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Mar. 4th, 2019 10:35 amThe thing about Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous is that Naomi Mitchison clearly knows her Arthuriana inside and out, and has decided to do some wonderfully weird and meta things with it, and I don't understand or agree with all of what she is doing but overall I'm extremely here for it!
The plot: Lienors and Dalyn are the ace reporters covering the Grail Quest for (respectively) the Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict. The Camelot Chronicle is run by Merlin and heavily funded by Church dollars, although Lienors herself secretly likes to go hang out with the White Lady and the Wild Hunt in her off-hours; the Northern Pict is run by 'Lord Horny' (Satan? Cernunnos? both? UNCLEAR) and has a strong pro-Orkney slant. And Dalyn and Lienors would quite like to report the truth, ideally, and, you know, they're doing their best, but there's the matter of the sponsors and the readership and the editors are going to chop it all up in post anyway ...
After seeing a collection of knights each come out carrying different maybe-Grails, Lienors and Dalyn make the executive decision to simplify the story for the readers and write up nice, uncontroversial Galahad as the Official Grail Achiever in their reports. The rest of the book consists of their attempts to follow up on the Grail story, while all the pieces are beginning to line up around them for the fall of Camelot.
Mitchison is interested in: irreconcilable and undeniable simultaneous truths, the public and private faces of major political figures, red carpet reporting, the ties between Arthurian legends and various early religious traditions, the way commercial news impacts public policy, journalistic ethics in wartime, whether the existence of a Cauldron of Plenty renders the human condition meaningless, and cute romances between rival reporters (extra cute in a when you learn that her daughter and son-in-law worked as reporters for rival papers! MITCHISON SHIPS IT.)
( Some specific character and grail spoilers )
Anyway, I am now all fired up about Arthurian meta, please tell me:
- your favorite weird work of Arthurian fiction
- your best-beloved Arthurian character
- your most important Unpopular Arthurian Opinion/Hot Take
Also if you have any good recs for interesting Arthurian scholarship, please let me know! I now desperately want to read a compare-contrast between The Once And Future King and To The Chapel Perilous focusing on Arthuriana as political allegory in postwar Britain, so ... you know .... if you've got one up your sleeve .......
The plot: Lienors and Dalyn are the ace reporters covering the Grail Quest for (respectively) the Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict. The Camelot Chronicle is run by Merlin and heavily funded by Church dollars, although Lienors herself secretly likes to go hang out with the White Lady and the Wild Hunt in her off-hours; the Northern Pict is run by 'Lord Horny' (Satan? Cernunnos? both? UNCLEAR) and has a strong pro-Orkney slant. And Dalyn and Lienors would quite like to report the truth, ideally, and, you know, they're doing their best, but there's the matter of the sponsors and the readership and the editors are going to chop it all up in post anyway ...
After seeing a collection of knights each come out carrying different maybe-Grails, Lienors and Dalyn make the executive decision to simplify the story for the readers and write up nice, uncontroversial Galahad as the Official Grail Achiever in their reports. The rest of the book consists of their attempts to follow up on the Grail story, while all the pieces are beginning to line up around them for the fall of Camelot.
Mitchison is interested in: irreconcilable and undeniable simultaneous truths, the public and private faces of major political figures, red carpet reporting, the ties between Arthurian legends and various early religious traditions, the way commercial news impacts public policy, journalistic ethics in wartime, whether the existence of a Cauldron of Plenty renders the human condition meaningless, and cute romances between rival reporters (extra cute in a when you learn that her daughter and son-in-law worked as reporters for rival papers! MITCHISON SHIPS IT.)
( Some specific character and grail spoilers )
Anyway, I am now all fired up about Arthurian meta, please tell me:
- your favorite weird work of Arthurian fiction
- your best-beloved Arthurian character
- your most important Unpopular Arthurian Opinion/Hot Take
Also if you have any good recs for interesting Arthurian scholarship, please let me know! I now desperately want to read a compare-contrast between The Once And Future King and To The Chapel Perilous focusing on Arthuriana as political allegory in postwar Britain, so ... you know .... if you've got one up your sleeve .......
