Believability
All fiction is a kind of conspiracy between author and reader. The author pretends that what they are writing is true and the reader pretends to believe them. I know there's a lot more to it than that—the author probably has something they want to say through shaping the events and characters in their story and the reader may be searching for some kind of truth, or a new way of looking at things, and what is truth anyway? But for the whole thing to work the reader has to be able to convince themselves while they are reading that what they are reading is true.
So when I started reading Meg Rosoff's Carnegie Winner Just in Case and discovered that the central character is named Justin Case, that contract between the writer and this particular reader was immediately undermined. I mean, Justin's parents seem quite ineffectual, but I couldn't believe that any parents would deliberately do that to their child.
Justin lives in a weird world. It's a world where toddlers have complex thoughts well beyond their years and where Justin's imaginary dog is mysteriously visible to other people. It's a world where Justin reacts to a close shave—the little brother he's meant to be looking after nearly falls out of a window—by deciding that Fate is out to get him (Justin) and he's no longer safe anywhere. Fate in this book is a disembodied character who speaks in bold type. A lot of bad things happen to Justin, but who knows whether Fate has anything to do with it? Is he mentally ill? Is he imagining everything? I have no idea. I did not believe in Justin Case for a single second so that, despite the assured and often very funny writing, I found it a real struggle to finish this book.
You, of course, may well love it! These days when I go to the cinema or the theatre I'm astonished to hear people guffawing at things I don't think are remotely funny. Maybe there's a limit to how much laughing we can do in our lives and I used up too much watching Marx Brothers movies when I was a student. Of course, I'm not the intended audience for this book, but should that even make a difference? I'm also starting to think I must have been a very odd teenage boy because almost none of the teenage boys I've read about in Carnegie winners and elsewhere seem to be like any teenage boy I've ever known, and certainly not like me. I'd have to look to Jan Mark, maybe, and Robert Westall for characters I can relate to.
And then—Oh, wow!—I read Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur. It was almost like the clock had been turned back to the late 1950s when historical novels from OUP won the Carnegie almost every year. Except that Philip Reeve begins his Author's Note by saying: 'Here Lies Arthur is not a historical novel, and in writing it I did not set out to portray"the real King Arthur", only to add my little thimbleful to the sea of stories which surrounds him.'
But this is an utterly believable story, even though it's all made up. I love the tag line on the cover: Everyone's heard of Arthur. But no one's heard the truth . . .
Well, this is Philip Reeves's truth. Merlin is a storyteller, conman and chancer who attaches himself to a minor leader of a war band in the aftermath of the Roman departure from Britain. He plans to make Arthur into a great leader by spreading stories about him, creating a myth. He's a kind of sixth century spin-doctor for Arthur. So in one way this is a book about the power of story, and about people believing what they want to believe when they're given a little prompting by an expert manipulator. Merlin, or Myrddin as he's called here, is more of a conjurer than a magician. He loves tricks and illusions and so when he finds a young girl who is fleeing from a Saxon raid and who is a brilliant swimmer he sees a chance to create the illusion of a sword rising out of a misty lake.
Crisp, clear narrative with real drive, vivid scene setting, great dialogue. I felt an enormous sense of relief when I started reading, knowing at once that this was a book I could sink into and truly enjoy.
The girl, Gwyna, is the narrator of the story, and she spends a large part of the book disguised as a boy. As a boy she sees all the rough brutality of the lives of Arthur's soldiery, and then as a girl she is in the confidence of Arthur's wife, Gwenhwyfar. Another character, Peredur, has been brought up by his mother as a girl to prevent him being taken as a soldier. A lot of people are fooled in this book, in one way or another, which nicely underlines the point that nobody really knows anything about Arthur. In his Author's Note Philip Reeve recommends Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthur trilogy and Paul White's King Arthur—Man or Myth. He also says his interest in Arthur was inspired by John Boorman's film Excalibur! But there's another book that's much closer in feel to Here Lies Arthur and that's Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset.
Sutcliff's book also attempts to imagine what a real Arthur might have been like. Sword at Sunset follows on from the action of The Lantern Bearers, and this Arthur, too, is the leader of a band of mounted cavalry trying to keep the Saxon invaders at bay. It is a long and incredibly detailed account of a military campaign lasting for years. It deals with the procurement and breeding of war horses capable of bearing armoured warriors; it deals with the logistics of keeping a band of 300 men (and camp followers) fed and watered. There is extreme violence, rape, murder and treachery (Philip Reeve's version has most of this too), and at its heart is a portrait of a damaged man. Many of Sutcliff's heroes are physically damaged, but Arthur is mentally scarred after he is seduced by his half-sister who bears him a child that she rears in hate to betray Arthur. She may or may not be a witch, but she is bitter and revengeful at her mother's abandonment by Arthur's father.
That encounter at the start of the book leaves Arthur impotent, unable, save on one occasion, to consummate his marriage to Guenhamara. Sutcliff is interested in bitter misunderstandings between men and women, which reflect her own experiences, but while that element of the plot does make Arthur a more complex character, it isn't the plot that makes this such a great book. A lesser writer might have made Arthur's betrayal by his son the whole reason for Arthur's downfall, but what Sutcliff shows is a gradual erosion of the power and willingness to fight of the British; a gradual dawning of the awareness that the Saxons are not going to go away and that larger historical forces are in play. In the end, as in Philip Reeve's book, it is the myth of Arthur, not his force of arms, that will carry the dream of Britain through the Dark Ages.
Of course, you do have to buy into the 'Romano-British (and Celts)= good, Saxons, Angles, Scots and Jutes = bad' idea, and, indeed, into the concept of 'The Dark Ages'. You also have to not mind Sutcliff's occasional archaism: 'Sa, sa. It is in my mind that the Saxons will attack at dawn.' I made that up, but there's quite a bit of that kind of thing. But on the whole I felt I'd been immersed for 450 pages in a completely believable world, and as for Sutcliff's descriptions of nature, landscape and weather, they are second to none.
The final book in the series, which I just re-read, is very dark in many ways, but in different ways to Sutcliff and Philip Reeve. There is murder, rape and treachery here, too, but there is also the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. With Reeve and Sutcliff we see Christianity in its infancy in Britain, and both books show how the old Roman and Celtic religions still have power. In Kevin Crossley-Holland's books, priests condemn love, banish women and children from the Crusade and endorse the slaughter of Infidels, and, really, anyone who gets in the way of retaking the 'Holy Places'. The Church takes almost as thorough a beating here as it does in Philip Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy. I remember writing a while back that I felt Kevin Crossley-Holland's Storm was a bit slight for a Carnegie winner. Perhaps I can make up for that by saying that if I'd been making the decision in 2003 I'd have given the award to Arthur—King of the Middle March.
As Philip Reeve says, these books are a good way in to the world of Arthur. Kevin Crossley-Holland also wrote an excellent compilation of stories and information about Arthur full of lovely illustrations by Peter Malone called The King Who Was and Will Be.
One last thing—my copy of Sword at Sunset is a horrible book club edition with small blurry type on browning paper, and it has NO MAPS! Can anyone tell me which is the best edition of this book? The American one? The original Hodder one? I can't tell looking at them online.
Originally published on ABBA February 2024
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