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[applause]
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Guy Kay: Thank you. Am I mic-ed? Yes. I'm mic-ed. A quick housekeeping note, I have
no problem with people checking their cellphones for the Blue Jay score. My preference, as
an extreme courtesy, is that no one shout, or yell, or moan, or do anything dramatic
when they find whatever happens there, because if I'm reading the scene when the mothership
comes down and transports everyone to 16th century Florence, you are going to kill my
buzz. So, that's first housekeeping note. Second of all, some quick "thank yous" to
the library for hosting this, to Tina for that generous introduction, to Lori for agreeing
to try to make me sound wittier than I'm likely to be. And we can write our books. I write
my books myself at an alarmingly slow pace as a number of people have been opined to
tell me.
[laughter]
GK: But I don't produce them myself. And I've had the extraordinary support, commitment,
creativity, energy of a great many people among my publishers around the world. But
tonight, I don't think that any of them would be so curmudgeonly, to use a word that is
occasionally for some reason applied to me, as to object if I single out Penguin Canada,
Nicole Winstanley, Beth Lockley, the team that Penguin have been so extraordinarily
engaged and committed to supporting my work for many books and many years now, and exceptionally
so with River of Stars. So, I would like to express my real thanks to them.
GK: My last thank you, which is anything but pro forma, this is as real as I get, is to
you, to my readers. The most salient and telling gift an author can have is the luxury of time
to make any given book as good as that writer can be, can become, can aspire to be. And
my readers around the world have... There are enough of them, and they seem to like
the books enough to give me that luxury to do my thing which is to write, rewrite, write,
rewrite, swear, rewrite, thing, over and over. We live in a sped up world with some expectations
of a book a year or better. And If I have escaped that mandate, that reality, it's the
gift, the grace extended to me by my readers. So, if I say thank you, I mean it.
GK: Now, River of Stars. Those of you... And I'm sure there will be a few who have heard
me riff on this before. I'd like to read from early in the books because otherwise you end
up doing very extensive backfill, which tends to be very extensively boring and often leads
to people in the audience falling asleep. [laughter] And over the years, I have decided
that that's counter-productive to my purposes. [laughter] So, I'd like to read from early
in the novels requiring as little back story as possible. I want to read to you briefly
because I want to make sure I don't keep Lori waiting because then she'll get irritable
[laughter] and I can suffer the consequences of that. So, we're about to be introduced
to one of the two protagonists. So, it's a young woman named Lin Shan. We are in 12th
dynasty Kitai which is modelled on, inspired by the Song Dynasty of the early 1100s, 12th
century.
GK: Shan is about 16 years old. This is, by the way, a recurring theme of mine. People
grew up faster for a myriad of reasons today, not least of which is the fact we tend to
live longer. We grow up more slowly in many respects. People grew up faster in earlier
times. Shan is 16. She has been betrothed by her father. She is getting married next
year. She is profoundly distinctive in a culture that is extremely repressive with respect
to women. She has been educated by her father, an extremely minor, diffident, shy, edge of
the court figure whose one subversive action in his whole life was to educate his daughter
as if she was the brother who died when he was young. So, Shan has received the education
that a young man preparing to study for and take the examinations that lead to a lofty
existence. She has been educated that way.
GK: She and her father have spent the day in the second city of the empire. They travel
to a flower festival in spring time, based on reality, and they are in the home of a
retired prime minister. They are visiting him, because the father, the gentle, minor
court figure father has written a tiny book on gardens, including the garden of this retired
prime minister, and he has presented it to him. Unbeknownst to them, on the same day,
the prime minister knew it, one of his most beloved protégées, in fact, one of the most
beloved figures in Kitai is a poet named Lu Chen, a poet and a politician, who has just
been exiled by the faction currently in power.
GK: One of the themes of the book is the way political conflict played out through horrific
exile that was usually meant, as I said once in the words of Goldfinger to James Bond,
"I expect you to die, Mr. Bond." Exile was in fact in some instances expected to kill
you. And this poet figure surprised Shan and her father by being there that day. They've
all had dinner in the older prime minister's house, and Shan has retired to her room to
go to bed.
GK: It is dark outside the silk paper windows. No moon tonight. The crickets continuing,
wind, the birds quiet now. She glances at the bed, she isn't sleeping anymore. She is
gazing at the books on the desk when she hears a footfall in the corridor. She is not afraid.
She has time to wonder at herself that she seems to have not closed her door after all,
when he steps inside. "I saw the light," he says quietly. Half a truth. His chamber is
at the front other side of the dining chamber. He had to have come this way in order to see
her light. Her mind works like this. Her heart is racing. She is truly not fearful though.
Words are important, you don't think or write afraid when it is the wrong word. She is still
wearing the blue jacket with gold buttons from dinner, there are phoenixes on it. Her
hair is still pinned, though without the flower now. She bows to him. You can start with a
bow. He says not smiling, "I shouldn't be here."
GK: "Of course, he shouldn't," Shan thinks. It is an offence against courtesy to her,
to her father, to their host. She does not say that. She says, "I should not have left
the door open." He looks at her, his eyes are grey above a long nose and the neat grey
and black chin beard. His own hair is also pinned, no hat, the men have removed their
hats at dinner, a gesture meant to indicate freedom from restraint. There are lines at
the corners of his eyes. She wonders how much he's had to drink, how it affects him. The
stories, widely shared, say it doesn't very much. He says, "I'd have seen a light under
the door, I could have knocked." "I would have opened it for you," she says. She hears
herself say that, and is amazed, not afraid.
