sublimated at the very instant that Ysabel experiences (Kay is stealth-reticent here, though what else could he mean?) one supernaturally intense orgasm. No time to waste then! The neatness is almost (though not quite) too much. Ned's valiant Doctor mother returns from Africa; her long-estranged sister, who knows about Beltane and stuff, also shows up, as does her enormous husband, who has been secretly sheepdogging the intrepid doctor, and who also knows stuff. Ned's dad turns out to be an expert fighter. Each member of his growing family, precisely and luminously distinguished from the rest of the cast, has a contribution to make, a power to exercise; each gets down to doing what he or she must.

Kay has a decision to enact here: whether to avow or ignore—for maybe it is another story—the growing parallels between Ned's mortal family (the sisters soon reconcile) and the immortals, whose drama becomes more and more tinged with family romance as it comes to climax. Perhaps inevitably, and with exact and silky precision, he chooses the latter. Ned finds Ysabel first, closely followed by the two warriors. At this point we learn why Ned has such a grasp of events, and something like a family compact is burnt into the shape of things. Melanie, 5 inches taller, comes back into the world. Ned and Melanie spend the night together on the mountain but do not fornicate. (There has in fact been zero sex in the whole 400 pages of the book.) As the tale closes in a clamorous reunion of the whole mortal family, Ned and Kate are holding hands.

Love and science fiction are synonyms

The problems are obvious. Through the exercise of inconspicuous but masterful technique, Kay has come as close as humanly possible to the creation of a tale about sex burning the world to a cinder without instancing either sex or cinders. Perhaps Kay's cleverest legerdemain is to make us feel the wind of this without dropping a single veil. There are times, however, when the cost is high. Kay's diction is sometimes too lacking in epiphanic luster; when Ysabel tells her lovers how to play this year's lovedeath agon, for instance, she gains their attention (hard to think they'd been woolgathering, frankly) by warning them to "Hear me carefully for I will say this once." But this is a famous tag straight from Allo Allo, the long-running British sitcom about World War II ("Listen carefully, for I will say this only once"), and nobody, not even Kay, can get away with evoking that echo. But Kay more tellingly refuses epiphanousness when he describes Melanie's return, totally unchanged from having been eaten whole by a goddess of love except that she's grown a few inches. "Melanie," says Ned, laughing, "jeez, you are at least three inches taller. Look at yourself!" This is bathos.

It may seem picayune to focus on passages like this, but I think in fact that it is not. Each of these refusals of gravitas comes at points in the story where the intolerable tale that cannot be told threatens to rip the skin off things. These passages do not represent failures of skill, in other words, but a possibly too intense engineering of response. The down side of knowing exactly what you want to do is a tendency to polish your own brass.

The up side is almost the whole of Ysabel. The plot is necessarily complex, but is told with meticulous and merciless speed, like a really fine thriller, but without the frame-grabs and furore. Kay captures faultlessly the signage of adolescents; he even makes plausible the fact that both Ned and Kate are genuinely good kids. This goes for the cast as a whole, all of whom he depicts as bearing their shadows with dignity (but see final paragraph); and there are moments of telling—even though necessarily sidelined—interaction among the adults. The language of action is lucid throughout: everything can be followed: this is rare. And Kay is superb on the landscape and the artifacts of Provence, which he depicts so lucently that one remembers being there (even if one never was). Ysabel as a whole rests fine-tuned in its chassis of story, a job well done: but there could be more.

Indeed, several small hints are dropped that this book may not be a singleton. Ned's mother's sister Kim has powers, and the siblings have a traumatic past which had split them apart for decades, but none of this backstory comes close to resolving itself in the current action. Kim's husband David's arrival is anticipated for half the book, but after leaping magnificently into the fray he immediately sprains his ankle: which also sounds like backstory waiting for water. And of course there is the torrent which drives Ysabel but does not speak its name. What this all seems to call for is not a linear sequel as usual, but something in the manner of someone like Lawrence Durrell, a retelling of Ysabel from an inside point of view (maybe that of Ysabel herself, or Kim). It is a sign of the ring-fenced but potent storytelling energies released in Ysabel that this reader at least thought of Kay's sharp jewel of a tale as the potential beginning of another Alexandria Quartet, the first stirring of another "Space-Time" "soup-mix" of love respelt. I am quoting from Lawrence Durrell's description of his work in the preface to Balthazar [1958], where he also says that to investigate "modern love" is to write "'science-fiction', in the true sense."Ysabel should go there.