Review of Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay has become, like many aging writers, a one note tune. He has been churning out the same cut/paste novels for the past decade. This is fortunate and unfortunate. As the market has made clear, there is a large swathe of readers who want dependable product. But there are also readers who look to storytelling to be an art, an idea that inherently requires innovation, evolution, and experimentation. Does Kay's latest, Written on the Dark (2025), buck his own trend?

Written on the Dark is the fictional biography of one Thierry Villar, a tavern poet. More episodic than overarching, the book picks and chooses the events of the poet's life relevant to how it shapes his fate. Skipping Villar's childhood, the book opens in his youth in the alleys and waterholes of the city of Orange (a clear medieval French analog). Villar is a talent recognized by the city's aristocracy, but he reserves his most subtle barbs for critiquing their feudal rule. That is, until broader events in the city drag him into court politics.

I describe Written on the Dark as a fictional biography, which it predominantly is. But there are large chunks of story that describe events in the wider kingdom beyond Orange. More than just context, these chunks have a foot or two under the narrative's spotlight. They are of such a hue, in fact, they distract from what would ostensibly want to be the novel's core. It creates confusion. Questions emerge. I thought this was a character-driven novel? If it's not about Villar, what am I to infer from the melodram? The result is an impasse. On one hand there is Kay's desired mimesis—of properly representing humanity, while on the other the multiple larger-than-life escapades Villar finds himself in which distract from said mimesis. It's like super-hero fiction that wants to be taken seriously. Can't do it. The gap between romance and reality can't be bridged this way.

To set a few examples to this, there are cheap seduction scenes where beautiful aristocratic women thrown themselves in Villar's bed. There are childrens' scenes—ahem, adult scenes—involving the upper crust of society airing petty grievances as if the forum were a playground, not a king's court. (The climatic scene is particularly egregious.) There are unlikely scenes, for example when one of the king's men forcefully recruits Villar to become a 'tavern detective' to pick up on gossip who killed a local duke. Really? A pub-cum-poet spy? And there are several other scenes of the melodramatic variety, all of which undercut Villar's presentation as a relatable, human character.

And the tone of the past decade of Kay novels continues, no change to the formula. Persistent is the cloying, almost maudlin repetition of “If he would have only known that in ten years time...” “And so it came to be that fate would intervene and take the best of intentions and...” Used appropriately, this type of prose helps establish a proper fantasy/fairy tale mood. But used in excess it becomes repetitive, distracting. And worse yet, it pushes the book further from showing and closer to telling.

In the end, Written on the Dark is romantasy which would seem to want to be literary fantasy. It's simplistic, romanticized storytelling made pretty by excellent prose and pace. The juxtaposition between character-focus and cheap plottign reduces the chances the novel had of being existential. It's clear the book wants the reader to ponder life, to appreciate and take in stride the random, subjective external events that we do not control but which shape our lives indelibly. A noble aim, that. But the humanity needs to be intact for that aim to strike home. When it's told through cartoon drama it becomes difficult. And goddammit, for a book about a poet it contains so little...