Arthur the King By Allan Massie

The Grail Quest is just a popish plot

We're not allowed to use the term "Dark Age" any more. Why, there was lots of stuff happening back then: invasions, raidings, pillage. Not much in the way of culture of course, but that's just growing pains. Anyway, Charlemagne appeared and our ancestors were all able to relax. But even the most revisionist historian has to concede that the period immediately succeeding the collapse of Rome was a rum time. A time, in fact, when anything could be said of anywhere.

The chroniclers were not inaccurate so much as bewildered. France, for example, could as well have been Grand Tartary for all the inhabitants of Britain knew. And it is in such desolate gardens that myths begin to sprout.

Like its predecessor, The Evening of the World, this novel is framed as a treatise on good government addressed to Frederick II. The narrator, Michael Scott, retells the story of Arthur as an object lesson: and the moral is, don't trust Rome. Even the Grail Quest is presented as a popish plot. All other accounts, especially that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, are dismissed as fables.

And the joke is that the story given here represents perhaps the most extravagant version of the Arthurian myth. Drawing upon pre-Norman texts, Massie presents Arthur not merely as the subduer of the Saxons but as the nominal ruler of an empire encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Massie's own contribution is to make him the heir of Roman emperors. Well, why not?

Otherwise, this is pretty much the legend as we know it, save for some intriguing twists. Sir Lancelot, for example, having being raised by the fairies, has no feeling for the human, and knightly, code of honour, and so sees nothing wrong in his adultery with Guinevere. Sir Mordred is a deformed malcontent who dons the mask of piety in order to replace Arthur's peace with a military dictatorship. But the boldest change lies in Massie's portrayal of Morgan Le Fay, here a warm and passionate woman, driven to madness and murder by the heartless intriguers who surround her.

There are some rather less successful tinkerings, however. Though it was enterprising of Massie to make Arthur's marriage to Guinevere a political one designed to appease the Saxon invaders, the fact remains that Guinevere is as good a Celtic name as you could find. Arthur's sidekick, Cal, initially a moving and sympathetic figure, quickly becomes a major irritant with his ooh-arr wisecracks. The tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is beautifully retold, until Massie decides to spike it by making the sorcerer-knight a hearty, jovial prankster. The motley mode is not this author's forte. The childish tittering about pederasty, de rigueur among far too many historical novelists, is also a bore.

It is in the mists of sinister suggestion that Massie's skill truly glitters: eerie meetings at night with the keepers of damned chapels, dreams more solid than the earth, a group of dispossessed Britons driven to wander by "men from the sea". But, paradoxically, this book is never depressing. And feeble anachronisms notwithstanding, you are held by the throat from beginning to end.