Exiled From Camelot - Cherith Baldry
Jan. 26th, 2023 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxFinished Exiled From Camelot by Cherith Baldry, which was actually very entertaining, in a cheesy B-movie kind of way.
Assorted thoughts:
- I found it very funny that Kay, once sent into his titular exile, immediately found himself back in the role of seneschal-slash-babysitter to a snotty teen who was allied with Briant and literally possessed by a demon— the exact situation that got him exiled in the first place— and was just like, "well, while I'm here I might as well put my administrative hypercompetence to good use." 10/10, favorite part of this book. I enjoyed competent!Kay more than woobie!Kay, who kept fainting dramatically instead of using his words, but as the internet says: get a man who can do both, he has the range, etc.
- Then again, Brisane's strategy for taking out both Kay and Lancelot, as part of her (Briant's? Claudas'?) plan to divide and conquer Arthur's triumvirate to leave him alone and vulnerable, was to get them both to kill one of the aforementioned demon-possessed snotty teens, and then publicly accuse of them of murder and being traitors to Arthur. This did in fact work both times.
- I was curious whether Meliant and Alienor de Lis had Arthurian precedent or were Baldry originals, because they gave me a sense of deja vu re: Laertes and Ophelia— the slain father, the vengeful son who teams up with a usurper, the sister gone mad from grief (although, like Hamlet, she still knows a hawk from a handsaw), even the fact they grew up in the court of a King Claudas? (I've connected the two dots!) A very quick Google search suggests that there's prior sources for a Sir Meliant whose father was killed by Lancelot and who allied himself with a Brian(t?) of the Isles, but Alienor and the (admittedly short-lived) Hamlet vibes were apparently new.
- Phyllis Ann Karr, of Idylls of the Queen and Ruddigore fanfic fame, gets a shoutout in the acknowledgements as well as providing a front-cover blurb: "One of the half-dozen best Arthurian novels I have yet read." The qualifiers in that sentence are doing so much work I think they qualify as load-bearing.
- I find it VERY funny that there is a character who is King Arthur's illegitimate son, evil, and wants to usurp the throne, and this character is not Mordred. Mordred is, in fact, Sir Not Appearing In This Book, although he does get very briefly name-checked and then never brought up again, just to make it clear that the omission was on purpose. Was this to differentiate the book from Idylls of the Queen? To keep the plot from getting too fall-of-Camelot-y? Who knows!
- Besides the obvious, the other book I kept thinking of while reading this one was The Song of Achilles: they're both extremely self-indulgent retellings that reframe as protagonist and seriously woobify a side character of the original story/canon, in part by framing that character as Not A Warrior (Baldry's focus on Kay as seneschal/steward/administrator; Miller's invented role for Patroclus as healer rather than fighter)— but The Song of Achilles is, for its sins, a guilty pleasure of a book that I've read multiple times, and Exiled From Camelot, while certainly entertaining in its way, is one of those books where I knew as I was reading it that I was going to forget it as soon as I was done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- I also found myself thinking of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle series, mostly because of the "everyone's kind of in love with each other, in varying combinations and gradients of interpretable-as-non-platonic" flavor of the capital-L Loyalty among Arthur and his knights. Kay loves Arthur, Gawain, and Guinevere; Gawain loves Arthur and Kay; Gareth loves Kay... Arthur also loves Kay, although he spends most of the book feeling betrayed by and (a possibly greater sin, in Baldry's eyes) unappreciative of him, in contrast to Gawain and Gareth's staunch little fanclub— but the real winner, subtext- and vibes-wise, is Kay/Gawain. Sure, at one point the aforementioned demon torments Kay with an illusion of Arthur embracing him and telling him to come home, he needs him, but counterpoint: "Lying still, his bed-furs clutched around him, Kay was shaken with a sudden agony of wanting Gawain."
