beautiful soup reviewed The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
"Stories are like gods; they care little for the human beings in their care."
4 stars
I read this one pretty slowly. It's a long book, I'm not really into Arthurian legend at all, and it took me a while to get into it. But I love Grossman, and I love how he takes fantasy tropes and makes them very human and recognizable. This book was no exception.
If you're into Arthurian legend, I have no idea how it will hit you. I have no idea exactly how Grossman played with these legends, because my knowledge of them comes entirely from movies that don't even focus on Arthur. The closest adaptation I've seen is probably Monty Python's Holy Grail (which is quoted at the beginning of the book, nice).
Of course, this book isn't really about Arthur either. We're exploring the world immediately after Arthur leaves it. It's a broken world, stuck between a magical past and an uncertain future, abandoned by God. (Extremely relatable.) The …
I read this one pretty slowly. It's a long book, I'm not really into Arthurian legend at all, and it took me a while to get into it. But I love Grossman, and I love how he takes fantasy tropes and makes them very human and recognizable. This book was no exception.
If you're into Arthurian legend, I have no idea how it will hit you. I have no idea exactly how Grossman played with these legends, because my knowledge of them comes entirely from movies that don't even focus on Arthur. The closest adaptation I've seen is probably Monty Python's Holy Grail (which is quoted at the beginning of the book, nice).
Of course, this book isn't really about Arthur either. We're exploring the world immediately after Arthur leaves it. It's a broken world, stuck between a magical past and an uncertain future, abandoned by God. (Extremely relatable.) The book follows our main man Collum and the leftovers of the Round Table as they stumble in and out of adventure, searching for some way to make everything right.
Our characters start off rather one-dimensional but Grossman slowly fleshes them out beautifully. They are complicated. They lose fights, they make bad choices. They're in love with the wrong people, they're traumatized, they're hiding secrets that could destroy them. They felt like real people in a mythical world.
The story was always unexpected and honestly it was a pretty fun rambling fantasy read. (Dark, though. There is a lot of real human pain in this novel.) And in the end I did care for these characters deeply. I cheered at one pivotal moment of violence (which was every bit as satisfying as LOTR's "I am no man" moment). I teared up at character deaths. I mourned with them. I wanted Collum to triumph and the world to be healed. But that is not quite how the world works, even this one. This is not a novel with easy answers or simple endings, and that's what I loved best about it. Sometimes the world is broken, and all you can do is try to mend your own small corner of it.
"Maybe terrible things would happen in the future, maybe it was empty, a waste land. But there could be seeds buried there, too, deep down below the dry dust, where hidden springs still flowed. It was deep winter, but there was still hope for renewal. The grail could be found. A new king could rise. The land could live again."
