BookBrowse Reviews The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

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Seventeen-year-old Collum yearns for nothing more than to serve the great King Arthur and become a Knight of the Round Table. However, when he arrives at Camelot, he finds he is too late…

All his life, Collum has longed to become a Knight of the Round Table: to serve the great King Arthur, have heroic adventures, and go on glorious quests. Although a poor, illegitimate orphan from a backwater province of Britain, Collum has trained as a knight since boyhood and is determined to emulate his heroes, prove himself in combat, and be found worthy. But upon his arrival at Camelot, he finds only a handful of remaining knights. The rest, he is told, died with King Arthur at the Battle of Camlann, where Arthur and Mordred, the king's own son born of incest and his bitterest enemy, fought and killed each other.

Camelot, the knights who are left believe, is over — the age of marvels and quests is gone. And since Arthur and his wife Guinevere had no children, the throne of Britain is now anyone's for the taking. The Saxons are commandeering swaths of the country, the land is divided, and Arthur's great kingdom is falling into chaos. Meanwhile, the fairy queen and powerful sorceress Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister and forever his ambivalent adversary, sees an opportunity for Old Britain and its ancient pagan ways, long suppressed by Rome and Christianity, to be restored. However, Collum's arrival is the catalyst for what appears to be the Camelot knights' last chance: a renewal of the marvels once witnessed in the age of Arthur, and one more epic quest across Britain and the Otherworld for a new king to take up Arthur's sword and lead them back to glory once more.

The Bright Sword is a vast, sprawling, entertaining adventure in true Arthurian tradition, encompassing influences from across the legend's immense spectrum, recalling everything from medieval Welsh texts such as Culhwch and Olwen to the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As the author observes in his historical note, the Arthurian legend is ever-changing, transitory; always evolving and adapting (see Beyond the Book). As they have developed over centuries, Arthurian tales have incorporated aspects of the ages in which they were written, and they often serve as a mirror to reflect the issues, attitudes, and anxieties of the day. With its tumultuous depiction of a world in chaos, lacking in leaders of depth and vision, full of unreliable allies and unexpected enemies, and bereft of meaningful convictions, values, or moral compass, it can be argued that The Bright Sword is heir to this tradition in its reflection of contemporary society's concerns.

The knights in the novel are characters from earlier Arthurian legend — some renowned, others less so. Not only do we follow them on their new quest with Collum, we learn their individual backstories in flashback chapters lending us insight into their personalities and motivations. At first, they seem to be a ragtag bunch of lost souls — not Camelot's finest, just all that is left of the once mighty Round Table. As Merlin dryly observes, "A quest is hero's work, hero's business, and that's just not quite you lot, is it? You're the other ones, the spear carriers. The stage is empty now but for the stagehands, and who will play the story?" But as we get to know them, it becomes clear that it is their very ordinariness that makes them heroic. Depression, dysphoria, displacement, self-doubt, the literal and figurative scars of abuse — all of these are experienced by one or the other of the knights, and how they overcome these burdens is as much a part of their noble fight as any battle or encounter with magic.

With chapters flashing back and forth in time, and supernatural worlds popping up everywhere and anyhow, the novel feels at times somewhat disjointed, even though this does give the reader an impression of the turmoil and confusion in which the characters find themselves. Some events that should be momentous are instead somewhat anticlimactic, such as the great battle between Morgan's fairy forces and the Christian knights. Futile actions and false endings can serve a valuable purpose in epic literature, but there are perhaps too many of them in this particular story. It is, however, a riotous, imaginative, and exciting series of exploits, and an overarching adventure imbued with Arthurian magic and mystery.

This review first ran in the July 31, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.