In the space of a few decades, fantasy has transformed from a vaguely disreputable genre to a multibillion-dollar behemoth that touches everything from film to television to miniature wargaming. Gone are the days of misanthropes digging through stacks of tattered paperbacks in the back of used bookstores. Modern fantasy novels rate glossy covers, Hollywood adaptations, and chin-scratching considerations in prestige media.
What happened? One reason for fantasy’s surprising popularity is that the genre celebrates virtues — martial skill, physical courage, honor, chivalry, and so forth — that we are instinctively drawn to but rarely encounter in our everyday lives. This presents writers with both an opportunity and a dilemma. Readers want adventure and heroism, but they also have modern ideas about how society should look, ideas often at odds with traditional fantasy storytelling. Meanwhile, the trappings of the genre have become cloyingly familiar to a generation raised on dwarves, dragons, and magical quests.
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In The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman tries to avoid these problems by reimagining perhaps the oldest fantasy story of them all, the legend of King Arthur. The Bright Sword approaches this age-old epic orthogonally, starting with the arrival of an anonymous knight wannabe at Camelot a few days after Arthur’s death.
Here, Grossman is working within a long and storied tradition of Arthuriana. Bards, troubadours, and writers have been playing around with Excalibur, Merlin, and the Lady of the Lake since the late Middle Ages. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem that dates back to the 14th century, ends with King Arthur laughingly telling the eponymous hero not to worry about his failed quest. Mark Twain had the bright idea to send a no-nonsense Connecticut Yankee back to Camelot. T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, perhaps the best-known 20th-century retelling of the Arthurian legend, includes a time-traveling Merlyn, a self-hating Lancelot, and several profoundly weird detours into animal life.
Modern culture is awash in remakes, reinventions, and remixes, and the oft-retold tale of King Arthur seems a natural fit for such a moment. Alas, a new spin on an old tale obliges Grossman to introduce quite a few new characters. These introductions usually involve lengthy quests to demonstrate that the newcomers are not your typical fantasy protagonists, as well as their connections to classic Arthurian figures like Lancelot and Merlin. At one point, Lancelot remarks that yet another quest “turned into one of those endless adventures with far too many twists and turns.” At least Grossman is self-aware enough to realize that the book sometimes drags.
