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Notes -
So I just read Lev Grossman's (of the Magicians fame) new book, The Bright Sword, and it was absolutely awful.
I absolutely loved The Magicians trilogy, and The Magicians itself is probably on my top ten all-time list. The Magicians worked extremely well as a post-modern critique of the magic-boarding school genre: turns out grinding at getting good at magic might suck just as much as other forms of school, especially when do you stuff like skip grades. The existentialism and angst that worked so well in the modern setting of the Magicians really doesn't fit in the King Arthur setting. I think part of this is because the two stories are not archetypally aligned: The Magicians is a story about overcoming decadence and hedonism in a society that's transitioning from adulthood to old age, King Arthur is a story about a traditional hero fighting back against the darkness is a society that's just starting to know itself (child to orphan transition). The beats that worked so well in The Magicians about ennui and meaninglessness just don't fit here: there's PLENTY to do, and the narration's suggestion otherwise is grating.
I think this archetypal misalignment kind of dooms the book, but The Bright Sword also has other serious problems. The plot is a mess: there is no clear arc, the characters just do stuff. Which was perhaps a deliberate attempt by Grossman to capture the disorganization (personally and politically) following the death of a great king. This unfortunately fell flat for me: the conclusion of every mini-arc felt random, unearned, and irrelevant as we moved on to the next adventure out of nowhere. Interspersed between these arcs we get some flashback chapters which I quite liked, but also messed with the pacing of the story.
I also really did not appreciate the insertion of "current political issue" into the themes of the book. The trans member of the round table was actually fine, although I wish the focus had been more on the conflicting gender roles rather than gender identity (our society's obsession with labels rather than actions/roles is a continual frustration for me). What was not fine was the rebranding of the Saxon invaders as "refugees", and the implication that the britons should have just let them in and embraced the resulting melting pot (with obvious implications for Current Year). This bourgeois attitude towards immigration misses all the suffering brought about by two groups of very different people competing for the same land, and implies that current worries about immigration are totally unfounded because it has happened so many times before. Yes it has, but it wasn't very fun for the native Britons (who basically no longer exist, and have not since the Norman conquest of Wales).
In contrast to my post last month about George R. R. Martin, I think understand the critique of post-modernism much better when it comes to this book. You can't just deconstruct a myth/legend layered with many generations of meaning from many different cultures and institute platitudes about current-year and expect it to deeply move people.
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