“You were so sure you were a false knight. Everybody always told you you were. You told yourself that. But you were wrong, you were a true knight all along. You just didn’t know it yet.”
I realized that it had been over a year since I posted
anything, but it’s also been a pretty rough year in a lot of ways – nothing
actually that bad for me personally as such, but family members have
been facing some health issues and work has been either quite busy or quite
disrupted. I’ve allowed myself to fall
behind in my reading and other entertainment options. I’d been thinking off and on that I was going
to do a compare/contrast of The Last Human and Some Desperate Glory,
both of which I mostly enjoyed and which had a lot of thematic similarities,
and then I continuously didn’t get around to doing it. But I was taking my kids to the bookstore recently
and was pleasantly surprised to see that Lev Grossman had something new out – I
was a huge fan of his Magicians trilogy and my oldest daughter was a fan
of something he did for younger readers, so I decided to give it a shot without
knowing anything whatsoever about it.
It's kind of a mess, but I loved it.
When I was much younger I had this set of young reader
classics that belonged to my own mother when she was a kid. It contained a lot of classic fairy tales,
and a number of very obscure ones, and a couple of volumes that had mostly
kid-friendly (actually mid-20th-century kid-friendly, which isn’t
quite the same thing) retellings of ancient epics like The Odyssey and The
Song of Roland. Naturally it had a
number of Arthurian tales in there, and I remember being fond of them but also
a little confused by how exactly they were supposed to work. At least in that volume they were more or
less self-contained stories, so you got some pretty big inconsistencies with
the various knights and they just seemed to do random things, but there was
lots of adventure and fighting so ten year old me was fine with it.
This one starts with self-designated Sir Collum riding from
his home from the ass-end of nowhere headed for Camelot and hopefully a life of
adventure, and in this initial part of the book I thought I saw where we were
headed. Collum is a knight because he’s
got a sword and a set of armor, and you get a lot of details about all the
various pins that hold this armor together.
Turns out that you don’t just throw that stuff on, that’s part of why
knights are so powerful. Sure, it looks
like it’s just some metal pieces but there’s infrastructure involved. So what I got from this is that we were going
to be doing something like A Song of Ice and Fire where the author
deconstructs typical Arthurian tropes and applies more realism to things. I was also prepared for this based on the Narnia
via D&D section of The Magicians so it seems like in Grossman’s
wheelhouse. And then he runs across a
knight who is possibly out of his mind and ends up killing that guy in a pretty
realistic and grim fashion, and this confirmed my impression of what I was in
for.
Except, not really, because what happens next is Collum
makes it to Camelot and finds out he’s too late. The Battle of Camlann just happened, Arthur
is dead, there’s about a half dozen knights of the Round Table left and they
don’t know what they’re going to do. So
far, so realistic. And they end up doing
some praying and then they get an honest-to-God miracle where they have to
fight a Green Knight to figure out what to do next.
The whole novel is like that. You get nods to realism from time to time,
like when the wannabe usurper army from the north of Britain is maybe a couple
thousand guys, not a huge host of a half million or something. Definitely period appropriate. But then Nimue comes out and does a spell which
kills 173 people (which doesn’t outright end the battle, but does help).
Just to cut to the chase here, after I read the entire thing
and then the afterward by Grossman, I think I figured out what is really going
on in this book. The Arthurian mythos is
already a godawful mess; Arthur is an Anglo-Saxon culture hero despite the fact
that he predates their arrival in Britain and would have opposed their coming to
the extent he’s a real person at all, plus he’s a knight and surrounded by
knights even though he and his court would have predated that too. And then everyone who’s come along since has
thrown in whatever they felt improved the story without regard to whether it
makes temporal or any other kind of sense.
So Grossman just jumps right in there and does the same thing too.
This isn’t to say that the story lacks any kind of internal coherence, because overall it ends up being the Tale of Sir Collum. But the narrative isn’t afraid to send them to the faerie realm where normal rules don’t apply, and even in the real world you might end up in some sort of vision quest that runs entirely on dream logic. And throughout you consistently get mixtures of quasi-realistic low fantasy grunge mixed up with honest-to-God divine miracles. It’s enough to explain their constant low-grade confusion about what exactly they are supposed to be doing! And to the extent the book has some weaknesses that's also got to be up there - stories that run on dream logic to this extent can suffer when it's really not clear that even the narrative knows where it's going.
You’ve got the frame story of Collum, but throughout we get some additional frame stories that delve into the background of the various Knights of the Round Table that he is adventuring with. Sometimes these stories are being told by the knights themselves, other times it’s not entirely clear who the narrator is supposed to be. And except for Lancelot (who canonically did make it through Camlann) this is definitely the B or C team here – you’ve probably heard of Bedivere if you watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail and I guess Palomides is known for his spoiler role in Tristan and Isolde but you’d probably need to be a real Arthur nerd to have any knowledge about Dinadan or Dagonet. Also I’m pretty sure that Scipio was just made up for this book. (He's not even properly a member of the Round Table. Also, no one really likes him that much.)
All these stories are very well done and would be worth
reading even without the underlying frame; they contain the same mix of squalor
and splendor, modern and classical. Dagonet,
for instance, is clearly suffering from what we’d now call major depressive
disorder, but neither he nor anyone else has the context to call it that. He considers himself to be a sinner for not
adequately appreciating the glories of the world, but he later has a visitation
from an angel that leaves him feeling even worse after getting a taste of
divine bliss and then having it removed.
That angel tells him that he’s right to feel like that because
the real world does suck so bad, which leads into the general theme that Heaven
is really a bunch of assholes.
There’s always that central triangle with Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere and that’s here too. Depending on the version of the story, this can go quite a number of different ways. Usually Lancelot and Guinevere are carrying on an affair that Arthur kinda-sorta knows about and ignores until it can’t be ignored. Less commonly she is unjustly accused of this affair, and even less commonly they are having the affair and Arthur is genuinely ignorant. This one takes a somewhat surprising approach that I don’t know I’ve ever seen before, and the reasoning behind it is also unique. Arthur himself doesn't always play that big a role in his own stories, but he does here, and I love the approach to him. He's still a mysterious guy, even to himself.
Also somewhat interestingly, there aren’t a lot of bad guys here except possibly God, and even that’s debatable. Without spoiling things too much, Lancelot is certainly antagonistic but you’d be hard pressed to call him villainous. Merlin probably comes closest (there’s a #MeToo section in Nimue’s backstory) but he’s really more of an opportunistic bastard than anything. Morgan Le Fay is not nice but you can reason with her. Mordred is more pathetic than anything here. Even the Saxons that keep invading have their own reasons. It's awfully gentle and understanding for all the terrible things that keep happening in it. But to the extent there's a point to any of this, I think that's actually it - there's wonder in the world and terror in it. A good thing to end a year or start a new one on, if that's your thing.
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