The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
Sep. 3rd, 2024 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotI have finally reached the end of this weighty tome! (Now I will finish The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 and then read Netherford Hall.) Though TBH it was a faster read than I expected, especially in the small bites I typically read these days, which is a great point in its favor. Still, I had a lot of complex feelings while reading it.
Basic synopsis: A mistreated young man from the Isle of Mull travels south to join the Round Table, only to find that the grail quest plus a massive battle has already killed most of the knights and King Arthur himself. He (lmao I never finished this synopsis last night) joins the remnants and they take on a new quest to find Arthur's replacement.
The prose is excellent, to start with. Very readable, but not workmanlike, with a good balance between description and action/dialogue and a strong narrative voice.
I loved the characters. Collum, our hero, has an extremely abusive past that underpins his search to find a place to belong, and he's a killing machine in the best way. Nimue is intelligent and capable, and I did not mind her heterosexual romance with Collum at all! Guinevere's a badass in a queenly sense. The remaining knights are all marginalized in different ways, drawing a very different picture of knighthood than we usually get: Bedivere is gay and one-handed, Dinadan is a trans man, Palomides is a Saracen, Dagonet is not neurotypical (depressed and/or OCD), Constantine has a stutter and some level of parental abuse himself. Scipio technically isn't a knight and isn't really marginalized, either - he's a Roman displaced in time by a century.
The setting kept throwing me, though. The book's very serious about the fact that the Romans just left Britain a century ago, referring back to it over and over again, and Christianity is well-established but still new. At the same time, the society described feels late medieval at best, early modern at worst. There's a functioning bureaucracy; people speak French from time to time; there are families that are wealthy on a "national" scale; there really is a British "nation" that Arthur was king of, with the individual kingdoms basically unimportant during his reign. There are court masques!!! While I read, I recognized that this was on purpose, and then in the end note Grossman says he's doing like T. H. White, so it's not that I think this is a mistake per se. Taking the story "out of time" and into a fairy-tale kind of version of high medieval Britain with plate armor, crests, masques, England, etc. makes sense with Arthuriana being what it is. BUT. I found it so jarring how the text switches back and forth between "this is all fake because it never happened and even if it did in some way the story is fundamentally high medieval or later due to the inclusion of Lancelot, courtly love, and so on! also, fairies" and "realism realism realism! battles are nasty and bloody, people are gross and mean! BRITANNIA IS REELING FROM THE LACK OF ROMANS". I don't remember White fixating so hard on grounding The Once and Future King in the post-Roman period.
And by the time I got to the end, I realized that what this really feels like is, more than taking some cues from White in constructing the setting, A Response To TOAFK, in much the same way that The Magicians is A Response To Narnia/HP. It doesn't entirely stand on its own. The flashback to Arthur's childhood is straight from The Sword in the Stone, except he's called Art instead of Wart, for instance, and some of the characters just feel the same in both texts. A lot of this could technically be part of the floating pop-cultural Arthur mythos, yeah, but between a) explicitly citing White as an inspiration and b) Grossman being a Publishable Fanfic guy, it just feels likely that this is less about Arthur Mythos and more about TOAFK, or at least Arthur Mythos Post-TOAFK (since it has been hugely influential).
