I’ve enjoyed Philip Reeve’s two series, the Larklight and the Hungry City books. So I picked up his Here Lies Arthur, even though for one reason and another I wasn’t really keen on another Knights of the Round Table book.
Which is just as well, as it wasn’t a Knights of the Round Table book. No Round Table, hardly any Knights. Hardly any tables, for that matter. Mr. Reeve wrote a book about a possible history behind the Arthur myths. It’s the eighth century or so, Roman infrastructure has essentially collapsed, power is maintained by rival gangs of warlords and their shifting alliances. We meet the people who become King Arthur, Merlin, Queen Guenevere, Sir Kay, Sir Bedivere, Sir Percival and a handful of others, although they mostly have different names and their actions bear only the slightest resemblance to the stories I know. On the other hand, the stories they tell each other about themselves bear only the slightest resemblance to their actions, and somewhat greater resemblance to the stories I know.
Which leads me to the title, which is actually quite clever. It reads as a sentence, of course, adverb verb present tense subject noun, connotation of death and sorrow, etc, etc. It’s actually closer in meaning to a list of the three subjects of the book: Here, that is the landscape of Britain; Lies, that is the process of mythmaking and propaganda as well as the self-delusions that support our attempts at goodness; Arthur, that is, a kind of historically-informed guess at the sort of thing that must lie behind the stories. Mr. Reeves says that the book isn’t a historical novel, although I have very little idea what he means by historical novel that wouldn’t include this book. I would guess that he is differentiating between a book that claims to take actual historical incident in the form of a novel and a book that is purely fiction, set in the historical past. And I suppose it’s a legitimate distinction, in a way, although lots of the latter kind are referred to as historical fiction also, as they should be (in my arrogant opinion).
And Your Humble Blogger isn’t going to go into tremendous detail about the responsibilities of the writer in writing this sort of pseudo-historical fiction. Y’all know what I think, and y’all haven’t read this one, either, I suspect. Nor did I feel that the ethnic diversity of eighth century England was inadequately representated, insofar as I understand anything about the actual history. I liked that the Saxons were portrayed as bogey-men, scary outsiders who the local power-brokers use to frighten the local powerless, and it only sorta works, what with the Saxons being in a different part of the country and not raiding around these parts much lately.
A thing that didn’t work so well for me, on the other hand, was the gender-bending stuff. Clever idea, ought to have worked. Our main character is a female who masquerades as a boy as a prepubescent, learns to be a woman, and later masquerades as a man again. One of the major supporting characters is a male who masquerades as a girl as a prepubescent and then learns to be a man, and then later masquerades as a girl again. I think. I don’t really remember that last bit, actually, maybe it didn’t happen, but I do like symmetry. And there is a bunch of good stuff in there, only, you know, it just didn’t work somehow.
There’s still some good stuff. I wonder if other people who are more heavily into the early Medieval/late Antique would like the book more or less.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.