Sometimes he’ll be mopping the floor and listening to a couple of the regulars, and he knows it’s not from now. It’s from before. What’s more, time is supposed to be sequential, right? One thing happening after another. Things further back receding, more recent things feeling, well, more recent. Not for Wayne. [loc. 1637]
The Matter of Britain meets Jilly Cooper! The setting is the medieval town of Abury, in Wiltshire: the characters drink at the Green Knight, where Vern the landlord has an odd agreement -- 'anything you gain you give to me' -- with Wayne the barman. Arthur is a tech billionaire, Lance is a veteran with PTSD, Gwen is an influencer, Mo was adopted from a Bangalore roadside, Morgan is ... vengeful.
The novel opens with the celebration of Arthur's fortieth birthday, a grand gala where several old friends appear unexpectedly. Gwen can't concentrate on the festivities: she's being blackmailed. Could it be the Invisible Knight again? There are flashbacks to when they were all teenagers together in the 1990s: alliances forged and broken, grudges taking root, Arthur already making his mark as a tech genius, Morgan the target of the bullies on the school bus. And then forward again, to 'Right Here, Right Now', and an attempt on Arthur's life, the reconsideration of an old murder, the risk of a computer virus that'd wipe out civilisation.
I loved this: the resonances with Arthurian myth, the surprising but thoroughly credible identity of old John who props up the bar, the way the characters' opinions and perceptions evolve as they mature. The focus was on the women as much as the men: Morgan bemoans the fact that there are 'no epic poems, no legends, no bardic songs, no Romeo and Juliet, that exist to explain it to her. The record is nigh empty, as though women never adored each other, never went into battle, never fought the monster, never wept and bled, killed and died for each other, who separated, didn’t feel the other’s absence like a missing limb.' [loc. 1037] For me, her relationship with Gwen felt like the core of the novel. And it is a novel about how women -- whores or saints, quest objects or evil sorceresses -- behave, are expected to behave, are punished for not conforming.
I liked the love poem (or is it a confession?) hidden in the comments of a piece of code ('/* Until I found, beneath her fairness/Putrefaction. [she] died choking on roses/Embracing the lover she earned, Death*/' [loc. 2367]) and the nomenclature of the viruses and worms Arthur creates/defeats: Wasteland, the Black Prince...True, there were a couple of false notes: 'pay a ten-pound bill with a hundred-pound note' (sorry, not in this universe); 'the comet goes over a little after ten' (comets don't visibly move). But they are forgiveable in the wit and flow of the whole.
Appreciating this novel definitely requires more than a passing acquaintance with Arthurian mythology, but it's thoroughly rewarding to spot all the little references and hints. Bliss and Blunder interrogates the original stories, highlighting misogyny and re-examining canonical relationships. And it's fun: a cracking read which I galloped through.
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