GK: He is still beside the door, has not come farther in. 'Why?" he asks, still quietly.
He has been cheerful all day, for the three of them. Not now. "Why would you have opened
it? Because I am being sent away?" She finds herself nodding, "That is also the reason
you are here, isn't it?" She watches him consider it, is pleased he hasn't offered the too quick
easy denial flattering her. "One reason," he murmurs. "One reason for me, then, too,"
she says from where she stands by the desk by the bed, near the lamp and two flowers.
Something shrieks from the garden, sudden and loud. Shan startles, catches herself.
She is too much on edge, not that that's surprising.
GK: Something has just died outside. "A cat hunting," he says, "perhaps a fox. Even amid
beauty and order, that happens." "And when there is no beauty, no order?" She regrets
that even as she says it, she is pushing again. But he smiles. He says, "I'm not going to
the island intending to die, Miss Lin." She can't think of what to say to that. "Say nothing,
for once," she tells herself. He is looking at her from across the room. She can't read
that gaze. He says,"People live on Lingzhou Isle, you know that, I just said the same
thing to Wengao." People who have grown up there, she thinks, who grow accustomed to
the diseases and the endless steaming rainfall and the heat. She says,"There are... There
are spiders." He grins at that. She has meant for him to do so. Wonders if he knows. "Enormous
spiders, yes," he says. "The size of houses, they tell me." "And they eat men?" "Poets,
I'm told."
[laughter]
GK: "Twice a year a number of spiders come from the forest into the squares of the one
town, and they must be fed a poet, or they will not leave."
[laughter]
GK: "There is a ceremony." She allows herself a brief smile. "A reason not to write poetry?
I'm told they make prisoners compose a verse in order to receive their meals." "How cruel.
And that qualifies them as poets?" "The spiders are not critical, I understand."
[laughter]
GK: He will be another kind of prisoner there. Not in a jail, but watched, forbidden to leave.
This folly is not amusing as he wants it to be, Shan thinks. He seems to come to the same
conclusion. "I asked if you would offer me one or two of your songs, if you remember?"
Men can say the strangest things. But she shakes her head. "Not now. Not like this."
"Poetry suits a bedchamber." Stubbornly she shakes her head again, looking down. "Why?"
He asks gently. She hasn't expected gentleness. She meets his gaze across the room. "Because
that's not why you came," she says.
GK: His turn to fall silent. Mostly silence outside now, as well, after that death in
the garden. Wind in the plum trees. Spring night. And now, Shan realizes, she is afraid
after all. It is not easy, she thinks, to make your way in the world while insisting
on a new path. She has never been touched by a man. She is to be married next year.
This man is past her father's age, has a son older than her, a first wife dead, a second
living with his brother's family, for Lu Chen will not bring her to the island with him,
whatever he might say about not going south to die. His son will be coming, to be a companion.
Perhaps bury his father one day, or bring the body back for burial, if that's allowed.
GK: He says, "I'm not so vain, or unmannerly, to have imagined anything beyond talking tonight."
She draws a breath and with it, with his words, her fear seems to have gone, as quickly as
it had flowered within. She can even smile, carefully, looking down. "Not even imagined?"
she asks. Hears him laugh, her reward. "I deserve that," the poet says. "But Miss Lin,
we may imagine much, but not always allow these visions to enter the world. We all live
this way." "Must we?" she asks. "I think so. The world falls apart, otherwise. There are
men I have imagined killing, for example."
GK: She can guess who one or two of those might be. "I think you meant to honour me,
coming here. I know how wide the space is between us, because of my sex, my age, my
inexperience. I want only to tell you that I'm not... That you need not... " She is short
of breath. Shakes her head impatiently. Pushes forwards. Says, "You need not assume I would
be offended if you came into the room now, Master Chen." There. Said it. And the world
has not broken asunder. No other animal has screamed outside. Burning suns are not falling,
shot down by arrows of legend. And she will not, she will not live defined or controlled
by what others think or say. '
GK: Because this is the life, the path, hard and lonely, her father has put her on -- never
realizing it would be so, never intending this when he began to teach her. And they
discovered, together, that Shan was quicker and brighter and perhaps even deeper than
almost any man they knew.
GK: Thank you, thank you. Thank you.
[applause]
GK: And now I go over to meet my fate.
[laughter]
S1: I'm not that scary, I don't think. [chuckle] I hope not.
GK: I know. But it's a good setup.
[laughter]
S1: Where to? Got yourself a little drink.
GK: It's the sound effects technician, rattling the ice cubes.
[laughter]
S1: I have to start off by asking something that I think is in a lot of people's minds.
When you were working on Under Heaven, did you know that you would be revisiting China
as a setting?
GK: No. No. I never know. And I don't just say that. I never know what the next book
would be. And if I had been asked to sort of lay odds as I was finishing Under Heaven,
I would have said I would not. I would move on. A couple of things happened. One of them
was that I made an extraordinary number of acquaintance of a number of remarkably intelligent,
inspiring scholars, working in Chinese history. And the connection, the communication back
and forth, continued when Under Heaven was finished. Another dear friend of mine, who
is here tonight, was working on his doctoral thesis on Song Dynasty calligraphy. And he
is very good at strong-arming. [laughter] I'm very good at resisting strong-arming.
