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| Subtitle | A Novel of King Arthur |
| First Written | 2024 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | Viking |
| ISBN-10 | 0735224048 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0735224049 |
| My Copy | library hardback |
| First Read | December 21, 2024 |
The Bright Sword
But then Grossman knows that just telling you that you’re a child of the king doesn’t do the whole trick. You can feel called to a grand destiny, but even if you were, you can't erase your own screwed up nature, and any self-aware man knows it. You need redemption to take your place in the kingdom! Grossman knows this!
Noted on December 21, 2024
Also, I think fundamentally Grossman understands the Arthur story carries that emotional truth that Christians should be talking about: Hey mortal! You think your life is insignificant and meaningless, but it turns out that where you grew up is not your true home! You are secretly the son of the king! And of course, Christianity tells you this truth without even asking you to discard your family of birth.
Noted on December 21, 2024
Sheesh, this is good - I'm a Grossman fan because of the Magicians series. He does a particular 'sad young man too smart for his own good' main character that's uh, always effective for me. But this is just a great Arthurian book beyond that! Really worthy of comparison with TH White. Telling some of the classic Matter of Britain stories in a new way, that feels modern without being trite. I see why everybody loved this book.
Noted on December 21, 2024
Arthur wasn't wrong. There was a terrible truth at the heart of his life that colored everything he did and everything he was.
Maybe all men had such secrets; certainly he, Bedivere, had one.
Arthur's secret was that when he was hardly more than a child they had handed him the whole world, and that world had a flaw in it, and the flaw was him. He was conceived in sin and deception and murder, and no matter how great a king he became, how passionately he pursued perfection and devoted himself to God, he could never change that. That was the catch, that was the cost, and he could never make it right. It was like one of those cursed wounds from the stories, that would never heal.
Quoted on December 21, 2024
From the outside Arthur's life looked like a fantasy, the one that all children dream of: he was an orphan, raised in obscurity, who discovered that his parents had actually been a king and a queen. He was really a golden princeling and his real home was a castle. But what Bedivere came to suspect was that the fantasy came at a cost, because it meant Arthur's whole childhood up until then, everything he thought he knew about himself, had become a lie. It was stripped from him like a hat in a high wind and whirled off into the dark-ness. And it had seemed so real! And what was real looked so much like a dream! The confusion must have been profound.
In a way, that was the birth of his genius, because after that Arthur doubted everything. He never once mistook the surface of a thing for its real nature. It was like he'd found an enchanted ring, like in the stories, that allowed him to see through all illusions. Appearances were merely reflections on the surface of a still pool, and he saw into the depths.
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 good-ness. He'd been sure he was a yokel, and he was wrong, so what made him so sure now that he was a king? Where was the catch? Who was paying the price? Maybe if Uther had been alive to love him and look him in the eye and say, Yes, you are mine, this is who you truly are, and always were. But Uther had sent him away and then died, and all that Arthur had to tell him who he was was the testimony of a gray stone and a sword that broke.
Quoted on December 21, 2024