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Sep. 27th, 2025 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsQ: So, did you expect to like Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword?
A: No. If I'm being honest, I did not pick up this book in a generous spirit: I haven't read any Grossman previously (though I watched some of The Magicians TV show) but my vague impression was that his Magicians books were kind of edgelordy, and also he annoyed me on a panel I saw him on ten years ago.
Q: Given all this, why did you decide to pick up his new seven hundred page novel?
A: I saw some promotional material that called it 'the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium' and I wanted to fight with it.
Q: And now you've finished it! Are you ready to fight?
A: ... well ... as it turned out I actually had a good time ........
Q: Ah. I see. Did it have a good Kay?
A: NO. Kay does show up for a hot second and I did get excited about it but it's not for very long and he's always being an asshole in flashbacks. It has a really good Palomides though -- possibly the best Palomides I've yet encountered, which is honestly not a high bar but still very exciting. Also, genuinely, a good Arthur!
Q: Gay at all?
A: No, very straight Arthur. Bedivere's pining for him but it's very unrequired, alas for Bedivere. There is also a trans knight and you can tell that Lev Grossman is very proud of himself for every element of that storyline, which I thought was fine.
Q: What about the women, did you like them? Guinevere? Nimue? Morgan?
A: Well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best, and he really wants you to know that he's On Their Side and Understands Their Problems and Respects Their Competence and, well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best.
Q: Lancelot?
A: I have arguments with the Lancelot. Can we stop going down a character list though and talk about --
Q: God?
A: Okay, NOW we're talking. I don't know that I agree with Lev Grossman about God. Often I think I don't. Often while reading the book, I was like, Mr. Grossman, I think you're giving me kind of a trite answer to an interesting question. I don't actually think we need to settle this with a bunch of angels and a bunch of fairy knights having a big stupid fight around the Lance of Longinus. BUT! you're asking the question! You understand that if we're talking about Arthurian myths we have to talk about God! And we have to talk about fairy, and Adventures, and the Grail, and the legacy of Rome, and we have to talk about the way that the stories partake of these kind of layered and contradictory levels of myth and belief and historicity, and we don't have to try to bring all these into concordance with each other -- instead we can pull out the ways that they contradict, that it's interesting to highlight the contradictions. You can have post-Roman Britain, and you can have plate armor and samite dresses and the hunting of the white stag, and the old gods, and the Grail Quest -- you don't have to talk to just one strain of Arthuriana, you can talk to all of them.
Q: Really? All of them?
A: Okay, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. I think that's why I liked it -- I think he really is trying to position himself in the middle of a big conversation with Malory and Tennyson and White and Bradley and the whole recent line of Strictly Historical Arthurs, and pull them into dialogue with each other. And, to be clear, I think, often failing! Often coming to conclusions I don't agree with! Often his answer is just like 'daddy issues' or 'depression,' and I'm like 'sure, okay.' But it's still an interesting conversation, it's a conversation about the things I think are interesting in the Matter of Britain -- how and why we struggle for goodness and utopia, how and why we inevitably fail, and a new question that I like to see and which Arthurian books don't often pick up on, which is what we do after the fall occurs.
Q: Speaking of the matter of Britain, isn't Lev Grossman very American?
A: Extremely. And this is a very American Arthuriana. It wants to know what happens when the age of wonders is ending -- when life has been good for a while, within a charmed circle, and now things are falling apart; but the charmed circle itself was built on layers of colonial occupation and a foundational atrocity, and maybe that did poison it from the beginning. So, you know. But I don't think any of this is irrelevant to the UK either --
Q: Well, you also are very American and maybe not best qualified to talk about that, so let's get back to characters. What did you think of Collum?
A: Oh, the well-meaning rural young man with a mysterious backstory who wants to be a knight and unfortunately rolls up five minutes after the fall of the Round Table, just in time to accompany the few remaining knights on a doomed quest to figure out whether Arthur is still alive somewhere or if not who should be king after him, in the actual main plot of the book?
Q: Yeah, him. You know, the book's actual protagonist.
A: Eh, I thought he was fine.
A: No. If I'm being honest, I did not pick up this book in a generous spirit: I haven't read any Grossman previously (though I watched some of The Magicians TV show) but my vague impression was that his Magicians books were kind of edgelordy, and also he annoyed me on a panel I saw him on ten years ago.