So, it was force, the irresistible force and immovable object. But that was of interest.
GK: And then, I have... Some of you will know this, I have a long-standing interest, it's
a recurring theme in my work, which has to do with the way the past does not go away.
"The past isn't even past," as Faulkner put it. And the Song Dynasty, the inspiration
for this book, was particularly obsessed with not repeating the errors that they understood
to have been made in the past. You know, how we use that term where we say, "We're always
fighting the last war" and that that's a common problem? They shaped their dynasty, they shaped
their culture, in a conscious effort not to repeat the errors that they assumed, they
weren't necessarily right, but they assumed were the errors of the past. And the more
I thought about that, the more it seemed like a perfect opportunity to really sharply explore
one of my own life-long themes, in a particular setting.
S1: So, would you say that, that's of obvious interest to you, but would you say that location
works almost as a character for you?
GK: Yeah.
S1: Yeah.
GK: Yeah. That's almost exactly how I put it. That's how I would like... If I do it
right, that's how I would like the reader to be drawn into the book. People use the
word "immersive," or "immersion," and I like the word. It's not so much the idea of putting
frogs in the pot and turning up the temperature slowly so that I kill you without your knowing.
And I'm not that sadistic. [laughter] But there is an element where I think that the
immersive quality of a novel comes, in part, from the reader, gradually becoming more and
more aware of how the setting works, how the framework for what the characters do is built
up. And I work on that. I work on that in the opening chapters of this a lot.
S1: And I know that you don't consider this a sequel, but that's why I would consider
this, to a certain extent, a sequel, and why I think that this will greatly appeal to people,
and draw them in. If they loved Under Heaven, I think that this is something that will appeal
to them. What do you think about that, because I know that you have said that this is not
a sequel?
GK: Four hundred years precludes the notion of a true sequel.
S1: No, but the setting is what the setting is. And I realize that it is somewhat different,
but in many ways, it is the same place.
GK: Let me ask you this. If I'd written a novel about Michelangelo...
S1: Wait, the boxing gloves are coming out now! [laughter]
GK: Yeah, you're setting me up. You're making it too easy for me. If I'd written a novel
about Michelangelo in Italy, and then my next novel was about Garibaldi. It's still Italy.
There will be the same cities. They've changed.
GK: No.
GK: Florence in the 15th, 16th century has evolved into Florence of the 19th. And 19th
century Italians would have been... I'm not putting this randomly, they would have been
hugely aware of the glory of the Renaissance in Italy. They would have felt smaller and
diminished, looking back at the sculptures and the buildings that had been erected in
their space under the Romans and then in the Renaissance. And they would have felt that
they were the small, shrunken kingdom. They weren't even a kingdom at that point, there
were many kingdoms. So, for me, when I say it's not a sequel, I'm not posturing. It draws
upon an awareness of previous events. But I think that would be true about many parts
of the world where we're conscious of what's happened before.
GK: In... I wrote about this in Ysabel. In Apollyon, in the Middle Ages, in a post-plague
time, there was a hovel, there was a ghetto, it was a slum, inside the Roman Colosseum,
that had been built in Avenue. And, it was a magnificent Colosseum that was still standing,
these spectacular walls. And inside, people lived in ramshackle shanties and hovels, jammed
together. And I remember seeing that building. We lived there when I was writing Ysabel,
and thinking what must it had been like to live inside a space where the people of the
past were so obviously superior to you? That interested me in that book. That interests
me in all my books because we don't have that mindset very much.
0:23:29 GK: We don't tend to think that people in the 13th century, or the 17th, or the 8th,
knew more than we do. We tend to think in terms of progress, with caveats about pollution,
or despoiling the earth, and worries about that. But we tend to have a mindset that we
are 'better than'. And in Ysabel, now in River of Stars, I'm interested in looking at a culture
that doesn't think that it's better than its ancestors.
S1: Did you go to China this time? You didn't go for Under Heaven.
GK: I was there in between. Actually, that's another... I could have answered your first
question in part by the visit to China in between the two books and one of the... It
wasn't so much a research trip. It was a lecturing and speaking trip, but one of the things that
happened in Beijing was that my wife and I were invited to, what we thought, would be...
I'm not making this up, but we thought it would be a tea party. A publisher there said
that we were going to meet some critics at the University and have an encounter. Encounter
is a very complex and ambiguous word but I assumed there were language difficulties at
play here. I didn't make much of it. And we got out to the University and we were met
by someone and we were being hustled through Beijing Normal University and I'm thinking,
"Why are we hustling? Is the tea on the boil or something like that? I mean what part of
the ritual are we about to miss?"
[laughter]
GK: And we're being basically force-marched through corridor after corridor and we end
up in the largest boardroom I have ever been inside, with communist era portraits, big
portraits, all around the walls of, I gather, previous heads of Beijing Normal University
and around this titanic boardroom table, there were probably about 80 fully-fledged academics
from Beijing Normal and around the walls of the room, there were probably another 120
or 40, what I assume were students. So, there were about 200, 250 people ringing in the
room for what I thought would be a tea party.
[laughter]
GK: And the gentleman on my left turned out to be the Head of International Literature
at the University and he explained, sort of, I had a translator on my right, very quietly,
he explained that each of the six papers would take approximately 20 to 30 minutes and your
response is expected to take about 30 minutes. Is that acceptable?
[laughter]
S1: Not quite a tea party.
