100 Books #20 - Bernard Cornwell's EXCALIBUR

With this third and final book of Bernard Cornwell's Warlord trilogy, the jig is up: the warlord these chronicles are really about is narrator Derfel Cadarn, the Saxon-born spearman in Arthur's British armies who rises to equal and in some ways surpass Arthur in terms of military prowess, wisdom, the attainment of domestic (if not marital) happiness and pretty much every other way but actual fame. And the fame given to Arthur is really kind of given to him by Derfel, in these novels, to whose lot it  has fallen in his waning years to write what he hopes is the definitive chronicle of the British-Saxon standoff in which both men are supposed to have been instrumental -- a chronicle that sets the record straight, he maintains, that demystifies and de-romanticizes all the tale's principal figures without diminishing their importance or their worth.

Except for that of Derfel himself, too modest, we are led to understand, to make much of his own achievements, which, he insists, are nothing beside those of his charismatic hero, Arthur.

Much of the action in this final book centers on a legendary battle, that of Mount Baddon, or Mons Badonicus, to which Arthur is supposed to have managed to rally most of the kingdoms of southern Britain to make a stand against a pair of invading Saxon hordes, one of which is headed by none other than Derfel's father, Aelle. The build-up to this battle is a bit agonizing; some 75 pages go by before the shield walls clash, but within that slow burn is an extraordinary accomplishment: Derfel, and by him, Cornwell, made me like Guinevere. This has never happened before!

All of the major themes and ideas of the series are tied together here quite satisfyingly -- the conflict between the native Celtic paganism and the new Christianity (which is early Celtic Christianity, the pre-Elviran kind in which bishops still married and anyone they said was a saint, was a saint, and so on), the encroachment of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes that so changed the landscape and language of Britain, the power of oaths and the importance of kings as the embodiment and ultimate engine of all those oaths, the difference between remembered truth and romanticized history and myth -- all come into play as everything falls apart for faithful Derfel and idealistic Arthur, ambitious Guinevere and patient Ceinwyn, pure-hearted Galahad and fierce Sagramor and all the rest with whom one has spent over 900 pages and most of a lifetime. It's all so wonderfully melancholy. After all, all this Arthur ever wanted was "a hall, some lands and friends about him," * and that's very close to exactly what he never really got.

Indeed lot of reviewers have complained that this final book in the trilogy is a bit of a let down, the characters diminished or altered beyond recognition, the tone bleak and forboding, the fit with the other two books poor, but I ask what we could reasonably expect of a book detailing the decline of Arthur and his companions into old age and misery and illness and loss and defeat? Were they to remain heroic and awesome to the bitter end, that would betray the spirit of the legend, which is as much about this decline as in the flowering of Arthur and his knights of ladies, no matter what details one cares to incorporate or ignore. Every mythic golden age takes on its tarnish, that it might become something that can reasonably be thought to lead to our present in which it is celebrated.

So yes, Excalibur is a bittersweet book, but I was ready for that, and am anyway once again impressed with all of the rethinking Cornwell has done while still preserving the broad outlines of the mythology we know and love. So here, for instance, we have Nimue's betrayal and imprisonment of Merlin, rendered into a far more powerful and wrenching tale (indeed, rather horrifying, the scenes depicting this being some of the most vivid and memorable of the entire trilogy) than any mere story of a pretty lady luring him into a tree. Her reasons for doing so are compelling and terrible and utterly understandable, even if we don't share Derfel's love for her.

In addition to these amazing reinterpretations of Arthurian myth, these books have also given a fascinating look at Dark Ages, post-Roman British (especially Welsh) culture. I am no expert on same, so cannot pronounce on the historical accuracy here, but I can say that it feels right and plausible and while I'm pretty glad I didn't live then, I wouldn't mind visiting for a bit, or should I say, just for a spell. But then I would need to come back to our time to take a shower. Or two.

I hate to see this series end, but am also kind of glad, because now I'm finally free of its spell and can move on to all of the other books I have ready to go, you know?

But yes, I cried at the end.

*Which is all any sensible person wants, really, no?

100 Books #16 - Bernard Cornwell's ENEMY OF GOD

Bernard Cornwell scoured pretty much all of the material that has been swept up and classified as Arthurian over the centuries and teased out something rather remarkable out of it: far from being the inspiration for the Quest for the Holy Grail, Arthur was pretty much the villain in a lot of the Lives of the early Celtic Christian saints "making more of them than God did" according to our narrator in this second volume of the Warlord trilogy.

I've mentioned already how much I like Cornwell's take on Arthur and his story, in which magic is coincidental and largely a matter of persuasion and belief and the courtly chivalry of a High Middle Ages, Normanesque hero-king is replaced by the brutal struggle to rebuild Britain after the Romans left its tribes to fend for themselves and its culture threatened with extinction by both the Saxon invasions and the spread of Christianity. Arthur here is not a king at all but a pagan warlord fighting to preserve a kingdom while the child who is its legitimate heir grows up.

