Take a moment

FICTION Guy Gavriel Kay offers up a look at temporary nature of lives lived

At first glance, “All the Seas of the World,” the new novel from Toronto writer Guy Gavriel Kay, seems like exactly what one would expect. A compelling historical fantasy, the novel depicts a world on the cusp of change, exploring both the heights of power and those affected by the decisions of the powerful. Steeped in detail and flush with memorable characters, it is a fine example of how Kay has become something of an institution in the world of speculative fiction, with works translated into nearly two dozen languages, a rucksack full of awards and an appointment to the Order of Canada to his credit.

“All the Seas of the World” is set in Kay’s version of early Renaissance Europe, which will be familiar to readers from his last two novels, “A Brightness Long Ago” and “Children of Earth and Sky.” Set a few years after the fall of Sarantium (inspired by the fall of Constantinople in 1453), the story begins with a meeting on a secluded beach. Rafel ben Natan, a corsair and merchant living in exile, and his business partner Nadia bint Dihiyan meet with Ghazzali al-Siyab to put plans in motion to assassinate the khalif of Abeneven. Rafel and Nadia — a former slave who escaped after killing “the man who’d owned her” and bought her way aboard Rafel’s ship — have been hired by Zariq and Ziyar ibn Tihon, khalifs of Tarouz, to create a power vacuum and imbalance, which will allow the brothers to expand their rule.

All does not, however, go according to plan, and Rafel and Nadia quickly find themselves not only swept up in the large-scale conflicts and political machinations of this unsteady world, but at the centre of them.

“All the Seas of the World” develops with the creeping intensity of an avalanche: an action here, an assignation there, and before you know it, all hell has broken loose. It’s a thrilling and exciting reading experience, and one which will more than satisfy fans of Kay’s fiction.

To describe further would do a disservice to a fine novel rooted in the vicissitudes of fate and the consequences of even seemingly simple decisions. Two things merit mentioning, however.

First, the publicity materials for the novel refer to it as a “standalone.” Strictly speaking, this is true: one would be satisfied reading “All the Seas of the World” without reading “A Brightness Long Ago” and “Children of Earth and Sky.” But to do so would rob the reader of the complexity of Kay’s vision and the interrelatedness of the world he has created. Characters and situations from the previous novels return in this one, adding depth and illumination to all three. If it’s not quite the third book in a trilogy, it’s much closer to that than it is to a stand-alone.

There is also the matter of tone. Kay has long explored the lives of characters on the periphery of power, everyday people juxtaposed against rulers and religious leaders. To this exploration, “All the Seas of the World” adds an aching sense of mortality and loss. “People die in stories, as in life,” Kay writes, in one of the novel’s many narrative interjections. “Sometimes these are figures at the heart of what we are reading or hearing. Sometimes they are not. But even so, even if they have only just walked into it on a night in a city far from their own, we must imagine them as having people who loved them, for whom their absence will loom large, even if it does not in the story we are being told.”

At first, the frequent digressions into the post-life consciousnesses of even minor characters feel like interruptions to the story. Gradually, however, one comes to realize that mortality, and what comes after, for both the living and the dead, is one of the main subjects of the novel. Written largely during the pandemic, and around the loss of Kay’s mother (to whom the book is dedicated), “All the Seas of the World” has an elegiac quality, an aching awareness of the temporary nature of lives, empires, worlds. As Kay writes, “If we take a moment for them it is also a moment taken for ourselves. For those who love us, those we love.”