Book Review: The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman

Second person present tense is the sexiest way to tell a story.

If you've not come across it before, Bisclavret is a 12th century poem, one of the Lais of Marie de France, which tells the story of a knight who suffers from frequent transformation into a wolf, a secret which is later discovered and exploited against him. Indeed, the word "bisclavret" is a middle Breton term equivalent to the Norman French "garwolf"... whose English equivalent I think we might be able to guess. It draws on the pool of shared early medieval mythology, with similar reflexes found in the Lay of Melion and in the story of Sir Marrok in Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman is a retelling of this werewolf story, playing on its status as a romance in the historic and the modern senses, to explore courtly love, kingship, fealty and living with a secret dangerous to oneself and others.

But before we get into the story, I actually want to start by discussing the historical note provided at the front of the book, which is one of the best I have ever encountered at setting out the stall for exactly what the author wants the story to be:

That last sentence is key to how Longman handles the historicity of their story - they promise not strict accuracy, but an authenticity of approach that aims to situate the story in the thematic space of its inspirations, if not the details and facts. And that intention absolutely is borne out in the story itself; there is an internal consistency that holds the whole thing together, but which also strikingly evokes medieval works in feel, in way often distinctly absent from modern retellings, even of Arthuriana. And I love this. Honestly, I feel like this approach is probably more difficult to pull off than literal accuracy, but all the better for the effort. What I want out of historical stories isn't the replication of minutiae - if that style of hood only came into fashion ten years later, who really cares - but in the evocation of atmosphere, used to a purpose. If a story is situating itself in a medieval mythical world, what matters far more in my view is how it turns its tools to supporting the feeling it engenders in the reader. Longman's decision to mess with the details how the medievals would have done is exactly the sort of choice that I think works for this.

And there are other tools they turn to this end with precision and skill - prose for one. The story is set in 12th century France, so obviously there's not going to be any kind of realistic language usage (I don't know about you but my middle Breton is pretty poor). But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to feed into the atmosphere with the linguistic choices they deploy. There's a consistent formality to the word choices - even the interior ones - that helps establish the court setting and the courtly manners of the people involved, even in moments of stress. They speak in the pattern of a knight from a story, even if their behaviour is more naturalistically drawn. Sentences are long and carefully structured, even speech full of delicately threaded subclauses and patterned back and forth. And the narration echoes this, seeming to speak itself in the voice of the storyteller, consistently determined to inspire wonder and magic, even at mundane details like travel-stained clothes. At no point does Longman let up: this is a myth, and so it must sound like one, in order that the spell never be broken.

It helps that Longman's prose is also just rather lovely:

The hunt is continuity: youth, exile, kingship, all of them joined by this bright thread of the horse beneath you and the call of the horns and the fierce joy of the hounds as they run, chasing down the boar as it crashes through the undergrowth.

Hear the alliteration and the rhythm to it. The story of Bisclavret is originally a poem, and Longman never lets that stray too far from memory either. There are three perspectives the story is written in, chapter by chapter, and one of those (labelled "other") is consistently in blank verse, its flow even closer to the poetic than even this crafted language.

For the other two, Bisclavret's chapters (labelled "him") are in close third, watching him from outside even though we know his thoughts, and the unnamed king's in second. This shifting gives a clear distinction to the different character perspectives, feeding into how they are in fact characterised, and what Longman wants to focus on in how they tell the story. Bisclavret feels at odds with himself, distracted and distant, and so we cannot be a part of his authentic thought process. The king meanwhile is the opposite, buried deep under his anxieties, his depression (never named as such but clearly described), his sadness and loneliness, his care and determination to be a better king than his father. And by giving us his sections in the second person, and the present tense, there's an immediacy to him, an intimacy to the experience of inhabiting his headspace because Longman puts us right there, thinking those thoughts through alongside.

Which pairs even more beautifully with those poetry sections of the Other. There... person is eschewed as much as possible. The Other is the wolf who overtakes Bisclavret and steals his skin and his self, and is divorced from humanity. There is no person, only scattered, ungrammared feeling and action, interspersed with italic moments of Bisclavret's humanity breaking through in the first person.

And Longman knows what they're doing with this, naming it on the page in one of these sections:

The mind of a man is difficult to lose: 

it whispers human, whispers I,

first person, self-absorbed, tangled up

with the gut instinct that pinpoints revenge 

The prose has us thinking about the how of the story just as much as the story itself.

