In the new novel by 'The Magicians' author, Britain is leaderless. And the only ones left to carry on are a handful of knights – the 'dregs of the Round Table' – and a sorceress.
Here’s a millennia-old spoiler for you: King Arthur is dead.
Or maybe he isn’t, depending on who you ask.
In T.H. White’s conclusion to his “The Once and Future King” series, it’s understood that the king will be killed by the traitor Mordred at the Battle of Camlann. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “Historia Regum Britanniae,” a badly wounded Arthur is carried off to the magical island of Avalon to recover, sleep and rise again when Britain needs him most.
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It’s just one of many fascinating Arthurian discussions we’re still having today (Guinevere and Lancelot! Merlin! Morgan Le Fay!), considering the subject is a mythological king who, if he existed at all, died around 1500 years ago. But doesn’t nearly everyone go through a King Arthur phase at some point in their life?
Fantasy author Lev Grossman, who wrote the acclaimed “The Magicians” trilogy, is having a King Arthur phase, he says. It led him, after nearly a decade of research, to write a new work of fiction: “The Bright Sword,” out July 16 from Viking. And while most other Arthurian adaptations tend to end at Camlann, that’s where “The Bright Sword” begins.
“Traditionally, the story of Arthur is about his doom and what leads up to it,” Grossman said. “Arthur’s death is the end of his story – but it’s not the end of everyone’s story.”
In “The Bright Sword,” Collum, an orphaned teenager whose dream is to be one of Arthur’s knights, arrives at Camelot only to discover that the king was mortally wounded at Camlann. Britain is without a leader. And the only ones left to carry on are a handful of knights – the “dregs of the Round Table” – and the sorceress Nimue.
Despite the despair over losing their king, the ragtag group vows to uphold Arthur’s principles and find a worthy successor to be the next ruler. But with the Saxon invasions at the coast, religious strife between Christians and pagans, and warlords seeking to take power, their journey becomes even more treacherous as Arthur’s Britain begins to fall apart.
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At its heart, Grossman says, “The Bright Sword” is about “looking past the end of everything, and thinking about how to keep on living.” This interview has been edited for clarity.
Q. You’ve said you can’t believe it took 10 years to write this book and mentioned “stuckness” in the writing process. Can you elaborate?
“Stuckness” is sometimes an indication that a lot of processing is going on. It isn’t resulting in visible writing, but there’s still work being done. For example, I had to digest a lot of great predecessors to try to arrive at my Arthur – the Arthur that felt right for me at this moment.
When it comes to “The Magicians” books, you can well imagine that I made it all up, and it wasn’t really a problem. But in the case of Arthur, everything has to have some kind of historical grounding. And that means a lot of reading. And then, once you’ve done the reading, the impulse is to put it all in the book – which actually turns out to be a mistake because there’s too much. Maybe there’ll be one perfect detail in there – but then you have to leave the rest of it out.
I think many novelists have the delusion that they are prolific and speedy writers. I’m going to have to abandon that delusion after this book. Part of the problem with writing is that you make all these false starts, or what I call false starts. And then when you finally get it right, you think, “Oh, my God, it’s so obvious. How can I have missed it?”
Q. Which Arthurian work had the biggest influence?
I’m pretty confident that I’ve reread “The Once and Future King” the most times. I thought I hid his influences well, but everybody who reads “The Bright Sword” immediately says, “Oh! T.H. White!” And yes, there is a whole ton of him in there.
He did this incredible thing, you know. Thomas Malory was his big predecessor with “Le Morte d’Arthur.” But T.H. White somehow brought everything to life – he gave all the knights inner lives and emotions – and gave the landscape colors and details that it never had before. I had a lot to work with because of him.
One of White’s strokes of genius was to write the story of King Arthur’s childhood, which nobody had ever done before: all the stuff about Merlin, and changing into different animals, and squabbling with Kay and things like that. He made that up out of whole cloth, and it’s amazing. It made me think: Well, where are the other blank spaces on the map? One obvious one is that world after Arthur’s death.
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Q. What was it like to tackle the aftermath of Arthur’s death? Most stories usually end at Camlann.
The time of Arthur kind of represents the first wonderful moment that Britain is standing on its feet, and trying to be a civilized country in its own right since the Romans left. It’s a very complicated, interesting moment. And then Arthur dies, which means that the center of the chivalric world is gone, it’s collapsed. Everything is falling into chaos and darkness and despair. I could see that there was a fascinating story there.
At first, I thought, ‘It’s not going to work, because: A) There’s no Arthur; and B) So many of the heroes are dead at that point.’ But then I began to realize what an opportunity it was, to bring in other people who are usually left in the margins, place them center stage, tell their stories and make them main characters. Non-white people, trans people, neurodivergent people – even after thousands of years, there were still more stories to tell.
Q. You developed the backstories of lesser-known knights, like Palomides, who was thought to be from Arabia – can you talk a little about that?
I love ensembles, and writing ensemble stories, like in “The Magicians.” I wanted to do something similar with the Round Table Knights. Arthur can be quite a tricky character to write, because most of the time, things happen around him. Even in the traditional tales, he’s not necessarily the focus.
The story of Palomides might have been my favorite to write. In all the stories of Arthur’s knights, no one has ever really talked about what he’s doing in Britain and how he got there from the Middle East. What was interesting, I realized, is that he came during the time of what was basically the Islamic Golden Age, and the science, culture, philosophy and mathematics were all incredibly far advanced beyond what was happening in Britain. So when he arrives at Camelot, it’s like he’s 1000 years in the past and everyone looks like a barbarian. I found that very, very funny.
Q. Why do you think King Arthur and his stories still resonate with you and so many other people today?
I think the answer has two parts. One is that Arthur’s stories contain a lot of themes that are always fresh: the longing to be better than you are, the feeling that there’s a golden age that is passing away, the sense of legacy we all carry with us.
The second is that, before and after Arthur, Britain was divided against itself. Right now, America feels like it’s at war with itself. There’s a palpable longing for heroes, a desire for somebody that we can believe in to make the world okay again. That’s the Arthur story.
I think early in the book, I had the idea to make a more human Arthur, but I quickly realized that a human-size Arthur is not Arthur. Arthur is about that longing to have a great leader, a great king, someone you could look at, and adore and believe in. I think a lot of people are searching for that right now.
The story of Arthur is not even bittersweet. It’s just a really sad tragedy. With “The Bright Sword,” I felt that there must be a way to move beyond that feeling of mourning and loss and make it a little more complicated. That’s what I was hoping to do with the way that I wrote it.