[laughter]
GK: And you're not really, if you think about it, you're not really in a position to say
"Not acceptable." [chuckle] But that won't work. So, the point of the story though, aside
from getting a laugh, which I wanted, is that they were wonderful. They were wonderful.
The responses to the existing box imprint in Chinese with the translator whispering
to me, were wonderfully generous and then the last paper was about Under Heaven, which
the academic had read in English and delivered a paper in Chinese to that symposium. It was
a symposium, not a tea party. And what happened to me, it's a roundabout way of answering
your question, is I felt validated and reassured by their response to the way I work.
GK: Now, those of you who've read me before will know that the phrase I've been using,
which I stole from Rob Wiersema’s review years ago of one of my earlier books, but
I do as much research as I can 'In A Period Of History' than I do 'A Quarter Turn To The
Fantastic'. I do it for more reasons than we have time to go through here. But that
"Quarter Turn To The Fantastic", it's underpinned by respect for the actual periods and the
actual people that I'm using as the inspiration for my novels. And it was so rewarding to
listen to a Chinese scholar talking about exactly that. In his first read of one of
my books, as to why the books take place in Kitai and not in China. But I think, looking
back, I think that there was a boost of confidence and belief that the method was understood
there as well as here.
S1: I want to talk to you about that. That quarter turn or spin that you give history,
how exactly do you set about blurring those boundaries between fiction and non-fiction
in your books, the history and giving it that spin?
GK: I can't give you a "how" exactly. One of us wouldn't be able to leave the stage
alive.
[laughter]
S1: It will get violent at some point.
GK: But the audience gets to vote.
[laughter]
GK: It's not so much a "how" that I suppose obsesses me. It's the why, which is to say
the "why"... And I'm asked this all the time, why I'm not writing about Provence or Byzantium
instead of Sarantium, why it's Kitai and not China.
S1: You notice I didn't ask that. [laughter] I did try to give it a... [laughter]
GK: You tried to dodge it. [laughter] You were skating around the edges of it. "How"
starts with... It starts with not wanting to assume that I know what Justinian and Theodora
were like in bed together. That's my usual, sort of flippant way of putting it, but there
is a point I'm making there. Not wanting to project my imagination on to the real lives
of real people. So, if I'm going to use that as my starting point that I want to be inspired
by figures of history, for some of my characters, not all, but I also want to have a little
space or distance so that the reader and I share, it's important, we share an awareness
that this is not the real thing. Now, you may say, "Well, anytime it's a novel. It's
not the real thing." But it's not quite true, because so many people assume that they are
learning what happened by seeing the movie Argo.
GK: So many people think that Zero Dark Thirty is telling them the events that led to the
killing of Bin Laden. We don't so automatically separate our response to a work of art from
our "Well, they're probably making it up." We end up with a blurring of that border,
and I want to make clear at the beginning of the book that we are making up a story
inspired by a real setting. So that beginning with the characters not being the actual people,
if you think about it, steers me into the quarter turn away from the geography, because
I'm not going to actually use Renaissance Florence, but make up someone who sounds like
Michelangelo, but isn't quite. If I'm going to do a "sounds like Michelangelo", I'm going
to move it into a "sounds like Florence". That's I suppose the starting point for that
quarter turn.
S1: 'Cause I was gonna say very early in the book, Daiyan says "He was determined to be
one of the great manhood of his day, restoring glory with his virtue to a diminished world."
And other individuals in the book think about how their actions might be interpreted or
misinterpreted in history. And I think you have a fascination with the construction of
history. And even in the real world, history you could argue is constructed. It's not real.
It's reported by people. It's constructed. It's a story in essence.
GK: She is very good.
[laughter]
GK: That's just about exactly it. There's a line in Under Heaven where I say, I write,
"Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives. How we remember shapes how we lived."
And what I mean by that is that nations, empires, cultures and individual people are always
constructing what our memories are, what made you into what you are today. There will be
certain stories you would tell, if you had a couple of drinks maybe.
[laughter]
GK: That led to Lori Glassie being what she is today. There would be stories you've told
yourself as touchstone moments in your life. And we work with the past that way, personally
and on a larger scale in that we look back, and we point to moments, scenes, figures that
were pivotal. And somebody else will, A, remember it differently. We all know that. Anyone's
got a family knows that you can have an argument at the drop of anything about what happened
at Christmas in 1997, who spilled the turkey on grandma that day? Something like that.
There are four culprits. The way in which we remember differently does in fact, I don't
want to use the word 'obsessed', other people can use it, it fascinates me. And the treatment
of history and fiction for me plays through that.
GK: Under Heaven and River of Stars both, this one more than anything else I've ever
written works in the present tense, the story is unfolding. The people in the book are remembering
previous events, both in the Empire and in their own lives, and history is looking back
at the events that we are watching unfold as the novel plays out. It's playing out,
if I do it right, I'm moving the reader through all three scapes of time, if you will, if
I do it right.
S1: Yeah, I think you're very successful in that. To me, it almost had the effect of time
lapse photography, all those timelines playing out and looking back at Under Heaven. And
really, you don't have to have read Under Heaven. But if you do, it adds a whole other
dimension to the book. I'd like to return to Shan who you introduced in your reading.
You've said before that one of the things you struggle with is finding plausible roles
for women in historical periods. How would you say that Shan fits into that in the context
of this book?
GK: That's a good question. First of all, to address the "struggling to find plausible
roles", I hate historical fiction that panders completely to our modern sensibility and mindset.