But where this is all high romance and abstract, the text also provides details to ground the story in the physical where needed. One of the recurring themes that arises in Bisclavret's sections is his intense focus on his hands. It is the loss of his hands that he mourns when he loses himself to the wolf, and it is those same hands he finds himself touching, welcoming, when he returns to human form. They become totemic of his humanity as a whole, and his focus on them recurs at critical moments to focus the story's attention on his mental state and sense of self.

There are also many moments just of physical action - it's a story full of knights so there's a fair bit of sparring, but also the clasping of hands, kisses given in loyalty, skin touched to skin in passion. It's a hard thing, I think, to entwine the formalised world of the medieval and the mythic with a more naturalistic approach to human interaction, but Longman does it well, never breaking one for the sake of the other.

To linger on that clasping of hands, one of the central themes of the story is to do with medieval kingship, and the duties, fealties, powers and relationships that run in both directions from the person of the king. The unnamed "you" of the story is coming into kingship unready, learning the ropes, and is intended as a deeply thoughtful character besides, so there's a lot of wondering on exactly how his performance of kingship and his development and use of relationships with his retainers and knights is working. The king has relationships of a loving or sexual kind with several people during the story, too, and those factor into his wondering. It is a very modern concern to be preoccupied with the abuse of power differentials, but the way the king thinks it through never slips out of that medieval atmosphere, breaking immersion by this modern concern, because the king frames it in terms that feel in place for the time, predominantly duty and fealty. He is aware that he can but ask, and his subjects will give. He highlights that a lord could be asked to sleep in the royal bed chamber and this intimacy (named as such) would be considered a mark of high favour, rather than a one-sided wielding of power in counter to desire. This is a story conscious of contemporary medieval mores, rather than imposing modern ones, for the most part, and that allows Longman to think through this concern without feeling inauthentic. It becomes more part of the king's character - and Bisclavret's, though in different ways - to be overthinkers, doubters and worriers. To the point that the knight in green, a friend to both, comments on it to each in turn. 

I suppose that is the uniting feature - Longman likes to name things on the page that they are doing, the things that might be contrasts or awkwardnesses or disjoints, and by naming them in text smooth their path, just as they do right at the beginning with that historical note. It is an incredibly knowing story, the sense of Longman's knowledge of the period - they have a PhD in medieval literature - suffusing the whole without the need for the sometime-problem of historical stories where the author feels they must demonstrate the research on the page no matter what. In The Wolf and His King, that knowledge is in every word, and so crowbarring it in would be redundant.

But it isn't a perfect story, though very accomplished. In the original poem, Bisclavret is betrayed by his wife, who steals the thing that allows him to return to human form, and marries another knight in his absence, when all think him dead. Longman cleaves close to the facts of the original, and while it works in all other places, when it comes to the wife, it feels a little of a let down. When first we meet her, she is sweet, kind, loving, understanding. It is very clear why Bisclavret falls in love with her - she sees the man and only the man, he thinks, not the wolf within - and why she with him, and their courtly romance does feel perfect and lovely, even up to their fumbling but passionate marriage bed consummation. But once it switches, once the story requires that she betray him, she (and the other knight, who in this telling is Bisclavret's cousin, who knows his nature and has helped him until they fall out) becomes suddenly unknowable to the story. Her motives become opaque to us, and any sympathy the story had for her - which, in the beginning, it did aplenty - is absent. Her suffering as the wife of a man who keeps disappearing for days and won't tell her why is not explored, and she is granted no grace. For a book so strong on the interiority and humanity of its other characters, this feels like a failing.

It doesn't fit the schema set up that she might have chapters in her perspective, but I almost wish she did, or the cousin. But we get to see their betrayal only through the eyes of the king (who doesn't know until it is revealed) or through the experience of the wolf, who cannot provide emotional depth and understanding the way Bisclavret as a man can. The wolf only wants revenge.

And so the bloody culmination and revelation feels... a little undermined. Thankfully, the story has as its climax not that but the aftermath, ensuring that there is a genuine emotional payoff waiting in the final chapter and epilogue, but it does mean that all rings a little hollow in contrast. The king, and Bisclavret, have both been characterised by their gentleness, their courtesy, their dedication to peace or understanding of things which many would not. That it does not hold here, for those they have loved, however understandable that might be, seems like a betrayal, almost, in order to remain true to the shape of the original narrative.

