Fantasy and history have always been closely entwined—stories of another time and place now inaccessible to us, littered with rulers and magicians and great battles that reshaped the earth. Written on the Dark is simply closer than most: a retelling and reshaping of French medieval history, made to evoke the feeling of what it was to live in the times of the Hundred Years’ War instead of merely the facts or the borders.
The book’s protagonist is Thierry Villar, filling the role of the real-life François Villon. Villon was a poet known for his comic works listing bequests to his friends and acquaintances, as well as the line “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”. Villon was also a criminal, sentenced twice: once for stabbing a priest, and once for stealing from a church, after which he was banished from Paris. Thierry himself is a tavern poet, renowned around the city of Orane for comic improvised poems featuring bequests, once banished for a year for stabbing a scorned lover, and plotting, on the coldest night of the year, to rob a church. A man, it seems, straight from history.
On the other side of the city, another historical tableau is playing out. In 1407, the mad king’s brother Louis I, Duke of Orleans, was assassinated in the street by his powerful rival, John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, in a bid for the throne’s power. Afterwards, John would publicly confess to the murder but justify it on the grounds of tyrannicide, for Louis had been deeply unpopular among the citizens of Paris—a move which would spark civil war. Here too, in the country of Ferrieres, in the streets of Orane, the king’s brother has just been killed by the Duke of Barratin, his bloody corpse left in the street where it fell.
But then history changes. Thierry is accosted before he can carry out his robbery by the city’s provost Robbin de Vaux, and asked to help: de Vaux needs a man who can gauge the public’s mood surrounding the duke, and bring back clues without being suspected like a king’s soldier might be. Thierry’s petty crimes will be overlooked if he can help find justice for this larger crime; and though he’s never cared much for the royal person, Thierry finds he can’t bring himself to refuse.
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Written on the Dark
A spanner in the works, Thierry’s presence slowly unravels Barratin’s plot. He identifies the red-robed assassin spotted in the area by late-night tavern occupants; worms his way into the Barratin estate under the guise of meeting a fellow poet; and, when Barratin gives his eloquent justification of why the king’s brother needed to be dispatched, is the one to stand and oppose it. Maybe none but a poet could have:
“Powerful men often believe justice has little to do with them. That they live above it, outside it. Maybe it is true. But perhaps it is not so now, here, for one reason: An equally powerful man was slain. And we all know, the dead cannot find rest or shelter… when they have been murdered and those who did it are permitted to walk away free. A slain lord cries out to us. Will we not listen to him, in the god’s name?”
The justice that comes is hardly complete: Barratin is banished for a year, and must repent fully before the church, but between his power and his armies cannot be convicted. Still, it’s more than France ever got.
The murder of the duke is just the opening act of Written in the Dark. Justice doesn’t mean peace, and history rolls onward: The Hundred Years’ War against Angland (whose real-life counterpart I don’t think I need to specify) rages, and a young woman named Jeanette d’Broche, said to hear the voice of God, raises a movement of peasants who call her the savior of the nation.
“But Sasha,” one friend said when I explained this to them, “this sounds just like a historical novel. Is it really fantasy?”
Yes, I would answer, but in a different way from most traditional fantasy. Although there’s a sprinkling of magic, the shadowy “half-world” that certain characters can peer into and receive visions of the future, it doesn’t define the book. Instead, the key difference that separates Kay’s world from our own seems to be its greater bend towards righteousness. Most of the historical events he draws from end ignobly—Villon dies in obscurity after his exile, the Duke of Orleans is unavenged, Joan of Arc is tried and burned at the stake—but in Kay’s telling, the balance tips the other way. Good people are more willing to stand up to power, their efforts better rewarded.
It’s seductive. The history of our world, after all, isn’t fair; its injustice is so often profitable. Death, cruelty, and evil still abound in Ferrieres—Kay’s characters are only human—but ultimately his world is a place where poems are just as powerful as swords. Even if its technology is medieval, I’d sure like to live there.
It’s also, I’ll note, wonderfully queer for its 15th-century setting—and here is where the line between history and fantasy blurs. It’s true that medieval France had far harsher laws against homosexuality than Ferrieres seems to; it’s true that people likely couldn’t be as open about their sexuality or their gender as they are. But it’s not true that queer people didn’t exist in medieval France, or that they never found ways to express themselves or find companionship. Queerness in historical accounts, then, is just as much a matter of the telling as of the facts, of what’s recorded and what’s not. Who can say whether this facet of Written on the Dark is more a reimagining of history or an unearthing of it?
For Thierry, a poet, the telling of history is deeply important. He has the creative freedom, in his writings, to describe the dead as he likes; and he wonders, with everything he performs or improvises, whether it will be remembered after he himself is gone. But he, too, is just one man: Here and there, Kay tells us what Thierry does not and cannot know, what his version of history will never record. The book’s title itself refers to the quiet moments that are recalled from the middle of chaos, that make it into the records when so many other ordinary moments don’t.
A shorthand for genre I’ve heard is that fantasy describes a world that isn’t, while science fiction describes a world that could be. This novel is neither, and unique: a beautiful depiction of a world that just might have been.
Written on the Dark is published by Ace.
I like Mr. Kay’s own explanation of his fiction as “history with a quarter-turn to the fantastic”. Though I would approach it as fantasy with a lot of side-eye towards history. Which allows it to surprise me pleasantly when I catch on to the historical analogues in his works. I remember having that shock of recognition with his first “quarter-turner”, Tigana (1990), when I spotted Carlo Ginzburg’s benandante from The Night Battles showing up as Mr. Kay’s Night Walkers. So, fantasy with historical “Easter eggs” added.
The Benendanti also play a major role in Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon. Her Benendanto aren’t much like Kay’s, however.
Sounds wonderful. Thank you for the rec. Would you please be so kind to tell uns in which way is it queer? Are there any queer charakters center stage? It would be great to learn more about them, if you don’t mind. Or is it more of an “open world” / “casual queerness”-approach?
None of the principal characters is presented as queer, but there’s too much running from assassins in the dark and riding to meet the invading army for them to have much time for romantic or sexual escapades, so we really don’t know. Some close friends / relatives of main characters are queer; this is presented matter-of-factly, without it being a plot point or an especially unusual thing. One secondary character is trans and gender-fluid (although not described in those terms), and while this is regarded by other characters as unusual, that’s not the strangest thing about that character. So: some canonically and known queer characters, but their queerness isn’t their most important quality, either to the plot or to their society.
Same question!
One of these days I’m going to code that Internet Gay Fiction Database wiki I’ve always dreamed of…