Into the Archive: The Bright Sword

 

The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur (Hardcover)

by Lev Grossman (Author)

A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find that he’s too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive.

They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords lay siege to Camelot and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell, and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.

The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, full of duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It also sheds a fresh light on Arthur’s Britain, a diverse, complex nation struggling to come to terms with its bloody history. The Bright Sword is a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, who are looking for a way to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves. - Amazon.

Well, this is the first book I've gotten in September (yes, it came on the last day of August, but rather late and bought with September funds). I knew it was coming and went out and started waiting on the porch at 4:30 PM. I went in at 6 PM to go to the restroom, then checked Amazon and saw it was three deliveries away. I got out just in time to accept the package from the hand of the deliveryman himself. I took it in, opened it up, and found a beautiful book of surprising heft; 673 pages to be exact. I hadn't realized it would be so big, but it's fine with me. I certainly enjoyed Lev Grossman's The Magician's Trilogy (I was surprised to learn he had written four other novels, two before The Magicians and two for chilren after the Magicians books). Please don't judge the Magicians books by the adaptations done on the SciFi channel. What I like about Grossman is that he likes to write Fantasy and he is an obvious fan of Fantasy on any level, and isn't afraid to show it. The very epithet of the first section of The Bright Sword is this quote: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government." But that is the author's comment. He combines legend, historical detail, and a modern sense skewed through applicability to these lenses. Grossman does this (so far; I haven't read a lot) with a light touch that is never intrusive; the only retelling (major or otherwise) that has taken this particular approach in so far as I can tell. The closest comparison might be T. H. White (with less sheer anachronism), a statement I believe that Grossman would find a compliment. 

Every generation of modern readers gets its own retelling of Arthur; it is a tribute to the applicability and even malleability of the legends. From Malory's Le Mort D'Arthur to Tennyson's The Idylls of the King to T. H. White's The Once and Future King to John Boorman's Excalibur, we find a different king and court  that the times interpret for themselves. I think we might have the next major one here.

I have been following 'the Matter of Britain' since at least the fourth grade (with the Blanche Winder Stories of King Arthur book), perhaps even earlier (check out Arthur! and His Square Knights of the Round Table). Here are but a few of the iterations I have filed in my skull.

(slightly edited)