But for all that, I could not help but love it nonetheless. As well as this repeated theme of what a medieval king was and could be, there is another thread about love and perception. Bisclavret falls in love with his wife because she sees him only as a man. When he meets the king, and continually afterwards, he notes that the man seems to see through him. His gaze pierces him, flays him, unmasks him. He fears he sees the wolf inside. And, in the end, that knowing gaze is the one he needs, not the one that only sees the surface. It's a little corny, but well... it is an Arthurian-inspired romance. We have to have some high ideals in there, right?

The Knight and His King is, in the main, an incredibly accomplished novel, full of linguistic control, beautiful atmosphere, vivid prose and a fully realised impression of a mythic medieval court. Longman does a difficult thing of managing to wed the right quantity of realism with the stylisation and formality of a courtly romance, in the old sense, resulting in something that feels distinctive and emotionally authentic, even as it holds true to tropes that have been around for nearly a millennium. It is also, for all its formality, an incredibly intimate, personal and passionate book, as only something with such a committed interiority could be. Longman understands, and I emphasise, that duty, honour and fealty are just incredibly sexy things when done right. And here, they absolutely are.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, two deeply feeling main characters, a world drawn straight from medieval myth

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Finn Longman, The Wolf and His King, [Gollancz 2025]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Interview with Natania Barron

Today, Paul Weimer talks with his longtime friend, Natania Barron, about her Queens series.

1. Can you introduce yourself to our readers unfamiliar with you and your work?

I'm Natania Barron, a fantasy author and fashion historian who loves monsters, magic, and mayhem. My books are almost always historical in some capacity, unapologetically queer, and full of fabulous costumes, adventures, and found family. My background was originally in academia, primarily focused on medieval literature, but I'm a big fan of the 19th century as well. I read voraciously, garden enthusiastically, and love traveling. At present, I live in North Carolina with my family.

2. You've written a fair amount of fantasy before tackling the Queens series. Why the jump to Arthuriana? What's the appeal?

This is the funny part about publishing. Chronologically, I've been working on the Queens series longer than almost anything else. The first draft of Queen of None was written in 2010, but it languished with me for about ten years, living in a state of limbo. It was, in many ways, the thesis I wish I'd written in graduate school, resurrecting a character I'd found in Geoffrey of Monmouth--which is a 12th century quasi-history that features King Arthur--named Anna Pendragon. Anna was the full sister of Arthur, with the same parents (Igraine and Gorlois). So, in a sense these books have been with me all along. In fact, keen eyed folks will notice quite a few Arthurian nods in some of my other works, including in Pilgrim of the Sky and These Marvelous Beasts.

Arthuriana has always appealed to me, as I grew up loving fantasy and it was a natural progression in my academic pursuits. For me, it's about the tension of the Matter of Britain (the fancy term for Arthuriana) between the golden age and its inevitable fall, the strong king and the affair that shook the kingdom, the ever-changing characters who go from most renowned to reviled and back again. Courtly love itself is walking contradiction! I often speak of Arthuriana as an amoeba, and certainly as fanfiction. From the 12th century onward, it traveled across Europe and beyond, capturing imaginations right and left. And every time it was retold, it changed shape. I mean, truly, so much of what we know about King Arthur are not Welsh or English in nature, but decidedly French. This amalgamation of myth over the next near millennium has shaped so much about how we think about fantasy, kingship, and romance. And it's delightfully episodic, so you have the opportunity to zoom in or out in the story as much as possible, which is wonderfully appealing as a writer. I'd love to continue the series at some point in the vein of what Joe Abercrombie does with his interconnected novels, and I feel like the genre is absolutely built for it.

3. The central logline of the trilogy are three Queens. What prompted you to tell your take on their stories in the Arthurian Cinematic Universe

Women are both plentiful and invisible in much of the Matter of Britain. They are most often used as mediums for succession, or as political pawns. Mothers, in particular, are everywhere and yet nowhere. Once a woman has done her duty to have a child, typically by a knight or king, she is of no use in the narrative. But their stories matter, and they're all there in the margins. The three women in the story are all queens in their own right, or should be, but their queenliness is more than their genes. Anna surrenders her throne; Hwyfar learns to claim her own; Morgen's realm is not of the mortal plane. Anna is a mother, Hwyfar is a maiden (in that she is unmarried), and Morgen is the crone. They are all powerful, but in vastly different ways. And their actions and alliances shape the very foundations of the overall myth. That was one of the really joyful parts of writing the third book, which occurs 20 years after the first, being the ability for me to tie up all the loose ends. And usher in a new generation! Because that's one of the other fun things about writing in this genre: it takes place over a fairly long stretch of time, and there are different phases of folks involved.

