“You are not who you think you are, and Britain is not what you think it is. I return you now to Camelot. Your disaster is already in progress.” [loc. 3099]
I rate Grossman's Magicians trilogy (The Magicians, The Magician King,The Magician's Land) very highly, but wasn't sure I wanted to read his take on the Matter of Britain. It was a Daily Deal, though, and I couldn't (well, didn't) resist. I think I loved it, but it's still too soon to say. There is a lot in its nearly 700 pages.
The story begins with Collum, an orphan and bastard who at seventeen is a spectacular warrior, heading for Camelot to pledge allegiance to King Arthur. He arrives too late: the Battle of Camlann was a fortnight ago, almost all the Knights of the Round Table (well, those who survived the Quest for the Holy Grail) are dead or missing, and Arthur was last seen being borne away, gravely wounded, on a magical ship. Those few who remain -- Sir Bedivere, Sir Dagonet, Sir Palomides, Sir Dinadan, Sir Scipio -- are empty of purpose and drowned in misery. Over the course of the novel, their histories (and some of the most famous episodes from Arthurian tradition) are explored, and we learn what the Round Table and Camelot meant to each knight. Morgan, Nimue and Guinevere are important figures, though -- unlike the knights -- none gets her own chapter. And meanwhile, there's a Green Knight and a new Quest and, perhaps, a new king.
This is post-Roman Britain, replete with anachronisms ('the Dark Ages king and the pretty high medieval trappings, Camelot and all the rest of it, [writers] who pick and choose what they like from history and sweep the messy bits under the rug', says Grossman in his entertaining Afterword), a land laid waste by the conflict between God and Faerie, a land threatened by Saxons fleeing rising seas to the east, and by the old gods, and by the new king at Camelot. I found the vestiges of pre-Roman Britain -- the light of civilisation going out, the people who 'scurried back to the old hill forts, which they barely remembered how to live in', the tribes that were once legions -- more engaging and poignant than the medieval-flavoured fantasies of flying ships, shining swords and combat in plate armour.
I very much liked the sense of time in this novel, of the events as happening at one brief moment between a long past and an equally complex future: of the history of Britain as a continual roil of story, 'the past never wholly lost, and the future never quite found'. I liked the knights' tales, which encompass cultural difference ('what the fuck is a zero?' someone asks Sir Palomides, who's from Baghdad), neurodivergence, gender and sexuality, and religious faith. Every time I dip into the novel for a quotation or a reference, I find myself rereading a page or so. I'm looking forward to revisiting The Bright Sword in years to come.
He looked up at the empty clouds, and ... wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one. [last lines]