I don't much want 21st century men and women in 12th or 6th or 9th century settings. We
cannot escape our own time and framework. As readers, as writers, we can't escape the
way we see the world, but we can be conscious of not trying to wholesale export ourselves
into the past. So for me, when I'm working with periods of history on an issue like the
role and the status of women, I try not to cheat. I try not to give you, if you will,
the cliché of the woman wielding a broad sword or something like that.
GK: At the same time -- and Shan is a perfect example of that -- I am really alert in my
research and my reading, for women in history who were in fact memorable and remarkable
exceptions to what might be the norm. And Shan is inspired by the most beloved poet,
song-writer woman in Chinese history, a woman named Lie Ching-Chow who did live during the
Song Dynasty and who was educated by her father in ways that no women in that dynasty, or
from any before, had ever been educated. She was a protégé and it didn't make for necessarily
a triumphant, powerful knight, but it made for a recorded life because she wrote events
that she lived through. She was a perfect example of what I look for when I'm reading
history, which is that word you use, was "plausible". She's obviously plausible because she really
lived, and so I don't feel that I'm cheating if I let that kind of figure inspire one of
my characters.
S1: And yet what's interesting about both her and Daiyan is that, in a sense, they're
both characters out of time in this book.
GK: They're both... Ren Daiyan is the male protagonist. Shan, the Lin Shan is the female
one surrounded by my usual terrifyingly large cluster of secondary characters.
S1: Big book.
[chuckle]
S1: I had to throw that in there. [chuckle]
GK: They're both prisoners... Prisoner's the wrong word. They're both constrained by the
nature of their society as we all are, if you think about it. None of us are particularly
free to avoid or escape whatever the norms of our society are. But they both chase at
those constraints. Daiyan is the son of a very minor clerk, at the outermost borders
of the empire, who wants to be a military figure at a time when no respectable family
ever allowed a son to be in the army. The army had caused all the problems in the past.
It was clearly and completely a consequence of powerful generals, too powerful soldiers
loving their general more than the emperor. The empire's problems were all based on the
army.
GK: And so, by the time you get to my 12th Dynasty in Kitai, it is a disgrace for any
young man to even think in terms of a military career. The only people went into the army
were conscripted sons of peasants who didn't have a choice. So, Daiyan is chasing against
the shape and nature of his culture. And Shan, educated far beyond the norms of women, is
doing the same thing. It leads you if you think about it... If you think about it from
the point of view of a woman, she's in an extraordinarily difficult circumstance because
a by-product of that education is going to be that almost all women detest her. It's
done...
S1: And a lot of the men too.
GK: That's right. The men will not accept you. You're a curiosity. You're a freak or
you're a threat. And for the women, she'd manifest a threat. The phrase used at the
time where the women was supposed to remain in what was called the inner quarters. There
was an aphorism that nothing but disaster would ensue if a woman overheard the men talking
about significant events. They weren't even supposed to hear it. So, if you have a woman
educated in a fashion to understand better than many men, the shape and arc of events,
she is not going go sit easily in any world.
S1: It's a fascinating character. And in fact this is the point in time, and you touch on
it, when women start having their feet bound.
GK: The best theory I read about this, I use it in the book. And it's a theory. It's not
conclusive, but it makes the most sense. A woman named Patricia Avery, who teach in California,
one of the major scholars, her theory is that as a result of what we were just talking about,
the detest that was felt for the military life, educated civilized men made it obvious
to their peers and to the emperor that they wouldn't dream of pulling the bow string,
wielding the sword, riding a horse. They grew plump, lazy. They were carried in the sedan
chair to go to the end of the hallway. It's a long way back, but I mean, really!
[laughter]
GK: That's when they started growing the little finger on the left hand long.
S1: The fingernail?
GK: "I could never hold a sword. I could never do anything in a physical way. I mean look
at the two-inch fingernail I've got." And so Avery's theory about bound feet was that
in order to preserve the "proper", and I'm putting that in scare quotes, the "proper"
distance between the capacity of men and the capacity of women, women had to be even more
limited in their mobility than the men had made themselves, by choice. And so bound feet
became a measure of attractiveness because they reflected that further limitation on
mobility.
S1: And of course, Shan is properly horrified by the idea of this. It seems to me that some
of the themes of your work, and in particular, in this book are the extinction of ways of
being the inevitably... Inevitability of time and the hopelessness of individual human endeavour,
and yet, the honour and importance of such endeavour, would you agree?
GK: Yes.
S1: Quite wistful and sad.
GK: Well, one of the ways into that point, and I didn't know this, the themes aren't
laid out. I've said forever that I hate books where the author rears up with one of those
hammers you see in a midway side show, trying to ring the bell, and bangs you on the head.
S1: Yeah, there isn't an authorial voice in this that pops up. Most definitely.
GK: Yeah. I hate the books that hammer you with the author's thesis or theme. I'd like
to... And I've said this before, I'd like to slip a stiletto into your ribs.
[laughter]
GK: So, you don't even know it's in there.
S1: You don't even notice it. [laughter]
GK: Yes, yes, you notice you're sitting a fair distance away.
S1: Yeah, that's right, I am. [laughter]
GK: You shifted over to the far side. If you want to talk about body language, just look
the other way! [laughter] The theme that surprised me in this book, because it kept sneaking
in and sneaking back, was about parents and children. And when you talked about honour
and behaviour in a certain way, and I don't want to go into a long riff on grittiness
and fiction and the notion of human beings as "all being", nasty, brutish and short.
