Astoundingly, a fresh take on an extremely well-trodden legend.
King Arthur is dead—what happens now?
Collum of the Out Isles has stolen armor and a horse from his local lord, hoping to be accepted as a knight of the Round Table. But when he arrives at Camelot, the place is nearly deserted; King Arthur and a majority of his knights have died in the battle at Camlann, leaving no clear heir. With the few remaining knights and the sorceress Nimue, Collum travels across the disintegrating nation and even into the fairy Otherworld, searching for a successor to the dead Arthur and marshaling forces against the rivals who seek Britain’s throne for themselves—including Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s enchantress half-sister, who claims that she is the rightful heir, but mostly acts as a chaos agent throughout, helping or harming the questers as seems best to her in the moment. As the book progresses, we learn the secret backstory of each of the surviving knights as well as the nature of the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere, the apparent spark for the civil conflict (the truth, intriguingly, is not what you think). The story of King Arthur has been told and substantially altered many times over the centuries, and explored by a multitude of contemporary novelists, but the author of the Magicians trilogy makes room for himself here. The purposeful inclusion of anachronisms recalls T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and the conflict between Christianity and pagan traditions is strongly reminiscent of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. However, very few writers have explored post-Arthurian Britain or focused quite so much on developing the stories of the minor characters in the saga—the transgender man Sir Dinadan; Arthur’s bodyguard, Sir Bedivere, secretly in love with his liege; Sir Dagonet the Fool, suffering from severe bipolar disorder; Sir Palomides, a highly educated prince of Baghdad whose not-so-secret passion for the lady Isolde keeps him in a primitive land that looks down on him for the color of his skin; and so on. This is not a realistic conjecture of how Britain would continue after the death of a charismatic leader who tried to institute new policies of standard law and justice. It’s a metafiction in which the survivors of a myth attempt to extend that myth as they contend with the inner demons of their pasts.
Astoundingly, a fresh take on an extremely well-trodden legend.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780735224049
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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