- The action scenes were actually quite good! Which shouldn't have been a surprise, really, although my previous experience with Baldry's action scenes a. featured feral cats and b. were written for fourth graders.
Assorted thoughts:
- I found it very funny that Kay, once sent into his titular exile, immediately found himself back in the role of seneschal-slash-babysitter to a snotty teen who was allied with Briant and literally possessed by a demon— the exact situation that got him exiled in the first place— and was just like, "well, while I'm here I might as well put my administrative hypercompetence to good use." 10/10, favorite part of this book. I enjoyed competent!Kay more than woobie!Kay, who kept fainting dramatically instead of using his words, but as the internet says: get a man who can do both, he has the range, etc.
- Then again, Brisane's strategy for taking out both Kay and Lancelot, as part of her (Briant's? Claudas'?) plan to divide and conquer Arthur's triumvirate to leave him alone and vulnerable, was to get them both to kill one of the aforementioned demon-possessed snotty teens, and then publicly accuse of them of murder and being traitors to Arthur. This did in fact work both times.
- I was curious whether Meliant and Alienor de Lis had Arthurian precedent or were Baldry originals, because they gave me a sense of deja vu re: Laertes and Ophelia— the slain father, the vengeful son who teams up with a usurper, the sister gone mad from grief (although, like Hamlet, she still knows a hawk from a handsaw), even the fact they grew up in the court of a King Claudas? (I've connected the two dots!) A very quick Google search suggests that there's prior sources for a Sir Meliant whose father was killed by Lancelot and who allied himself with a Brian(t?) of the Isles, but Alienor and the (admittedly short-lived) Hamlet vibes were apparently new.
- Phyllis Ann Karr, of Idylls of the Queen and Ruddigore fanfic fame, gets a shoutout in the acknowledgements as well as providing a front-cover blurb: "One of the half-dozen best Arthurian novels I have yet read." The qualifiers in that sentence are doing so much work I think they qualify as load-bearing.
- I find it VERY funny that there is a character who is King Arthur's illegitimate son, evil, and wants to usurp the throne, and this character is not Mordred. Mordred is, in fact, Sir Not Appearing In This Book, although he does get very briefly name-checked and then never brought up again, just to make it clear that the omission was on purpose. Was this to differentiate the book from Idylls of the Queen? To keep the plot from getting too fall-of-Camelot-y? Who knows!
- Besides the obvious, the other book I kept thinking of while reading this one was The Song of Achilles: they're both extremely self-indulgent retellings that reframe as protagonist and seriously woobify a side character of the original story/canon, in part by framing that character as Not A Warrior (Baldry's focus on Kay as seneschal/steward/administrator; Miller's invented role for Patroclus as healer rather than fighter)— but The Song of Achilles is, for its sins, a guilty pleasure of a book that I've read multiple times, and Exiled From Camelot, while certainly entertaining in its way, is one of those books where I knew as I was reading it that I was going to forget it as soon as I was done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- I also found myself thinking of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle series, mostly because of the "everyone's kind of in love with each other, in varying combinations and gradients of interpretable-as-non-platonic" flavor of the capital-L Loyalty among Arthur and his knights. Kay loves Arthur, Gawain, and Guinevere; Gawain loves Arthur and Kay; Gareth loves Kay... Arthur also loves Kay, although he spends most of the book feeling betrayed by and (a possibly greater sin, in Baldry's eyes) unappreciative of him, in contrast to Gawain and Gareth's staunch little fanclub— but the real winner, subtext- and vibes-wise, is Kay/Gawain. Sure, at one point the aforementioned demon torments Kay with an illusion of Arthur embracing him and telling him to come home, he needs him, but counterpoint: "Lying still, his bed-furs clutched around him, Kay was shaken with a sudden agony of wanting Gawain."
- The action scenes were actually quite good! Which shouldn't have been a surprise, really, although my previous experience with Baldry's action scenes a. featured feral cats and b. were written for fourth graders.
