troisoiseaux

Apparently the universe has decided to fuel my Arthuriana kick, because I recently checked my local Little Free Library and found that someone had left a bunch of 1970s-90s Arthurian-retelling novels— it didn't feel fair to take the lot, but I did grab Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex (1978) (with an inscription indicating that it was a birthday(?) gift from the original owner's grandfather(?) in 1979) and Ian McDowell's Mordred's Curse (1996). Read the McDowell first, which is an ~EdGy~ retelling* (impressive, really, given the starting premise): ( ... )

All that aside, McDowell's Mordred is a foul-mouthed little freak*** and I love him; his Arthur is, as one character describes him, half priest and half soldier, a bit of a prig but not wholly unsympathetic, even as he passes from the object of Mordred's hero-worship to betrayed rage to a sort of not-quite-apathy. This book also goes full-on Mordred/Guinevere, and it's actually... really cute? They're close in age and education, bonding over Roman poets and games of chess (no, seriously, WHERE did the "playing chess with Guinevere" trope come from?); ( spoilers! ) I am increasingly amused by how many Arthurian retellings have whatever knight is central to said retelling be in love with Guinevere (Kay in The Idylls of the Queen, Mordred in The Wicked Day) because she is kind of the only option unless you want to make up an entirely new character.

( Footnotes )

Re-read The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck, which I read a couple of years before I really got onto my Arthuriana kick and have been meaning to re-read since. The first five of the total seven stories/chapters are more or less a straightforward translation of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and I found myself more surprised than I should have been by how much it Smacked Of Gender— all broad sweeping statements about "the inborn craft of maidens" and "inborn helplessness of men" and "the detachment of ladies for other ladies" in the place of any individual characterization for, e.g., Nyneve (Nimue). My Arthurian reading of the past five years has skewed towards women authors and/or recent adaptations with intentionally 21st century attitudes, which might be why this felt so jarring?? On the other hand, this might technically have more women per page than most... what I guess I'd call character-focused(?) retellings, since a knight apparently could not throw a stone in the Arthurian Britain of Malory-by-way-of-Steinbeck without hitting a damsel, often accompanied by several of her friends, who would provide a random quest or otherwise notable encounter; I kept thinking of a post I saw... somewhere... about how often the "damsels in distress" of Arthurian legend show up to demand violence be done on their behalf.

On the third hand, my favorite story/chapter - "Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt", which as pointed out by Christopher Paolini's foreword is the point where Steinbeck starts to mix things up, inventing scenes and "delv{ing} into the characters' thoughts and feelings in a way Malory never did" - flips the first point delightfully on its head. The titular three knights encounter a trio of ladies, who bestow the quest of each picking a lady to go off and adventure with for one (1) year— ( ... )

The other stand-out is "The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake", which reminded me a lot of T.H. White, although maybe the comparison is inevitable. (Side note: I feel like positive depictions of Lancelot have kind of fallen out of fashion, retelling-wise?) Steinbeck's Lancelot is ascetic, alternately insightful and bewildered by other people, uncomfortable with the extent of his fame; the doomed Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle hangs lightly but inescapably over this story and pays off with one of the most deliciously *drags hands down my face screaming* takes on it I've read.

Also interesting to (re-)discover that I had highlighted a couple of quotes back in 2018: ( ... )

Finished The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, an Arthurian fantasy novel set in the immediate aftermath of the death of King Arthur, with only a handful of Round Table third-stringers, a starry-eyed new recruit, and a maligned sorceress left to try and hold the pieces of Camelot together. It's always interesting to see how more recent Arthurian retellings reflect the time they're written in— I mean, this is presumably also true of all Arthurian variants/retellings/etc., but I can only speak to, like, T.H. White's at the earliest— and which characters different authors write as the heroes and the villains. (Among other things, I've gotten so used to the niche of Kay-centric novels it was a surprise to find he was Sir Barely Appearing In This Book— ( ... ))

It took me a few chapters to get into it, but overall, I really enjoyed this! It somehow feels more like a fantasy novel than other Arthurian retellings/adaptations I can think of, even though they are, almost by definition, all fantasy novels?? I had mixed feelings on Grossman's Magicians trilogy when I read it a few years ago, but a. this one basically had all the things I liked about those books without the things I didn't, and b. I forgive him many of my issues with that series* for his Sir Dinadan.** I also really liked the backstories/characterizations of Sir Palomides and Sir Dagonet.

( footnotes (ft. spoilers) )

Read The Fraud by Zadie Smith, historical fiction based off of the life of 19th century English author William Harrison Ainsworth and the 1873-74 Tichborne claimant trials, but focused on figures at the corner of history's eye: Ainsworth's cousin and housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, and one of the witnesses who identified the Claimant as the presumed-to-be-deceased Roger Tichborne, Andrew Bogle, who grew up enslaved in Jamaica. It's a curious, kaleidoscopic book, told in mostly one- or two-page-long vignettes, bouncing between Eliza's past (mostly 1840s, iirc) and present (1870s) until it veers sharply into Bogle's self-narrated life story, and then back again.