Q: Given all this, why did you decide to pick up his new seven hundred page novel?
A: I saw some promotional material that called it 'the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium' and I wanted to fight with it.
Q: And now you've finished it! Are you ready to fight?
A: ... well ... as it turned out I actually had a good time ........
Q: Ah. I see. Did it have a good Kay?
A: NO. Kay does show up for a hot second and I did get excited about it but it's not for very long and he's always being an asshole in flashbacks. It has a really good Palomides though -- possibly the best Palomides I've yet encountered, which is honestly not a high bar but still very exciting. Also, genuinely, a good Arthur!
Q: Gay at all?
A: No, very straight Arthur. Bedivere's pining for him but it's very unrequired, alas for Bedivere. There is also a trans knight and you can tell that Lev Grossman is very proud of himself for every element of that storyline, which I thought was fine.
Q: What about the women, did you like them? Guinevere? Nimue? Morgan?
A: Well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best, and he really wants you to know that he's On Their Side and Understands Their Problems and Respects Their Competence and, well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best.
Q: Lancelot?
A: I have arguments with the Lancelot. Can we stop going down a character list though and talk about --
Q: God?
A: Okay, NOW we're talking. I don't know that I agree with Lev Grossman about God. Often I think I don't. Often while reading the book, I was like, Mr. Grossman, I think you're giving me kind of a trite answer to an interesting question. I don't actually think we need to settle this with a bunch of angels and a bunch of fairy knights having a big stupid fight around the Lance of Longinus. BUT! you're asking the question! You understand that if we're talking about Arthurian myths we have to talk about God! And we have to talk about fairy, and Adventures, and the Grail, and the legacy of Rome, and we have to talk about the way that the stories partake of these kind of layered and contradictory levels of myth and belief and historicity, and we don't have to try to bring all these into concordance with each other -- instead we can pull out the ways that they contradict, that it's interesting to highlight the contradictions. You can have post-Roman Britain, and you can have plate armor and samite dresses and the hunting of the white stag, and the old gods, and the Grail Quest -- you don't have to talk to just one strain of Arthuriana, you can talk to all of them.
Q: Really? All of them?
A: Okay, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. I think that's why I liked it -- I think he really is trying to position himself in the middle of a big conversation with Malory and Tennyson and White and Bradley and the whole recent line of Strictly Historical Arthurs, and pull them into dialogue with each other. And, to be clear, I think, often failing! Often coming to conclusions I don't agree with! Often his answer is just like 'daddy issues' or 'depression,' and I'm like 'sure, okay.' But it's still an interesting conversation, it's a conversation about the things I think are interesting in the Matter of Britain -- how and why we struggle for goodness and utopia, how and why we inevitably fail, and a new question that I like to see and which Arthurian books don't often pick up on, which is what we do after the fall occurs.
Q: Speaking of the matter of Britain, isn't Lev Grossman very American?
A: Extremely. And this is a very American Arthuriana. It wants to know what happens when the age of wonders is ending -- when life has been good for a while, within a charmed circle, and now things are falling apart; but the charmed circle itself was built on layers of colonial occupation and a foundational atrocity, and maybe that did poison it from the beginning. So, you know. But I don't think any of this is irrelevant to the UK either --
Q: Well, you also are very American and maybe not best qualified to talk about that, so let's get back to characters. What did you think of Collum?
A: Oh, the well-meaning rural young man with a mysterious backstory who wants to be a knight and unfortunately rolls up five minutes after the fall of the Round Table, just in time to accompany the few remaining knights on a doomed quest to figure out whether Arthur is still alive somewhere or if not who should be king after him, in the actual main plot of the book?
Q: Yeah, him. You know, the book's actual protagonist.
A: Eh, I thought he was fine.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 03:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 07:21 pm (UTC)(To my limited understanding, Lev is American and has been living in Sydney for some years. Is that not the case? Austin OTOH is very American.)