It's all very powerful stuff, given focus through the quest undertaken by our narrator, the warrior-much-later-turned-Christian-monk Derfel Cadarn, to retrieve a cauldron that is one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain from the Island of Mona, now in wicked Irish hands. With it, the druid Merlin insists he can get rid of both threats and create a new British golden age in which Britain is British and so are its gods.

But while the first volume focused mostly on the Saxon threat, here it is the Christians who are the villains, sheltering opportunists like Lancelot (who showily converts when it becomes clear he won't be initiated into the warrior brotherhood of Mithras) and eager to rid the world of pagans in time for the Second Coming in 500 A.D., whether by conversion or killing, it doesn't really matter which. I'm fine with this perspective, of course, no fan of any kind of religious absolutism, but I found myself wondering again and again as I read what kind of reception this book got in the greater world, where religious dogma is still an acceptable excuse for not thinking.

Of course my reading was colored very much by current events, in which political candidates purporting to be led by their faith are proclaiming that faith is all the reason they need to curtail my liberty and pen me up -- so from my perspective, Enemy of God came across as a very brave book, and also, which I've not mentioned yet, a very funny one, full of old soldier wit that comes at the expense of pagan and Christian alike (and Arthur himself isn't much of a pagan; he honors his culture and its rituals but expresses no belief in anything more mystical than the ability of a sword or spear point to draw blood and kill).

I look forward to the third volume, Excalibur, which I'll start on as soon as my tablet recharges -- not least because now I'm really wondering how it's going to come about that Derfel is going to become a monk, and not just a monk, but one in the monastery of Samsun, his arch-foe whom he and Nimue have nicknamed "the mouse lord."

100 Books #14 - Bernard Cornwell's THE WINTER KING

Zounds, did I enjoy this book.

I've read my fair share of Arthuriana in my day - Le Morte D'arthur, The Mists of Avalon, The Once and Future King, The Quest for the Holy Grail, Gawain and the Green Knight, The White Raven etc. etc. etc. But never, not even when I was a teenager in love with Lerner & Lowe's Camelot (I grew up listening to the original cast recording with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet), have I been so utterly delighted with it as I've been reading this first book of Bernard Cornwell's Warlord trilogy.

What I love is the approach Cornwell took to the material, trying, via his narrator Derfel Cadarn, to depict the "real" story from the point of view of a man who was there and who, as he struggles to put his account into writing, can already see his truths being embroidered into romance and really wishes they wouldn't be.

In other words, this book sort of tries to demystify the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, or at least to ground it in reality, but without making it dull, without diminishing it or mocking it. So Arthur is here, but he is the bastard son of the King of Dumnonia (now a part of southwestern England) and a great warlord during the long and bloody Saxon invasion of Britain. And Guinevere is there, but she's the daughter of a client king and not nearly as important as the woman Arthur spurns to marry her. And Pellinore is there, but he's a naked madman in a cage. And Merlin is (barely) there, but he is something between a Druid and a Druid fanboy and spends much of the story off on his own quest after the 13 Treasures that can bring back Britain's good old days (meaning Britain before good old Clau-Clau-Claudius and his Romans made Brittania into a backwater Roman province). And Lancelot is there, but -- oh, I can't even hint at what Lancelot is like, except to say that I laughed my ass off every time his name wound up occurring.

The Winter King concerns itself mostly with war and politics, but there is a little magic and religion, too, but -- and this is my favorite bit, the bit that makes this trilogy look very much to be what I most wanted George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire to be -- Cornwell doesn't care if we believe in it or not. Any spells cast or prayers said are just depicted as weird things that people do (mostly spitting) and any "results" could just be coincidental. The reader is free to interpret it as magic or, more interestingly, as a testament to the power of superstition and the cleverness with which that can be exploited. It's subtly and cleverly done and is a big part of what makes this book such a pleasure to read.

And every single character, whether drawn from history and legend or created for this book, is vivid and unmistakeable. The reader is expected to keep track of a whole lot of them and remember their relationships to each other, as is often the case in, e.g. giant doorstop fantasy series like The Wheel of Time , but here it never feels like work; one barely notices she is doing it, so immersed does the reader become in this lively and believable version of Dark Age Britain. Wow!

But that's not all, of course. There are also the fight scenes. Oh, the fight scenes. Oh, they are glorious, very much the work of a man who has done his homework and thought everything out in great, gory detail. Fans of Shouty Men in Shiny Armour need look no further than this stuff.

Does it count as fantasy? I'm really not sure. Does it count as historical fiction? Not sure there, either. What I am sure it counts as, though, is really off-the-charts-good storytelling.

So yeah, I'm pretty much diving straight into the sequel, Enemy of God, right about... NOW.