Which is fine! I don't mind that at all. What I do mind is that it also feels like there's a lot of unthinking influence from GRRM. You have that "realism means blood and grit" thing, rubbing the reader's face in the dirt because ha! you thought you were going to read a fairy tale, didn't you, stupid? You also have Lancelot and Merlin turning out to be villains, Lancelot a fervent conservative and Merlin a sexist asshole, because blah blah did you really believe in the songs and stories, Sansa? Guinevere isn't really a princess, she's a member of the rich "Eastbrook" family that supports Arthur in exchange for the marriage. And more subtly, Arthur's Britons are ... not exactly Britons. They're aware of "Old Ones" that they may have wiped out(?), and there's a sense that Arthur's cohort have displaced some other pre-Roman people somehow (despite the fact that they do not appear to be Roman remnants themselves), in much the same way that Westeros has Andals and First Men, which is itself obviously based on British history, so it's kind of an ourobouros. Which makes it, again, sort of understandable, but it jars in context. It feels like Arthur's people are Anglo-Normans, when they're actually dealing with Saxon incursions. (Which was done kind of ridiculously, by the way. At the end there's a massive flotilla of Saxons migrating in all at once?! That's not how that works.) "We are but the latest of invaders to this land that has been overwritten many times" is a standard trope in a certain type of British fantasy, along with the association of the older peoples with faerie/magic/Old Gods, but it doesn't make much sense in this context. Oh, and that reminds me of the way the treatment of religion feels pulled directly from the pages of ASOIAF - the strict separation between the church and magic/the Old Gods, which is completely ahistorical (and comes off as very pro-Jesus). And again, an established trope, but in the context of the rest it feels like either deliberately GOTifying Arthuriana or having allowed GOT to become a subconscious brain pattern. I don't really like that.
On the whole, I really enjoyed it! The weirdness of the quests and the semi-randomness of the last big quest for the Lance was perfect. But I would like to read another take on the period following Arthur's death that feels less like it's saying, "Well, of course they need another high king, of course the church wins out over magic," and so on, and more like it's just genuinely exploring what could happen. If that makes sense.
Basic synopsis: A mistreated young man from the Isle of Mull travels south to join the Round Table, only to find that the grail quest plus a massive battle has already killed most of the knights and King Arthur himself. He (lmao I never finished this synopsis last night) joins the remnants and they take on a new quest to find Arthur's replacement.
The prose is excellent, to start with. Very readable, but not workmanlike, with a good balance between description and action/dialogue and a strong narrative voice.
I loved the characters. Collum, our hero, has an extremely abusive past that underpins his search to find a place to belong, and he's a killing machine in the best way. Nimue is intelligent and capable, and I did not mind her heterosexual romance with Collum at all! Guinevere's a badass in a queenly sense. The remaining knights are all marginalized in different ways, drawing a very different picture of knighthood than we usually get: Bedivere is gay and one-handed, Dinadan is a trans man, Palomides is a Saracen, Dagonet is not neurotypical (depressed and/or OCD), Constantine has a stutter and some level of parental abuse himself. Scipio technically isn't a knight and isn't really marginalized, either - he's a Roman displaced in time by a century.
The setting kept throwing me, though. The book's very serious about the fact that the Romans just left Britain a century ago, referring back to it over and over again, and Christianity is well-established but still new. At the same time, the society described feels late medieval at best, early modern at worst. There's a functioning bureaucracy; people speak French from time to time; there are families that are wealthy on a "national" scale; there really is a British "nation" that Arthur was king of, with the individual kingdoms basically unimportant during his reign. There are court masques!!! While I read, I recognized that this was on purpose, and then in the end note Grossman says he's doing like T. H. White, so it's not that I think this is a mistake per se. Taking the story "out of time" and into a fairy-tale kind of version of high medieval Britain with plate armor, crests, masques, England, etc. makes sense with Arthuriana being what it is. BUT. I found it so jarring how the text switches back and forth between "this is all fake because it never happened and even if it did in some way the story is fundamentally high medieval or later due to the inclusion of Lancelot, courtly love, and so on! also, fairies" and "realism realism realism! battles are nasty and bloody, people are gross and mean! BRITANNIA IS REELING FROM THE LACK OF ROMANS". I don't remember White fixating so hard on grounding The Once and Future King in the post-Roman period.
And by the time I got to the end, I realized that what this really feels like is, more than taking some cues from White in constructing the setting, A Response To TOAFK, in much the same way that The Magicians is A Response To Narnia/HP. It doesn't entirely stand on its own. The flashback to Arthur's childhood is straight from The Sword in the Stone, except he's called Art instead of Wart, for instance, and some of the characters just feel the same in both texts. A lot of this could technically be part of the floating pop-cultural Arthur mythos, yeah, but between a) explicitly citing White as an inspiration and b) Grossman being a Publishable Fanfic guy, it just feels likely that this is less about Arthur Mythos and more about TOAFK, or at least Arthur Mythos Post-TOAFK (since it has been hugely influential).