Read Sir Mordred and the Green Knight, a new short story by Phyllis Ann Karr; it is less a direct "what if Mordred, instead of Gawain, took up the Green Knight's challenge?" AU than I had expected from the title, and in fact centers mostly on an original character of Karr's— an idealistic young squire— who, according to the afterword, appears to be an Arthurian AU of a character from Karr's steampunk alt-history works (?) who is, in his home canon, a vampire (?!). However, it does involve Mordred coping badly with finding out he's prophesied to kill Arthur, which appealed to my personal interests.

Finished Exiled From Camelot by Cherith Baldry, which was actually very entertaining, in a cheesy B-movie kind of way.

( Read more... )

Read Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, which happens to be the second mystery/thriller about a biracial Native American protagonist taking down a drug ring preying on their community that I've read in a month. When a Lakota vigilante-for-hire raising his orphaned nephew on a reservation in South Dakota is hired to scare off a local drug dealer, the assignment quickly becomes more complicated - and personal - than he had imagined.

( Read more... )

Read Graveyard Dust, the third book in Barbara Hambly's series starring Benjamin January, a free man of color in 1830s New Orleans who is a doctor by training, musician by profession, and detective by circumstance. In this book, the circumstances are that January's sister - a voodoo practitioner - is accused of murder. (In my admittedly uninformed outsider's perspective, I think Hambly does a good job of writing about voodoo as a religion in a respectful and nuanced way.) It also features a side plot about the New Orleans business elite aggressively denying a spreading epidemic, which, lolsob.

Read The Alington Inheritance, a curious little novel by Golden Age crime writer Patricia Wentworth. It's not a whodunnit: once the murder occurs, the reader is told immediately who did it, and why. The twist is that 1. the murderer didn't kill the person they intended to, 2. the circumstances, by sheer accident, make it look like someone else did it, and 3. various members of the fairly disconnected cast of characters each hold different, individual clues. It's an interesting premise to see play out, but I quickly soured on the narrative thread of, like— the (accidental) victim would be the type of person to get themselves murdered, and one mustn't speak ill of the dead but they were a little so-and-so, and just, generally, how it was better that the accidental victim was killed instead of the intended one.

( Read more... )

Listened to High Noon Over Camelot, a sci-fi Western retelling of Arthurian myth in the form of... a cross between a radio play and musical concept album? I found the actual songs a bit hit or miss, but as a retelling, it's so cool, and plays with the concepts and characters of the source material in really interesting ways. There were, like, four moments in particular that I audibly reacted to: ( Read more... )

Finished A Tale of Two Cities, which I was relieved to discover I still love— I'd spent so long considering it my favorite Dickens novel that it was genuinely disorienting to try to re-read it last summer and feel absolutely nothing. I'm sure someone, somewhere, has written a paper on the depiction of now-recognized mental health conditions in A Tale of Two Cities - Doctor Manette's PTSD, Sydney Carton's depression - which I'd be interested to read. I was also struck by the anonymity (?) of Dickens' depiction of the French Revolution, as compared to, say, Baroness Emma Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel books or Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three, which include Robespierre et al. in at least cameo roles— the only actual historical figure he references (besides the "king with a large jaw and queen with a fair face") is the executioner Sanson. In the tragedy of its closing scene I'd forgotten how absolutely bananas the last act is. Sydney Carton is one of my all-time favorite fictional characters; probably even in my top five.

Read To the Chapel Perilous by Naomi Mitchison, which is SOOOOO good. Arthurian legend retold through the charmingly anachronistic lens of two reporters at rival papers— Merlin's Camelot Chronicle ("intimately connected with the Court and scarcely less so with the Church") and the pro-Orkney Northern Pict, run by (I confess, I snickered every time I read the name) Lord Horny (Satan, possibly??). This review by skygiants has better commentary on the Arthurian-retelling aspect than I am able to give, but I can say that my favorite knight-centric chapter was the one about Sir Bors, in the same way that when I read the Odyssey I was charmed by how normal Menelaus and Helen were.

I really enjoyed Lienors (reporter for the Chronicle) and Dalyn (for the Pict), both individually and together! Their dynamic reminded me of the line from Good Omens about how field agents often found they had more in common with their opposite numbers than their minders back at headquarters. Mitchison's depiction of a partisan press was utterly unsurprising to read in 2022; what is surprising is that no one seems to have written an op-ed about revisiting To the Chapel Perilous in these days of "alternative facts."