I don't want to go there. But in River of Stars, one of the things that my reading and
then the process of writing and exploring the book brought forward, was how role modelling
from parents, it's a parent talking, that role modelling plays such a role in how children
will conduct their lives.
GK: If they've respected, Shan and Daiyan are both the children of immensely respectful
men, and the story shapes itself around the fact that both of them respond to that. And
then, there's sibling relationships, and again that wasn't planned when I began the book.
There's a sibling relationship that's central in the end to the emotional response of the
book. These aren't themes that I sit down and sort of lay out a checklist. Some people
do, but I can't write that way. I don't outline. So, I don't know all of the things that will
find their way into the book.
S1: You talk about how your treatment of books and the fantasy component gives them a universality.
I'm gonna turn that around a little. Do you think that this book and the themes of the
book, even though you don't outline and have check marks, do you think that this, in essence,
means that this book could have been set anywhere and at any time?
GK: Ask me that again?
S1: Your treatment of the books and the fantasy component, you said in the past that that
fantasy component gives your books a universality.
GK: Yeah.
S1: Do you think that that means that this book could've been set anywhere and at any
time?
GK: No. No, but it's a great question, and I think the only context for this particular
story would be a culture or a society as focused on right behaviour as this one was. And also,
as driven by its desire to escape its own past. I think the particular template of River
of Stars requires a culture like that. But a larger point fascinates me, because some
aspects of my writing would lend themselves to what you're talking about but they are
not settings specific in the overarching motifs. I just put up an essay today on the web on
exile, on the implications of exile, that a publicist I work with asked me about two
months ago, pretty much in this voice, she says, "What's with exile in all your books?"
And I said, in my suave way, "Say what?"
[laughter]
GK: And then I started looking back and, damn it, she was right. That I've been dealing
with... And in the essay, I run through, and I've been dealing with that as a motif for
12 novels. Without ever having sat down and said, "Okay, who's gonna be the exiled figure
in this one?" Or something like that. I've never done that. Norman Mailer once said that
every author has only two or three books in him and he just writes variants. Ann Patchett
said that. And you and I both love Bel Canto. Ann Patchett said, "I only have one book!"
S1: Well, it's interesting because I interviewed Helen Humphreys recently and she had said
once that all of her books are about loss. And I asked her in the interview... I said,
"That's what they're about, and you said you wanted to get away from that." And she said,
"I know, and I can't seem to escape myself." It seems to me that your books are also about
heroic endeavour. What do you think that that says about you?
[laughter]
GK: I never got over Bill Mazeroski homered to beat the Yankees in the seventh game, first
World Series I ever watched.
[laughter]
GK: History put its stamp on me at five years of age. I do believe that we are one of the
most ahistorical cultures that's ever been. I think that we are presented with such a
staggering and fascinating amount of contemporary "of-the-moment" information that it obliterates
our capacity and to some degree, our interest, in stopping and looking back. You know, every
once in a while somebody runs another survey, about 50% of Canadians don't know who Pierre
Trudeau was or something like that, or what caused World War II, and that's not quite
what I'm talking about, because that's a function of how history is taught today in schools.
GK: But in a larger sense, I think what might be said about me through all my books is that
I find an urgency to looking at causes as to how we are where we are. And I mean that
in the broadest sense, which is to say it's not that the books are about us here and now.
I'm not being that precise. I'm writing about cultures and trying to show the reader how
that culture got to where it is through its own past, and then the extrapolation is more
general that readers today will think about what is it in our own past that has led to
our evolving to where we are now. I think that is a core fascination that runs through
most of what I write.
S1: It's interesting because I know that you have been... I was reading something the other
day and you have been... And this person called you a historian and that your books are sometimes
taught in history classes. I find that kind of ironic given the fact that you really strive
to stay away from presenting real history. You don't want to write about real history,
and in fact you have a problem with people who write about real history.
GK: I want...
S1: And not people who write about real history but people who present...
GK: Real people in history, real people in history.
S1: Yeah.
GK: There's a really interesting thing that happens to us when we are consumed by a novel
which is to say that we... Some of us can be so absorbed, and I know you're like this,
we talked about this. We can be so absorbed by the story, storytelling, that we are being
given that it takes on an intensity and an urgency that sometimes leads us to, and I
suspect some of you will nod as I say this, that you look up from the book and you're
surprised at where you are, the setting and the framework, the chair you're in, the couch
you're on, feel a little bit odd because you've been so deeply engaged by a narrative, and
I think that angles into what you're talking about. It's the nature of the experience of
a story, of a fiction that can nonetheless feel compellingly real to us. Sometimes it's
worrisome. Sometimes it's worrisome on the Team Edward novel in something...
[laughter]
GK: And we won't go there, but it's not safe for our purpose.
S1: Shades of Gray. Shades of Kay?
[laughter]
GK: But more often, I find it really, really reassuring. I find it reassuring when people
talk about... The reviewer in The Globe talked about being changed by reading River of Stars.
That's an extraordinarily wonderful thing for a writer to hear from a reader, that a
story can... To an adult person... When we are 12 and 14, a lot of what we read can change
us, can help define us. We were talking before about looking back. If you read To Kill A
Mockingbird at 12, maybe that put its stamp on you in a certain way. But as an adult to
be changed by a story? That's about as good as it gets for a novelist from an educated
reader.
