When I had my first child, I spent a lot of time awake. My son was born five weeks early and wanted to snuggle around the clock, and adults really shouldn’t fall asleep while holding tiny babies. So my husband and I were very much not sleeping, all the time.
And while I was awake, day and night, I was usually on my phone. Journalists have a bad habit of living on social media, and even with a baby, it proved hard to kick that habit. After all, it was 2021. So many alarming, terrible events were happening, and I worried about it all.
Christians are called to mourn with those who mourn, but my scrolling didn’t encourage that in earnest. Instead, it pushed my anxiety into overdrive and distracted me from tangibly loving others. During one of the most joyful moments of my life, I found myself slipping into the most suffocating despair I’d ever felt.
Canadian novelist Guy Gavriel Kay—whose latest, Written on the Dark, published last week—helped me begin to climb out of that pit. On a whim, I picked up Kay’s 2010 book Under Heaven during a walk to the library with my baby, and in it I found an untamed, winding story about humanity’s history, the kind of story a medieval bard might have shared in a great hall before kings and peasants alike.
I’ve always loved reading, and I had tried other books in those months. But I was bone-weary and nearly hallucinating from sleep deprivation, and they never quite spoke to the fears and trials then dominating my life. Under Heaven did. It starts slowly and poetically, daring us as modern, distracted readers to put down our phones, lean in, and pay attention. The story is disarmingly warm and rich with historical detail, as Kay’s characters persevere through a once-in-a-lifetime political crisis based on real events during China’s Tang dynasty.
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Reflecting on the past—dwelling on the wars and pain and joy and beauty that humankind has experienced through the ages—was grounding for me. It was the opposite of doomscrolling. (Hope-reading?)
I read one after another of Kay’s books, finding that theme of resilience across them all. His stories depict evil unflinchingly while holding tightly to the good. These books did more than pull me away from the doomscroll or pass the difficult hours of my early postpartum era; they rekindled my love for storytelling and gave me an appreciation for its power to defy the darkness of this fallen world.
Kay, who is Jewish but not personally religious, often explores themes that Christian readers will find compelling and beautiful, with an emphasis on friendship, love, and self-sacrifice—a father putting his life on the line to save his son, or a warrior setting aside nationalistic animosity to instead value the dignity of his neighbors. Beauty and virtue exist amid pain and evil, just as in our own lives.
“Terrible things can happen, but people can do good things for each other,” Kay told me during an interview in downtown Toronto this spring. “Tenderness can exist in the midst of danger and chaos.”
History is his preferred material for exploring that truth through fiction: The Last Light of the Sun is inspired by wars between Viking raiders and King Alfred the Great. The Sarantine Mosaic series draws from the Byzantine Empire under Justinian. Tigana is a tale of warring wizards and a small band of rebels inspired by Renaissance Italy, and A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan both meditate on religious conflict, tolerance, and good governance.
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“Every book I’ve ever written has been, in part, an attempt to look at how different the past is and how similar it is,” Kay said. “The people of the past are strange and alien and wildly different from us, but they also loved their children, loved their spouses, didn’t love their spouses, wanted security, wanted a roof, wanted a harvest.”
Their basic needs, hopes, and fears were the same as ours. Their sin, too, is the same as ours, which means Kay’s books are often violent. Those moments are sometimes detailed and distressing enough to make the books inappropriate for sensitive readers and children. His stories also sometimes include sexual scenes that, though typically brief and vague, will be beyond the pale for some Christian readers.
Yet for adults already grappling with suffering or evil, Kay’s work can be encouraging precisely because it can acknowledge the reality of evil without succumbing to it.
It helps that Kay, 70, has been writing successfully for decades. That means he doesn’t have to play by the more restrictive rules of modern publishing, he told me. Rules like: Don’t jump from the past tense to the present tense. Don’t hop between characters’ heads—just choose one perspective per chapter or, ideally, one perspective for the entire book. Don’t write long books. And definitely don’t write an entire chapter from the viewpoint of a grizzled medieval courier who is largely irrelevant to the plot.
Because of his freedom to experiment, Kay’s writing feels like a continuation of a storytelling tradition far older and deeper than most contemporary literary output. He’s not making a product carefully pruned to its most marketable form. He’s telling a tale—and telling a truth.
He also wants that kind of freedom for more of his fellow bards, telling me he’s distressed that publishers increasingly won’t let other writers break the rules like he does.
“If you’re a young writer, the pressure will be on you to fit the category that you’re writing towards, and those categories get more and more rigid,” he said. “‘Your market likes your dragons.’ ‘Your market likes your battle scenes.’ ‘You’ve got to give them battle scenes if you want to keep writing, otherwise you’re going to be doing freelance editing and workshops.’”
