The Bright Sword

Review

It would not be quite true to say that I have loved the Arthurian tales since I was a child. But, in a way, I have loved their progeny. A young boy from nowhere, swept up on an adventure that may never end, full of love, magic, and wonder. It’s the tale of various Narnian stories, of Taran from the criminally underrated Disney Renaissance film The Black Cauldron (not to mention the books on which that is based), of Luke Skywalker, of Harry Potter. It is the Wizard of Oz, the Lord of the Ring, and the Dark Tower. We all want to believe that there is more out there, somewhere. That magic is real, and that love need not hurt.

Closing the book, there is a sense of leaving behind a world and the people known from it. No more Bedivere, or Dinadan, or Nimue, or Palomides. At the end, a story is only that, and life is so much less magical and sometimes so much darker. And so, we pick up another book, and another. Or a film, or a comic book, or a visual novel, or whatever form of storytelling speaks to you. The medium doesn’t matter, it’s the magic that’s needed.

I needed this book. I bought it probably a year ago, based on the cover and proclamation of Arthurian legend. There was so much more to it than I would have imagined, and Grossman has done a hero’s work making these relics of myth into relatable, lovable, people. There is someone to see yourself in, probably multiple someones, and each character is handled with such love.

Sometimes I wondered about tropes, but can you worry about tropes when you’re reading a Novel of King Arthur? The tropes are the point. They are almost comforting, especially since Grossman twists them just enough to be suspenseful and thrilling. Magic swords every other chapter, but where is The Sword? Knights all over, but losers all. Faith and myth colliding and belief in general shaken for all involved.

Many of the characters hate themselves, or a part of themselves. They believe they are inherently flawed and that no amount of work for Good will ever cure them of their impostor status. It does not matter that everyone around them says and perhaps believes whatever, at their core, they feel broken. I think Grossman writes this familiar feeling carefully and believably. Many self-hating characters become annoying and moaning whiners, but it never feels that way, here. Instead, you (or, I) recognize exactly the feeling and the trap that the character is in, which is that perhaps there is no gold inside to mend the broken cup. Perhaps you will go all through life struggling to stop it leaking water with your bare hands, hoping that you can keep the illusion of wholeness up until it’s safe to be finally broken.

I loved this book. I have been intimidated by its length for months, eyeballing it cautiously each time I go to my shelf for the next read. Yet, there is not a page that I would trade away. At 670 pages, all I could feel at the end was that I wasn’t ready for it to be over. I already miss Dinadan, Palomides, Dagonet, Bedivere, and all the rest.

Notes

p77 – But in the stories a gift was always a curse, too, and this one was no different, because once you donned the ring you could never take it off, and sometimes it made Arthur mistake real things for illusions. Sometimes it made him doubt himself, and his own goodness.

p233 – A lot of heroes hate themselves, it’s why they work so hard to make everybody love them.

p328 – “You’re probably wondering if you should be embarrassed about all those things we learned about you,” Bedivere said. … “Nobody cares,” Dinadan said, “We all have plenty to be ashamed of.”

p371 – You are not wrong. You see this world as it truly is: a vale of tears, empty of meaning. (TB: emphasis in original, as noting of speech by an angel.)

p378 – “Not our fight,” the old knight said. “We’re hunting God, not Saxons.”

p474 – “I’ll never understand it.” Morgan shook her head. “A man with your, shall we say, proclivities, fighting for a God who would send you to Hell just for being what He made you. There are other ways to live, man! I put it to you, to all of you: What can you say about a God who judges your worth by how infrequently you touch yourself?” She drew a finger suggestively along one elegant antler. “What can you say about a government that falls apart just because the queen got a poke on the side?…”

p588 – “Honestly I don’t know what to believe in anymore. … Maybe I don’t have to know. I can be a good person without God, or fairy either. I guess I’ll just believe in myself for a while.”

p643 – But that boy was him. And he couldn’t have been as weak as all that if he got through everything he did and still kept going. Could he. So give me what you’ve got… Are you sad that God doesn’t love you? He doesn’t love me either.

p667 – “…We’re all of us refugees from somewhere, we just don’t like to admit it.”

p670 – He looked up at the empty clouds and as he died he wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.