The Bright Sword

“Crouching in the stern, he watched the umbilical of wake that connected him to his island home disperse and fade away. The sky above Mull was wild and windblown, here dropping curtains of gray rain, there lighting up a headland with a clear shaft of sunlight that made it look like a lost paradise. The island’s bumpy silhouette got thinner and thinner till he could cover it with two fingers, and it became the small, insignificant thing he always knew it was.”

Colum comes from a tiny island in the far north of Britain and has trained for more than 10 years to be a knight. After his father finally frees him he spends weeks walking to arrive in Camelot only to discover that Arthur is dead, only a handful of the 80(?) knights remain, Queen Guinevere is in a nunnery and the Kingdom is broken. Will God choose a new King or will Britain revert to the old pagan ways. The Christian god is always in the background remote and silent right up until he grants miracles that are sometimes cruel and at other times merciful (yes angels make an appearance). With no handy sword in the stone around to choose a new king, Colum joins the Knights in a hunt for the new King. Along the way they are severely tested by many different challenges including Morgana Le Faye, Mordred, demons, dragons curses and more mundane power politics by other competing kings. Besides the questing the book tells the personal stories of our remaining knights who have struggled with their identities as christians, as men and as knights.

Mr Grossman’s prose is clever, frequently beautiful and the adventures are of the milieu you expect from the Arthurian canon: damsels in shimmering samite, enchanted swords, mysterious knights of various colors, jousting, riddles that must be solved to lift curses. For added bonus, not just one lady in the lake, and one of them is very put out when she winds up in the ocean because somebody abandoned excalibur in the nearest convenient body of water.