S1: What books would you say have changed your life in the past? Can you think of any?
GK: Well, the biography of Bill Mazeroski after he hit that home run.
[laughter]
S1: I sense you're fixated. [laughter]
GK: Yes, yes. We can go with that. We can go with that one. Do you know that I cried
when he hit that home run? [laughter] My mother and I... True story, my mother and I were
in the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg. On the mezzanine floor... There was a television
on the mezzanine floor, tiny black and white TV. That's all that was back then, and my
mother took me up to where a crowd of men were chain smoking and watching the end of
the World Series and I was already a Yankee fan, without a cigarette, and Mazeroski homered.
Like, he waited till I got there. He homered about 30 seconds after I got in front of the
television, and everyone is cheering and yelling, and this five-year old kid starts crying.
And a courtly dignified gentleman knelt down in front of me as I'm sitting there crying,
and he said, "Son, if you're going to be a sports fan in your life, you're going to have
to learn to take losses with wins." And I kicked him in the shin.
[laughter]
GK: And I don't regret it.
[laughter]
GK: There are so many books. There are so many books that have one way or another changed
me. I was a precocious reader. So, I was reading some things really early and really strongly.
A lot of them were historical fiction. Mary Renault, Greek settings for historical fiction.
Dorothy Dunnett writing about 16th century Europe. Tolkien later. But that didn't changed
me. See, I want to be careful because I'm naming books that affected me, not necessarily,
that changed me. They did make me want to write.
S1: So, what I was going to say, they must have... Those books must have influenced your
writing. What about non-fiction, things other than books that have influenced your writing,
would you say?
GK: Well, I'll give you a couple of books that did change the way I looked at the world
which would be Robert Graves, and Joseph Campbell and James Frazer, the great writings about
Myth and Legend. 'Cause Myth and Legend really did intensely infused my sense of the larger
world. That did change me, reading those. Sports.
S1: No! [laughter]
GK: Absolutely. I could have been, and there are people in the room who will testify to
this, stand up and say, Hosanna! , that I could so easily have been a bookworm. But
I love sports too much. And we had ferociously competitive Winnipeg-Y chromosome sporting
events going on all the time. And I think that influenced me because it put me in some
degree of balance, which I might otherwise have been an overly cerebral young kid, that
the young kid was also out there swearing and kicking people.
[laughter]
S1: Just to close off, I have to ask you. I think a lot of people ask writers what advice
they have for aspiring writers. But I want to ask you, given that we're in a library,
what advice do you have for readers?
GK: That's a great question. Move out of your comfort zone. One of the things that I increasingly
notice talking to readers is that we tend to find what we like and stay with it, look
for it again, and there's nothing wrong with that. We know which Rye bread we like best.
We don't need to try a different one. But if reading is going to do some of the things
we've been talking about, not just distract and divert you, but also stretch you, then
moving out of your usual haunts, the usual section of the library or the bookstore where
you go, that would be a piece of advice because that gives the act of reading a chance to
contribute to you, extending your definition of yourself. So, I would say move out of your
comfort zone.
S1: Alright. It's always wonderful talking to you, Guy. Thank you. A character in the
Fionavar Tapestry who we never meet, because she was killed in a car crash, I think her
name was Rachel or Sarah. Was her character background based on a real person?
GK: No. No.
Okay. Short.
GK: I've almost never done that. I've almost never done that. My middle brother once asked
me with my first book, and he was being funny and he said somewhat preeningly, "Which of
the heroes is based on me?"
[laughter]
GK: And I said, "The third peasant to the right in line." It was too good a setup. I
mean I wasn't going to miss that one.
S1: Are any of them composites of real people?
GK: No. But you know what is? You know what does come? Characters don't come, but gestures
do. Expressions. When I'm in writing mode, I'm kind of omnivorous in terms of conversations
when I'm looking at people, the way someone crosses their legs...
S1: Oh, great. [laughter]
GK: The way they... No. No. I'm not in writing mode, I'm just saying. The small things of
how people act whether they are prone to nod their head to encourage a conversation, or
whether they are po-faced, that sort of thing enters and I make notes about that. I make
notes about letting characters in the book pick up traits like that.
S1: What about... I know a lot of writers make notes when they are in cafes and things
like that. Do you... Of conversations. Do you... I mean your stuff is historical too...
GK: Well, no. But you you can do that. I certainly did that with my very first novel, the one
that was never published. My first book was a picaresque about Canadians backpacking through
Europe and I was on the South Coast of Crete writing there and every damn day I would go
into the cafe...
S1: Drink Ouzo?
GK: Yes, exactly, and end up with a life-long dislike of Ouzo but that's another thing.
And listen to people saying things like the Youth Hostel in Paris was the worst hell-hole
that I have ever stayed in, and the next scene in the book would have someone talking about
the Youth Hostel in Paris being the worst hell-hole they ever stayed in.
S1: Okay, this one. Let's see if we can read this. In discovering a new story, which manifests
first, a character with his or her history or the world in which they will live and act?
GK: I usually go setting, theme, character, narrative. That's not set in stone. But the
usual pattern is that I need to know where I am, and then I need to know why I'm about
to spend three years there. And then I need to know who I'm dealing with. And only when
those are in place do I start thinking carefully through what happens to them. That's my usual
sequence for that.
