TORONTO—If you don’t know the work of Toronto fantasy novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. His latest, Ysabel (Viking Canada, $34), features an ancient fight between cultures involving gods, daggers, and magical transformations. Why are people calling this one different?

Well, the book is set in present-day Provence, rather than, say, sixth-century Byzantium (Sailing to Sarantium) or medieval Spain (The Lions of Al-Rassan). A main character is an artist, as usual, but here Edward Marriner is a photographer rather than a mosaicist or troubadour. Characters carry iPods instead of lutes; cellphones, not quill and parchment.

In a café near his Toronto home, Kay agrees the new book is “a major shifting”. Ysabel tells the story of Edward’s son, Ned, whose strangely tuned instincts land him in the middle of a battle between the Celts and the Romans that has been raging since 500 BC. The past plaits into every page of Kay’s oeuvre, but never so explicitly as here. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to write about the past, not in the past,” he explains.

The past seems very remote to Ned, at 15 still caught between the worlds of child and adult. Thematically, this touches a central element of Kay’s work. “I don’t like the word obsessed because of the pathological connotations,” he replies with a laugh, “but fascinated and engaged by the ideas of transition.…If you’re looking to try to write a compelling story, when are we most interesting? When we’re dealing with transition, change, conflict.”

High-flown thoughts for a much-derided kind of writing. “I’m perverse in the way in which I’m seeking to make use of a genre that tends to be scapegoated or diminished as marginal, escapist, for 13-year-olds. I’m trying to write adult literature in a form that in North America—not in Latin America, not in Eastern Europe, but here—tends to be trivialized.”

Readers outside North America seem better-equipped, he feels, to appreciate subtext. “Parts of the world that have lived through the idea of cultural suppression as a tool of tyranny to eradicate or eliminate or reduce opposition—people who’ve lived through that—get it instantly.”

The subtext of Ysabel has to do with a conflict of world-views: Celtic paganism versus Rome’s new world order. Is it fair to read in it, then, a criticism of empire-building? “I think we live in a dangerously ahistorical society. I think there are reasons for that. The speed of change can lead you to the illusion that it’s what’s coming forward that you need to focus on. You need to learn how to deal with YouTube; you don’t actually need to learn how to deal with World War II.…The absence of awareness of the past is pervasive in our education system and in our mindset, in our world-view.”

Not if Kay has anything to do with it.

Guy Gavriel Kay discusses Ysabel at a Vancouver International Writers Festival event next Thursday (February 15) at SFU Harbour Centre. For tickets, visit www.writersfest.bc.ca/.