I grabbed this book by Lev Grossman from my library because I saw somewhere that it was a Guinevere-forward version of the Arthurian legend, and I was all over that.
It’s not.
The main character is just another white dude named Collum who dreams of becoming a knight of the Round Table.
That said, I do appreciate Grossman’s feminist take on aspects of the legend that love to hate on women.
Guinevere wasn’t an adulteress, she was a pawn in Lancelot’s grab for power.
Nimue isn’t an evil witch who betrayed Merlin, and Merlin isn’t the good guy he wants us to believe him to be. He’s just another man who tried to take what he wanted from a woman without her consent. He also underestimated her and paid the price.
I still wish we had seen more of Guinevere, especially since that’s the main reason I picked up the book. As it is, we barely see her until the end, when she sweeps in to save the day.
Most of the book focuses on another white dude with special powers: Collum. If that’s all I told you about this book, you might think it’s not that different from The Sword in the Stone, in which an orphan from nowhere turns out to be a king.
There are a couple of times when characters suggest Collum might secretly be Arthur’s son, and thus heir to the throne, but it turns out not to be true, and I appreciated that. It would have been too predictable and too like a retelling of The Sword and the Stone, rather than a reimagining.
Instead, Collum is just another orphan who was dropped off at a minor lord’s house, where he was abused and neglected until he managed to make his way to Camelot to try and join King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.
The problem is he arrived two weeks too late. Arthur is dead, Lancelot has vanished, Guinevere is in a convent, and the remaining handful of knights are sitting around trying to figure out what to do next.
I wouldn’t say Collum leads them on an adventure, but he does prompt them to take off in search of, if not Arthur, someone or something he might have left behind to indicate who should sit on the throne next.
There’s a battle for Camelot, a trip to Avalon, a deep-sea dive for Excalibur, and a duel with Lancelot.
It’s all very exciting, except for the fact that it takes almost 700 pages to cover.
In between stages of the post-Arthur adventure, Grossman dives into the past to give us a bit of history on each of the knights who are left, including Sir Palomides, Sir Dagonet, Sir Bedivere, and Sir Dinadan. We meet them before they meet Arthur, we spend a little bit of time with each of them when they are adventuring with (or for) Arthur, which I appreciated because it gave Grossman a chance to explore various aspects of the Arthurian legend while making up his own stuff.
I don’t always read the author’s notes at the end of a book, but it was included in the audiobook, so I went ahead and listened to it. Grossman started by giving a brief literary history of King Arthur and how the legend morphed over centuries from warrior to king. Mordred went from nephew to bastard son (but also nephew?)
Grossman outlined his goal to embrace both the historical time period in which Arthur would have lived (if he lived) while incorporating some of the more medieval aspects of the story that have come to dominate his legend, specifically plate armor and chain mail.
At the same time, Grossman recognizes that each version of the Arthurian legend is of its own time, and this version is no exception — even though it’s not a story of King Arthur, it’s a story of some of his knights and a random guy named Collum.
Grossman includes a gay knight, a transgender knight, and a Muslim knight … even though he admits Arthur would have died before Muhammed was born.
The book is very well written, but if you do decide to dive into it, be prepared for a meandering story that weaves back and forth in time and between various characters. It all seems disconnected and unrelated until you get to the end and Grossman manages to weave it all together.
I should also note that I listened to the audiobook and the narrator did an excellent job. Just be prepared to either spend 23 hours listening to the audiobook or to listen to it at 1.5X or 2X speed.