The lack of any archaeological evidence hasn’t diminished the ability of Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin and the rest to beguile writers and readers. Modern versions include those by Tennyson, Mark Twain, T.H. White, Bernard Cornwell, Mary Stewart and Marion Zimmer Bradley, among numerous others. Now Lev Grossman, best-selling author of the Magicians Trilogy, takes up the quest in his marvelous new fantasy, “The Bright Sword.”
Arthur is dead when the novel opens, though its protagonist, 17-year-old Collum, doesn’t yet know that. An orphan, Collum has been dumped by his stepfather onto Lord Alasdair, who promises to educate him as a knight. Instead, Alasdair treats the boy cruelly, beating him and forcing him to sleep on the stone floor with the servants. Yet Collum manages to catch the eye of Alasdair’s marshal, who teaches him the basics of swordplay. Finally released from servitude, Collum steals Alasdair’s armor and horse and embarks upon his dream of pledging himself to King Arthur.
“Like him, the knights of the Round Table were despised and forsworn, but unlike him they weren’t fazed by it,” Grossman writes. “They lived in a warm, safe world wrought of old gold, rich with strength and love and fellowship, where evil was great but good was greater, where God was always watching, and even sadness was noble and beautiful. That was the world Collum wanted to live in.”
Soon enough, he reaches Camelot. But it’s not the castle of his dreams, abuzz with knights paying court to the legendary king. Instead, he finds some disheveled men, drunk and dozing around the vast Round Table. “You’re in luck,” one of them tells him. “At the present time we find ourselves with several vacancies.”
Collum is too late. Arthur has been killed in battle by Mordred, his son by his own sister, Morgause. Most of the great heroes of the Round Table — Gawain, Gareth, Bors, even Galahad — are dead, and Arthur’s champion, Lancelot, is MIA. Collum has stumbled upon the few survivors who remain loyal to the king — Bedivere, Dinadan, Constantine, Palomides and a handful of others, including Nimue, Arthur’s magical adviser. She brings news that finally goads the grieving knights from their stupor. With no legitimate heir, “everything Arthur built is coming apart. The Saxons’ve already got half of Essex, and you can bet the Hibernians have heard by now. … Then there’s the Franks and the Picts and John Strongarm and the Free Companies and the fairies. Cantium’s got a witch king. In Londinium they’re forming a commune, they’re going to pick their own king!”
And there are other contenders for the throne: Mordred’s son and Arthur’s grandson, Melehan; Arthur’s wife and queen, Guinevere; potentially even Lancelot. How to choose among them?
The dispirited knights have no answer, but Collum does. Pray for a miracle, like Arthur did with the Holy Grail, and let God show them the way. No sooner asked than done: A miracle appears, in the form of the Green Knight, and the ramshackle band of second-string knights sets off to find a Holy Lance.
“Every age and every teller leaves their traces on the story, and as it passes from one hand to the next it evolves and changes and flows like water,” Grossman acknowledges in his author’s note. Bradley gave the epic a feminist-pagan spin, White a Freudian one. Bernard Malamud set his in a baseball park. Grossman affects a breezy 21st-century style that still allows plenty of room for magic. He gives each knight a new and extensive history that frees them from the ur-narrative while honoring it.
Bedivere, a fine warrior despite being one-handed, is deeply in love with Arthur, a passion that’s one-sided and unrequited. Dinadan, too, has a secret he must keep to survive. Sir Palomides, the learned, sophisticated Muslim aristocrat from Baghdad, is continually bemused by the barbaric ways of Arthur’s men. Scipio is a Roman commander assigned to guard Hadrian’s Wall before he joins Arthur’s ranks. Their backstories are neatly braided into the main quest for the Holy Lance and Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, a journey that dips in and out of the realm of fairy, where Morgan le Fay holds sway.
Other major players also get updated bios. The Machiavellian Merlin’s allegiance is to power alone. Nimue, often cast as a temptress who imprisons Merlin, holds her own as an enchantress who aids the loyal knights even as she captivates Collum. Guinevere, usually relegated to the thankless role of traitorous wife, acts here as Arthur’s beloved confidante. Lancelot, still the Round Table’s greatest hero, is a bit of a cold fish with an unexpected role to play as the saga winds to its close.
Grossman’s take on the Arthurian legend may lack the grandeur and tragic gravitas of White’s classic “The Once and Future King,” but he excels at colorful characterizations and vibrant action scenes, which are legion. Like White, he uses humor liberally and masterfully (the book’s epigraph is from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”). And he gets in more scenes of genuine strangeness, especially when Collum finds himself in Morgan le Fay’s kingdom. As Grossman’s splendid, offbeat quest reaches its conclusion, we see Arthur’s waves of Saxon invaders and their many predecessors refracted in a different light, one that helps illuminate our own tumultuous, battle-torn age in the way that only the best epics can.
Elizabeth Hand’s most recent novel is “A Haunting on the Hill.”
The Bright Sword
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