The root problem here is bigger than the publishing industry, he argued: “The state of publishing is a reflection of the state of society.”
Distracted, anxious, online scrolling habits like my own are changing the world—and the world of books—instead of the other way around.
Still, Kay has resisted.
“I trust my readers,” he said simply. “And at this stage, my readers—and I mean it when I say this is a gift—my readers let me get away with it.”
Kay’s characteristic “quarter turn to the fantastic,” exploring history but with twists of magic, also leaves room for the numinous and spirituality. There are no elaborate, concrete magic systems here; instead, the books are haunted by the other, the transcendent, and mystery. Characters sometimes face encounters or miracles they can’t explain but must reckon with nonetheless.
Kay himself has only experienced the inexplicable a few times, he said. Decades ago, before cell phones, he was backpacking through Europe with a friend when they decided to separate for a bit to explore individually. A month and a half later, he recalls, he was checking his mail in Rome when he had the overwhelming feeling that he should stay at the post office and wait for his friend, who he somehow knew would arrive shortly.
“I hadn’t seen him for six weeks. I had no idea where in Europe he was at that moment,” Kay recalled. But he sat on the floor and waited. Soon, his friend walked into the room.
It was a small thing, but inexplicable, even now.
“It sits as a complete anomaly in my life,” Kay said.
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Though a ravenous reader from childhood, Kay cited his parents, his wife, and the experience of having his own children as more significant influences on his work than any one author. But he also pointed to William Shakespeare: “I read Julius Caesar when I was ten and was stamped for life, like a duckling or something,” he remembered. “That was it. I was done. Lost. Enraptured.”
He started writing and publishing poetry as a teenager, then got his start in fiction as a young adult. In 1974, he helped Christopher Tolkien compile The Silmarillion after the death of his father, J. R. R. Tolkien. That experience helped him get a feel for the demands of novel writing and how to craft worlds. He tried his own hand at it, with a stint in Greece to work on a first attempt at a novel. His work has been published in more than two dozen languages since then, and he was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2014 for “outstanding contributions to the field of speculative fiction.”
After decades’ more experience, writing remains, for Kay, an “endless, brutal effort to reduce the gap between what’s in my head and what I can get on the page.”
His new novel, Written on the Dark, is set in a world a lot like medieval France. It starts as a murder mystery before slipping into a sweeping story about averting civil war, interrogating “the idea that some people could be too powerful for justice,” he said, and that there’s “an immunity that comes from wealth and power.”
The theme is compelling and relevant. Longtime Kay readers will smile at some of his personal flourishes and callbacks to past writing, but the book is accessible to new readers too. It’s shorter than many of his other novels, though, leaving less space for the intimate character development and detailed storytelling style that makes Kay so much fun to read.
Written on the Dark is at its best when it focuses on the relationships of its protagonist, tavern poet Thierry Villar. He begins in love with his city and his lifestyle of freedom, and he ends more committed to the people around him with a newly selfless love.
This is a timeless arc but not a simple or painless one. In one scene, the same night Villar finds love, a side character in the story is killed. “He was dead in a tavern on a summer night,” Villar reflects. “The night my own life altered again and love came in, as through an open window. A gift. A blessing of the god. What are we to make of such things overlapping, coinciding, in our days?”
This is the very question that weighed heavily on me after my son’s birth, as I tried to absorb all the world’s suffering through my smartphone’s screen. And though Kay doesn’t pretend to have the answer, I’ve found I much prefer art that at least knows to ask.
My son is much better at sleeping now that he’s almost four years old. We still cuddle all the time, and I still have to make a conscious effort to put away my phone. (I hope to throw it into the sea one day.)
Reading books aloud with him has become my favorite part of each night. No Kay yet, but books with a similar sense of adventure and moral inquiry: stories set in wild jungles, deserts, and oceans; stories about time travel, pirates, ninjas, knights, and selfish kings; stories of ordinary people trying to live virtuously through it all.
My son likes to jump straight from those stories to playtime. He runs around the yard, pretending to be a Viking facing a long winter or a bold knight challenging a ferocious villain.
“Not you!” he shouts at his imagined foes, his favorite cry of defiance.
These stories aren’t the only way he’ll grow more creative, courageous, and resilient, of course. Those transformations will come with maturity, discipleship, and time. But as a reader, I know—and, I think, Kay knows as a writer—good storytelling can help prepare us to live our own stories with tenderness, love, and bravery, even as we walk through the dark.
Haley Byrd Wilt is a journalist whose work has been published in Foreign Policy, CNN, and The New York Times, among others. She reports on Congress for the nonprofit news publication NOTUS.