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Date: 2025-09-28 08:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 03:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 08:03 pm (UTC)But I did like the strange abandoned-by-heaven Christian elements with the Lance of Longinus and the angels and the whole weird shaggy-dog adventure that Dagonet has: Dagonet and Constantine were a couple of my favorites in the ensemble. In a lot of ways my favorite parts of the story were the strange, sort of one-off, unhappy and unresolvable tales: like with the knight who turns out to be the Roman lost forward in time, as a bookending tale to the arc that's about the ends of eras and outlasting the era you're in.
Re. Arthur, I read him as less a decidedly straight Arthur and more of a cipher Arthur, in re. Bedivere's feelings towards him - an extremely unrequited relationship, but more so on a general emotional level. The kind of unattainability and unknowability of Arthur as a figure (with increasing cracks in this, in re his unhappiness and self-loathing, but not wholly) is so central to the narrative, and I enjoyed it; it's definitely not a queer presentation of him, but I do think of it as different from a "fully and statedly straight Arthur with a tragically gay loyal best friend." He seemed like more of a figure that was leading everybody on and stringing everyone along, in different ways.
(I liked Bedivere a lot also, I thought his plot did not fall into the same This Narrative Is An Affirming Ally cringe problem as Dinadan's due to being a more major character; he was more of a bitter grieving survivor trying to fruitlessly make sense of the person he'd lost, which is a character element I almost always go in for. [insert It's Over, Isn't It from Steven Universe joke])
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Date: 2025-09-29 03:40 am (UTC)(Well, that's not true, I had a lot of questions the part where it was revealed that Cartoon Villain Lancelot engineered the entire Arrest in Guinevere's Chambers sequence -- why? what?? this plan is incredibly convoluted and makes no sense?? what??? -- and those did not feel like productive or interesting questions to be left with, but.)
Yeah, I also really liked the vision of Arthur through many different eyes as he attempts to project whatever anyone needs from him at any given time -- this was one of the most pleasant surprises for me in this book, actually, I knew it was a post-Arthur Arthuriana and I really didn't expect to find such a compellingly elusive Arthur at the heart of it. (I also liked Bedivere! & I appreciated that in his grief he got to be a difficult and abrasive person to be around from others' points of view, which I think is perhaps the element that was missing from anyone that Grossman was trying ardently to be an Ally To.)
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From:no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 08:47 pm (UTC)I cannot imagine myself having enough patience for this in the next few millennium but strength to you that you did it.
And this man's sister is Bathsheba Grossman, for all love. It just boggles the mind that this is what his best looks like when he spent all of childhood standing next to Bathsheba Grossman.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-09-27 09:06 pm (UTC)"It wants to know what happens when the age of wonders is ending -- when life has been good for a while, within a charmed circle, and now things are falling apart; but the charmed circle itself was built on layers of colonial occupation and a foundational atrocity"
That seems to be a Theme with nearly all of his books -- the Magicians trilogy was in large part about being thrown out of Paradise, or being not worthy of Paradise, or Paradise being built on terrible things; and I think "showed up just a bit too late and now all the good jobs are gone and the housing market is insane" is a preoccupation of Gen Ex (and later generations too, but I think Gen Ex got hit first) and he was born in the middle of 1969, so. But maybe that's just psychologizing. I do think he actually mentioned that feeling in interviews about this book and the Magicians, tho. Sort of a 1950s-in-Britain Paradise Postponed kind of feeling.
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Date: 2025-09-29 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 09:57 pm (UTC)But nonetheless this sound super interesting! I'm curious which 21st century takes on Arthuriana you think should fight it for the title "the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium," since I'm really more familiar with 20th century Arthuriana, I think.
Bummer there's so little Kay for you. Glad you got a lot of Palomides though!
Also laughing at your final summing up of Grossman's OC.
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Date: 2025-09-29 03:47 am (UTC)Before reading this one I was going to go to bat for Perilous Times (2023), which I Do think is a bit silly but all the same I did really enjoy. I think other people would also probably fight for Once and Future (2019-2022) or Legendborn (2020) (which I've not yet read but which is wildly popular) or even Jo Walton's The King's Peace (published in 2020 and thus just squeaking into this millenium.) But having read it ... I do think Bright Sword goes bigger than any of them, even if it's arguable whether it's better ....
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 03:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-28 12:37 am (UTC)Speaking of Arthuriana of this millennium, though, have you read Once & Future by Kieron Gillen et al.? I quite enjoyed them and I'd be interested in your take.