Which is fine! I don't mind that at all. What I do mind is that it also feels like there's a lot of unthinking influence from GRRM. You have that "realism means blood and grit" thing, rubbing the reader's face in the dirt because ha! you thought you were going to read a fairy tale, didn't you, stupid? You also have Lancelot and Merlin turning out to be villains, Lancelot a fervent conservative and Merlin a sexist asshole, because blah blah did you really believe in the songs and stories, Sansa? Guinevere isn't really a princess, she's a member of the rich "Eastbrook" family that supports Arthur in exchange for the marriage. And more subtly, Arthur's Britons are ... not exactly Britons. They're aware of "Old Ones" that they may have wiped out(?), and there's a sense that Arthur's cohort have displaced some other pre-Roman people somehow (despite the fact that they do not appear to be Roman remnants themselves), in much the same way that Westeros has Andals and First Men, which is itself obviously based on British history, so it's kind of an ourobouros. Which makes it, again, sort of understandable, but it jars in context. It feels like Arthur's people are Anglo-Normans, when they're actually dealing with Saxon incursions. (Which was done kind of ridiculously, by the way. At the end there's a massive flotilla of Saxons migrating in all at once?! That's not how that works.) "We are but the latest of invaders to this land that has been overwritten many times" is a standard trope in a certain type of British fantasy, along with the association of the older peoples with faerie/magic/Old Gods, but it doesn't make much sense in this context. Oh, and that reminds me of the way the treatment of religion feels pulled directly from the pages of ASOIAF - the strict separation between the church and magic/the Old Gods, which is completely ahistorical (and comes off as very pro-Jesus). And again, an established trope, but in the context of the rest it feels like either deliberately GOTifying Arthuriana or having allowed GOT to become a subconscious brain pattern. I don't really like that.
On the whole, I really enjoyed it! The weirdness of the quests and the semi-randomness of the last big quest for the Lance was perfect. But I would like to read another take on the period following Arthur's death that feels less like it's saying, "Well, of course they need another high king, of course the church wins out over magic," and so on, and more like it's just genuinely exploring what could happen. If that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-04 01:11 am (UTC)I think a lot of the GOT-ness went over my head, because I... don't really know that much about GOT. (Somehow missed that massive pop culture phenomena almost entirely— I read the first few books in high school, but obviously they didn't stick.)
Which was done kind of ridiculously, by the way. At the end there's a massive flotilla of Saxons migrating in all at once?! That's not how that works.
I read this bit as being a metaphor for / commentary on how Maybe We Shouldn't Be Terrible To Refugees, Actually?, in the way that Merlin and Lancelot were villains in specifically, recognizably modern ways— the creepy entitled sexist and religious zealot who wants to Make Camelot Great Again— and the way the underdog knights were coded as underdogs.
I do agree that the overall vibe was, like, way more pro-Jesus than I expected.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-04 11:47 pm (UTC)Oh, I totally agree - it just struck me as ham-fisted, like "we can't just say that immigration is Fine, Actually Even If The Immigrants Are Different From Us, we have to have A MILLION IMMIGRANTS!"
I do agree that the overall vibe was, like, way more pro-Jesus than I expected.
Right?! Probably it stands out more because of the Mists of Avalon style of Arthuriana where Church Bad, but I expected it not to come down so hard the way it did.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-04 12:57 pm (UTC)I figured out what TOAFK was, but kept staring at it going "That isn't the acronym for A Court of Thorns ... " LOL
To disagree with you, the one good thing about GRRMs universe is that it reminds people that shit's dirty and people are fucking assholes when they think they can get away with it.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-05 11:52 pm (UTC)My main problem with the GRRM mode is just that it's rarely "things are dirty and there are bad people in the world," it's like there's an extra scathing edge for people who try to see beyond the dirt/clean the dirt or believe anyone could be helpful without an ulterior motive. And to be fair again, The Bright Sword does not go that far, it just feels like it was written in a milieu that's been fundamentally changed in that direction. And tbh if you're into that, you might actually enjoy the book more than you think!