S1: I have a question that occurred to me, just because the books are so big, [laughter]
in terms of your process and the actual mechanics of the process, how do you work in... You
work on a computer, I presume, and in terms of insane back ups and in terms of the process
of the files you don't...
GK: Do I practise safe typing?
S1: Well yeah, do you actually work in Word or what process do you use in terms of the
files? Because this is massive. This is like, what, a couple of hundred thousand words.
GK: I'll give you a couple of them.
S1: And notebooks. And...
GK: It's all on the computer now. And it's all backed up.
S1: Notes on all the characters... Okay.
GK: It's all backed up. My first three books were written long hand with a fountain pen.
Retyped, writing in the morning, and the second draft... When you talk about how I work, I
am... I could never tell you how many drafts a book is. I'm always amused when a writer
says this one took six drafts or three drafts or nine drafts. I have no bloody idea. Because
at the end of every day, I am rewriting that day's work. And at the beginning of every
morning, I'm rewriting the previous day's work again. And about every three or four
chapters, I stop, and I rewrite everything up to that point. So, I'm going back to one
to four, then one to eight, then one to twenty. I'm an idiot. [laughter] I'm an idiot. It's
really not smart. So, that is part of the work ethic that I could not do if I didn't
write on a computer.
S1: So, hence, a book every three years.
GK: Yeah.
S1: Okay.
[laughter]
GK: And then I'll rewrite all of them.
S1: So another question, when making your turn toward the fantastic, does the setting
drive the magical elements or do you use them to drive the needs of the plot?
GK: That's a terrific question. Somebody feel good out there.
[laughter]
GK: It's a terrific question because one of the things I dislike in most historical fiction
is an underpinning of smugness or superiority about how much more we know than people in
the past knew. Can you believe that in 6th century Byzantium, they actually thought that
if you carved a curse on a wax tablet and baked the tablet so it was hard, and threw
it in an open grave before it was closed up, the curse would come true. Isn't that quaint?
Isn't that remarkable that they believed that in the past? And when we read most historical
fiction, writers are presenting this in a framework where we are meant to be a little
amused or bemused about the way people behaved.
GK: I want to give value. It's important to me. I want give value to the way people in
the past understood the world. So, if they believed that improperly buried family members
might become ghosts to haunt their descendants until they were properly, respectfully laid
to rest, which happens in River of Stars, I want that to be true in the world of the
story. I want the reader of the novel to see the world playing out the way the characters
understood it. And if I do it properly, that takes away some of the smugness we feel in
a lot of historical fiction when we look at the quaint beliefs of the past. So, the supernatural
elements, certainly in the last five or six books, the supernatural element grow out of
what I learn about the societies that I'm using as the inspiration for the book.
S1: That was good. What music, if any, have you listened to while writing, especially
works with musician characters for example, A Song for Arbonne, Tigana and Under Heaven.
GK: Once more. I didn't quite follow you.
S1: Oh, sorry, what music, if any, have you listened to while writing, especially works
with musician characters?
GK: No pattern, no absolute pattern. The best example of something shooting into my consciousness
is that, Laura and I have been living in Aix-en-Provence when I was researching A Song for Arbonne
and beginning to write it. It's based on medieval Provence and by complete, staggering coincidence
one night, we saw an announcement of a concert by a French chanteuse named Esther Namantier.
And, by God, she was singing Provencal songs from the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th century. She
was singing the music of the period that I was there to research and write about. And
that ended up on the CD player for the duration of the next period of time.
With regards to exile, if longing for home is such a strong, subconscious theme in your
work, where is it that you are exiled to?
[laughter]
Wow! I'm gonna give a probably too serious answer. It's always... Let me be more cautious.
It's usually a mistake to draw too close a parallel between the work and the artist.
We tend to do that. We read a tragic novel. And we think, "God, you must have been depressed
in the year you wrote that." Or we see a comedian on stage killing us with his routine, and
we're shocked to discover that this is a depressive, anguished human being. The art and the person
don't have anything like that one-to-one correspondence of experience. So, I don't particularly feel
exiled to or from anything. I'm fascinated by the way exile plays itself out in human
lives, but it's not a personal sense that I'm aware of.
S1: We have time for one more question. I've noticed that you referred to Fionavar often
in other books, the first world war stories come from. Do you think you might return to
Fionavar again? Did something inspire the first world idea? And that's from Christie.
The references in later books are meant as absolutely no more than what a musician would
call a grace note. It's a tiny nod back to where I started. It has never been meant as
something building towards a device I hate when I see it in other writers, and it comes
late in life to many people, and I'm hoping I dodge it, which is the desire to create
the grand, unified field theory of your fictional universe, and tie everything together in some
way. I don't want to do that. I haven't actually sought to do that. The notion of the first
world itself, the other part of the question, was that when I wrote the Fionavar Tapestry
long way back now, I was playing with the notion of... I suppose even back then, that
quarter turn was playing itself out. I wanted to use a kitchen sink's work of our myths
and legends from various cultures in our world, and place them in the Fionavar setting and
twist them just a little bit.
GK: So, if I was going to do that, it struck me as consistent in world building to imagine
that our world legends are the distorted version of Fionavar's actual, true story that we've
got it seen through a smoky mirror. That's where the notion of the first world, and what
it might imply going down the road into our world. I haven't thought about this question,
that maybe even back then, with my very first books, I was thinking about spinning the dial
just a little bit that way.
Thank you.
GK: Lori, thank you. Thank you, all.
S1: Thank you, everyone.
[applause]