2020/102: By Force Alone -- Lavie Tidhar

Morgan laughs. ‘I keep forgetting you’re half-human, Merlin. You’re always so invested. Haven’t you got it yet? The game’s the game! Let men war and murder for king and throne. But the land’s ours. Their souls are ours. Men come and go but we remain.’
‘By what right, Morgan?’
She laughs openly in his face. ‘No right,’ she says softly. ‘By force alone.’ [loc. 2550]

In which Tidhar tackles the Matter of Britain with glee, anachronism and a mashup sensibility. The setting is Britain in the 6th century, the protagonists a set of chancers and hard men scraping a living amid the ruins of Roman occupation. Arthur is a drug-dealing thug, Merlin is half-Fae and drawn to anyone with power, Kay is a pimp, Guinevere's a mercenary, Lancelot is a Nubian kung-fu master, formerly apprenticed to Joseph of Arimathea. (Obviously.) And as for the Grail ... well, in Uther's time a dragon, or a comet, was seen in the sky, and a long bad winter follows.

There isn't a great deal of chivalry or courtliness to be found here: but there are reflections and echoes of the Arthurian cycle -- that mosaic of old stories, myth and invention built up by Mallory, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Chretien des Troyes, and many others -- reframed as a base tale of greed and force and treachery. There are, too, echoes of more recent narratives: a pastiche of Trainspotting here, a foreshadowing of Oppenheimer there, and a detached observer, questioning Galahad, who's dismayed to discover that 'it’s all so awful, this story of Arthur, just a sad, simple tale of violence and greed'.

By Force Alone is pervasively gritty, by which I mean violent, crude and sordid. And sweary. It's also very funny, and provides a pointed commentary on modern politics, on Brexit ('‘Foreigners!’ he says, savouring the words and their effect on his captive audience. ‘Angles and Saxons, coming over here, to fight and pillage and – and rape!’) and on the whole elaborate contraption of myth. There is magic here, as well as dreams and hallucinations: shape-shifting Morgan, Elaine, the monstrous cat Cath Palug, the Green Knight. And Merlin, at the heart of it all, at once hopeful and disillusioned: "It doesn’t really matter, he thinks, this matter of Britain. Just another way to pass the time."

By Force Alone is iconoclastic, hilarious, dark and inventive: I liked it a lot, though it's not an especially comfortable read: I consumed in small doses.