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Date: 2025-09-28 12:40 pm (UTC)it's been a very long time but I recall The King's Peace and The King's Name being affirmatively about the Matter of Britain, FYI.
Becca, this review is very useful and I shall continue to not read the book but now with a more detailed understanding of why not!
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Date: 2025-09-28 02:23 am (UTC)BUT I just loved this: "we have to talk about fairy, and Adventures, and the Grail, and the legacy of Rome, and we have to talk about the way that the stories partake of these kind of layered and contradictory levels of myth and belief and historicity, and we don't have to try to bring all these into concordance with each other -- instead we can pull out the ways that they contradict, that it's interesting to highlight the contradictions. You can have post-Roman Britain, and you can have plate armor and samite dresses and the hunting of the white stag, and the old gods, and the Grail Quest -- you don't have to talk to just one strain of Arthuriana, you can talk to all of them."
Just loved it! You can talk to all of them! Because they're all talking to and about each other, so why not? They kind of are a picture of what time does, how it makes us see things in different ways, like a field at dawn is not a field at midday, and a patch of land in 1815 is much transformed when you look at it in 2025.
Also your comments about Lev Grossman Trying His Very Best with the women made me laugh.
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Date: 2025-09-29 03:53 am (UTC)But regardless of my various ignorances I do deeply love the Legend of Arthur as an accretively layered thing, all the various strata of human storytelling -- as close to deep time as our mythmaking gets -- and I'm glad that spoke to you too.
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Date: 2025-09-28 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 03:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-09-28 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-28 04:29 am (UTC)As far as token ensemble representation went, I had almost the reverse reactions re: Palomides and Dinadan, or rather, I thought the stuff about the Islamic golden age read as painfully condescending and did-you-know in practice to a degree that could not but distract from the things that were specific and human about his arc, of which there were certainly several. I think this is also to do with where I calibrated my expectations, though, as far as getting as far as the prophecy with Dinadan and being like "right, will just brace myself for that I-am-no-woman mic drop then" and thus experiencing pleasant surprise when he featured in any non-structural role as sort of a close-minded asshole jock, etc. and not a constant font of superior understanding; vs. my "it's 2025, are we still doing this?" about the learned and cleanly East.
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Date: 2025-09-29 04:07 am (UTC)(NIMUE DOUBLE SHAFTED. I went into her chapter ready to roll my eyes and briefly got excited about the utilitarian possibilities right before the sex pollen, and then, indeed, sighed and sadly rolled my readied eyes.)
tbh The stuff that really worked for me wrt Palomides was everything with the Questing Beast; I've been weak for the Questing Beast since White. spending your whole life in fascinated pursuit of a big weird cat that occasionally shows heart-rending signs of affection! very relatable!!
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Date: 2025-09-28 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-28 05:08 pm (UTC)A: Eh, I thought he was fine.
Ha!
I read all three Magicians novels, to my sometimes regret. The Bright Sword sounds like solid writer's craft I would roll my eyes at a lot.
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Date: 2025-09-29 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 07:15 am (UTC)This part sounds riveting to me and the rest sounds like I would blow a fuse.
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Date: 2025-09-29 05:56 pm (UTC)OTOH, the comments here as well as skygiants' post have been helpful cumulatively: what I should save my retry for is when I want to be thoroughly cranky at a book. That's not usually how I approach Arthurian things! so it really is a help.
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Date: 2025-09-29 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-29 10:29 pm (UTC)Fun(?) anecdote: my mom knew the Grossman twins in college and when I complained to her about The Magicians she diplomatically said something like "yes, I think he could have done better." I do think this was better.
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Date: 2025-09-30 12:55 am (UTC)That being said, I did enjoy the grappling this book does with the big issues, but agree with many of the aforementioned "trying" issues. It was a romp and it could have been a lot more, but there were parts I really liked.
My favorite batshit but profound modern Arthur retelling is the (as yet unfinished?) Bold As Love series by Gwyneth Jones, which are not a perfect map to Arthur, but at least make a go at making the central love triangle functional despite massive dysfunction.
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Date: 2025-10-26 06:27 pm (UTC)