skygiants

The 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.)

Takes on major Arthurian figures include:

King Arthur: mostly an offscreen cipher, which is extra interesting as this book comes out pretty much right in the middle of T.H. White's intermittent publications of bits and pieces of The Once and Future King, which spends a lot of time working as an in-depth study of Arthur's Character; I think the one thing we factually get about him is he's way more invested in Lancelot than in Guinevere

Lancelot: Everyone Loves Lancelot, Including Lienors (But In Like A Hot Celebrity Way, You Know)

Guinevere: Dignified, Sad And Mad. While Mitchison's take on the trio is disappointingly non-threesome, I like her Guinevere quite a lot. As does Lienors, who ships Lancelot and Guinevere so much that she ends up accidentally kick-starting the downfall of Camelot.

Sir Bors: just a nice man with a nice farm and also maybe a holy grail? but, like, a very domestic one.

Sir Percival: owner of the least domestic grail, constantly code-switching between Peredur the Extremely Pagan Wild Man of the Woods, and Percival the Extremely Holy Christian Knight; makes unwanted passes at girls at parties.

Galahad's Mom Elaine: Mean And Christian; presides over both Lancelot's Grail, which heals the sick, and Galahad's Grail, which raises the dead. Not unexpected, as even the most Revisionist Arthurianas tend to have a hard time finding a flattering take on Galahad's Mom Elaine, although I'm sure someone will attempt it someday.

Gareth: has a larger-than-cameo appearance to be kind and noble and make Dalyn feel a bit guilty about his trashy coverage of the Orkney Grail (a very Mabinogian Cauldron of Plenty). Has anyone in the history of Arthuriana ever written an unflattering Gareth? I mean, he is pretty uniformly a sweetheart, so I get it, I also would not write an unflattering Gareth, but I do wonder if we're due for the first negative take.

(Sidenote: I don't know why you would name a character Lienors Blanchemains and then not associate them with Gareth in any way whatsoever. I trust Naomi Mitchison to know what she was doing and have a reason for this but I'm still baffled!)

Sir Palomides: does not really show up in the story enough to get a personality but I was just excited to see him at all, especially since he DOES get a Grail (which is not much officially reported because Lienors and Dalyn sadly agree that their papers' backers would not be happy with coverage of a foreign knight getting a grail)

Sir Kay: appears once in the novel at a joust and is then immediately called away again to fix a backed-up drain, which is exactly as it should be.

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 .......