I've been dipping in and out of Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, by Rosemary Sullivan, for a couple of months now— it's not that long, or particularly difficult, but I've found it taken best in small doses, because hoo boy did she go through it. I just got to the point where Svetlana, who defected to the U.S. in the 1960s, joined Frank Lloyd Wright's widow's cult, which is not a sentence I could have predicted writing.

If any love triangle could and should be resolved by polyamory, it's Arthur/Guenever/Lancelot. It wouldn't solve all of their problems, but it would make at least three people less miserable and many people less dead.

The Once & Future King is one of my favorite books of all time, so I was shocked to discover how little of it I actually remembered? I had remembered most of the "The Sword in the Stone," and the parts of the second section that revolved around Gawaine & co.'s childhoods (which was so sad to read about immediately after reading about Arthur's much happier one), and of course the very last scene of the novel - ( TToTT ) - but I'd forgotten the specifics of most of what happened in between those points.

Things I'd forgotten include the entire premise of Phyllis Ann Karr's Idylls of the Queen (I spent that entire book like, "I wonder who did it?" and it turns out the answer was on page 506-507 of TO&FK the whole time) and - most surprisingly to realize, since at one point I had very strong feelings about it - the fact that White's Lancelot is definitely on my list of top 10 favorite fictional characters in literature, if not in the top 5.

Realized that I've hit another milestone of being the same age as/older than characters in a book I last read while younger than them— Guenever is 22 and Lancelot is 22 or 23 at the beginning of their relationship. And poor Elaine is only 18?! She's a baby. I felt so much for Elaine, this time.

Speaking of The Idylls of the Queen (which was on my mind a lot, re-reading this, mostly in the context of "ohhhh, that's who X was") I was intrigued by White's comparison of Mordred to Richard III, because Karr's characterization of him as still on the edge of deciding whether to self-destruct or self-fulfill vis-a-vis his prophesied role of villain made me think of the line from Richard III:

And therefore since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain

After reading two sympathetic depictions of Mordred in a row - Karr's, and Elizabeth Wein's The Winter Prince - White's characterization of him as Richard III meets Oswald Mosley was a bit of a turnabout, but while not a sympathetic villain, he was still an interestingly complex one.

It's definitely a product of its time, in both interesting and, uh, interesting ways - among other things, T.H. White has Opinions on the Irish and hoo boy is it A Lot - but a lot of its themes are strikingly relevant today.

Recently read

Finished Phyllis Ann Karr's Idylls of the Queen, an Arthurian murder mystery, which I absolutely loved. I am a BIG fan of "reluctant allies" as a trope, so I loved the premise of Kay and Mordred working together to solve the mystery of who poisoned one of the Knights of the Round Table and tried to frame Queen Guenevere for it, while trying not to murder each other on their road trip to find Lancelot and/or the Lady of the Lake.

( Very, very mildly spoiler-y musings )

Finished Barkskins by Annie Proulx, which is one of those "generational epic"-type historical fiction novels that seem to be super popular these days. It follows the descendants of two men who arrived in New France as indentured servants in the 1690s, but it is focused as much (maybe even more so) on the impact of these generations on the land as on their individual human lives. The destinies of both families are tied up in the lumber industry— as hard-living and short-lived loggers, as the scions of an ever-expanding timber empire, and eventually, in the 21st century, as conservationists.

It's a fast-paced novel, mostly sketching out its characters' lives and the passage of time in the broadest of strokes, although it spends more time with some characters than others. Most of the novel's ten sections cover roughly a 25- to 30-year time period, overlapping as the narrative moves between the Sels and the Dukes (anglicized from Duquet circa the early 1700s), but the last two sections of the novel cover the whopping time frames of 1844-1960s and 1886-2013, respectively. I kept thinking of the quote from Atonement about writing as miniaturization: "the childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved with a single word— a glance."

After last week's post, I realized that I had not, in fact, read Agatha Christie's final Tommy & Tuppence novel, Postern of Fate, so I decided to get on that. To be honest, I found it slightly... wobbly? Not well-paced, for one thing. This may be a problem mostly arising from the fact it has two people investigating the same mystery from different angles - they keep circling back and filling the other in on what they've learned through their own line of investigation, which as a reader I found repetitive and slightly disorienting - but ALSO, they kept being like, "ohhh, I don't think we can actually solve this mystery, there can't really be decades-old papers of political import hidden in this house we just bought. Haven't there been a weird amount of bizarre and potentially life-threatening accidents happening lately? Haha what a weird coincidence!" for an annoyingly long time. I don't have a ton of patience for mystery novels that don't embrace what they are; it was especially weird to encounter this problem from Agatha freaking Christie, of all authors.

On a positive note, she clearly got a kick out of narrating the interior monologues of dogs and it's adorable.

Currently reading

Call Down the Hawk, Maggie Stiefvater's follow-up to her Raven Cycle series.