The Rainbow Round Table

It’s been nearly 1800 years since the Romans left Britain, and the English-speaking world is still reeling from the trauma. The Arthurian myth has grown up over the millennia partly to fulfil the wish to both have Roman civilization and also to have British home rule. Fresh from the major success of his Magicians series, Lev Grossman’s new epic revisiting of the Arthurian story in The Bright Sword, is surprisingly timely: the mythic allure of Brexit was just another such British dream of having the cake of European civilization and eating it with native paws.

Growing up in England, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table always confused me slightly, but I learned as an adult that the anachronism baked into the heart of the legends caused that confusion.If Arthur existed—and there’s little evidence that he did—he was a leader of the immediately post-Roman Britons who fought the migrating Saxons, in the fifth or maybe sixth century of the Common Era. But the abiding myths of the knights of the Round Table that live on in literature and wider culture are bound up with religious beliefs, military technologies and social practices—like chivalry—that come from hundreds of years later. 

In his epilogue Grossman gives credit to the writers who came before him, most notably Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and T. H. White for the “mash-up of a thousand-odd years of British history” that constitutes the Arthurian legends. As a former literature graduate student colleague of his, a million years ago, I appreciated Grossman’s significant endnotes. But Grossman has come a long way since his Star Trek fan fiction, Warp, and he leans heavily into the genre of “mashup” for The Bright Sword, heaping more historically improbable, but narratively compelling, stories into the epic. 

Grossman’s starting point is an aspiring knight, Collum, who escapes his miserable bastard life on the far northern Isle of Mull and sets off for Camelot. He arrives after the Quest for the Holy Grail is over and—at least as far as the remaining knights know—after Arthur has been killed. Collum’s fresh viewpoint along with frequent flashbacks and diversions into the histories of other characters, allows Grossman to retell significant portions of the Arthurian tales. Appropriately for 2024, though, the Round Table has undergone significant diversity training and, though decimated after Arthur’s battle with Mordred, still includes more members of the LGBTQ community and people of color than, for example, Malory gave credit. 

Though Collum stays at the heart of the story, he accompanies survivors of the Round Table. Lesser known but canonical knights such as Sir Bedivere, Sir Dagonet, Sir Dinadan, Sir Constantine, and Sir Palomides have their day alongside other hybrid characters like the Christian witch Nimue and the Roman Knight Scipio who Grossman either repurposes from other parts of the myth or brings in as extras from history. Limping on from the glory days of Arthur’s court and magic quests, they feel compelled to find a way to restore Britain and bring the country to a new post-Arthurian stability. 

Many contemporary fantasy histories get split up into series of books and it is credit to the ambition of The Bright Sword that it remains intact, at epic length. Though, at 688 pages, the book requires some sustained attention, it constantly rewards that attention. The back stories of the characters are exciting and eye-opening, full of delightful details like how the Round Table was originally just a white elephant gift from the in-laws and even a hilariously oblique and anachronistic Peanuts reference at one point. Grossman evinces an enjoyment of his characters and their adventures, and his book delivers us to a conclusive ending that such an undertaking promises, rather than to bathos or a cliffhanger.

If there is one weak part of the book, it is the episode where the battle between Celtic-British Paganism and Romano-British Christianity takes a melodramatic turn. Perhaps it resolved some plot points, and it is in keeping with previous retellings of the myth which have clumsily wedged religious ideologies into the mix. Perhaps, too, it evened the score for a thousand years of heavy-handed Christian insistence that a pagan Welsh king would be a true believer, barely a hundred years after Rome itself had adopted the new faith from the deification of what Grossman’s Morgan Le Fay calls the “Jew on a stick.” But still, the scene felt more like Monty Python meets The Magicians than Malory’s Arthur.

That is to cavil, though. With quests, battles, looping and interwoven plots and the explicit recognition of those narrative tools you might expect from a 21st century novelist, The Bright Sword is a fitting addition to the canon of Arthurian legends. All your favorites are there: Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad, Merlin, Morgan, along with a lengthy cast of knights and fairies — even the Lady in the Lake. And, since he directs them with the same engaging style that made his Magicians a New York Times #1 bestseller, they mostly read as if they are accessible, contemporary characters.

As it turns out, Grossman is a writer of young adult characters. Not of the “young adult” sales demographic of middle school book publishing, but of those actual years where newly independent adults venture into the world alone. From Hollis Kessler in Warp to the cast of The Magicians to Collum in The Bright Sword, Grossman captures the uncertainty and the hope of youth, the projected magic of the unknown and the desperate battle to establish a meaningful presence in the world. In The Bright Sword, too, the back stories are most convincing as they cross that sweet spot where the characters finally leave home, whether that home was a bubble under a pond or a palace of Baghdad. 

The Bright Sword also works because it’s not just about the characters, but about Britain’s coming of age, too, newly independent of the Roman Empire. Whether the details are right or wrong, whether the history is mashed-up or not, whether the characters are always totally believable is not as important as whether Scottish Collum (literally “dove”) can bring peace to a Welsh / Cornish regime that is being threatened by the immigrant Angles and Saxons arriving from the continent. 

Post-Arthurian Britain was staring down change and though all Collum wants to do is to achieve glory and live in a “timeless castle… a world wrought of gold” he recognizes that it’s a forlorn hope. Guinevere tries to channel Arthur at the end of the book, to think how to deal with the masses of Saxon families arriving on the British beach:

“He would’ve thought of some clever way that it was all right. That Britain with the Saxons was still Britain, it was just a different Britain, no better or worse than the old one. Or something. He would’ve quoted Heraclitus or someone of that ilk. Panta rhei. Change is the only certainty.”

(Viking, July 16)