4. The time frame of most fantasy novels is months, or even weeks. Having books that take place over years or lifetimes is rare. What models and inspirations in fantasy and mimetic literature did you have in telling the lifetime stories of your characters

Well, in-genre there is certainly T.H. White, who has a similar approach in The Once and Future King. Each section follows a different character or characters, and we begin with Arthur as a boy, and the story reaches all the way until his departure to Avalon. I think, if I'm being academic about it, it's sort of woven into Arthurian DNA to both expand and contract time as needed. In my approach, the first book spans about 10 years; the second is just a few months; the third is a few weeks. But there are breaks of time between each one, so I can zoom in and zoom out as needed. The timelines get more complex, though, even though the time spent is less. By the time we get to Queen of Mercy, there are even dual timelines to contend with, as Morgen's story is happening in the background of the story happening at Carelon with Gawain, Hwyfar, and the triad of Galahad, Percival, and Llachlyn. I don't think anyone does complex timelines as well as N.K. Jemisin, I'd say, outside the Arthurian genre.

5. Maiden Mother and Crone is an interesting alignment for your Queens. What other mythic models and frameworks might readers look for in the trilogy?

Oh, there's so much. In fact, there are so many mythological Easter eggs that I stumble into some I had totally forgotten about when I'm re-reading or listening to the audiobooks. A big theme in the stories is around the contradictions of chivalry and courtly love in the face of a world experiencing magic that is both vanishing and changing shape. I poke plenty of fun at Arthur's very simplistic view of Christianity, but show how well it molds to certain minds looking for straightforward answers. The magic of Avillion is complex, old, and very matriarchal--save that their king is a man. There are heroes, and there are anti-heroes, but there are very few true villains in the story. One of my favorite frameworks is the escape to the wilderness/descent into madness cycle that you see very often in the Matter of Britain. Both Lancelot and Yvain have moments where their minds, essentially, experience a psychotic break. The wood is both healing and challenging in their subsequent adventures. I got to work through Yvain's story a bit in the last book, which was quite the adventure.

I suppose, the biggest theme is the magical woman--the woman of both actual and perceived power. So often, especially Morgan le Fay is associated with seduction and sexuality, and I wanted to change that. In much of the Arthurian canon, powerful women are rarely revered. They are feared, othered, and often looked at as obstacles rather than healers or wise women. In the Vita Merlini, which is from the 12th century and her first large appearance in literature, she's a powerful woman who clearly comes out of the Celtic past, an herbalist, and respected for her work. She's not described as wily or difficult or hedonistic. That all comes later. So I wanted my version of Morgen, who appears within the first chapters of Queen of None, and conveys throughout, in a similar way. She chooses, when Merlin spurns her, to work as a midwife at Carelon. Her magic is not just the magic of Avillion, but blended powers she learned from Merlin as well as her own connection with Death itself. She is called the "midwife of souls" for that reason, and I pulled a lot of my inspiration from the triple-goddesses of death you see in some religions, and especially in Celtic lore.

6. Arthuriana is a vast place and perhaps daunting for readers to find their way in, at least beyond the usual ones. Where you do suggest readers who have read your trilogy wade in next?

Some of the books I suggest run the gamut from faithful retellings to general vibes, and I love that. There's a Palamades even in Gideon the Ninth and plenty of Arthurian echoes. Tracy Deonn's Bloodmarked series is a fantastic YA modern take on the Arthurian inheritance. Of course, Lev Grossman recently wrote The Bright Sword, which has a lot of the humor that I love in writers like T.H. White, but shaped in a way that is very much his own

7.  The sheer diversity of differences in the Arthurian mythos from book to book and story to story is breathtaking, and your works add to that tradition.  Why do you think that remixing and reinterpretation is so popular?

Given the time it was created, it's surprising to many how diverse and far-reaching Arthuriana is. As a medievalist, that's not shocking. The medieval world went far beyond the borders of Britain. And indeed, the West's "Dark Ages" were far from homogenous (or, as the quotes indicated, "dark" to begin with). Indeed, in the Middle Ages, people were asking many of the same questions we're still positing about gender, religion, faith, power, and patriotism. Because of all of this, and its historical context, Arthuriana is built flexibly, diversely, and with a great adaptability. In many ways it's similar to the adaptation and appropriation you see when the Catholic Church really sinks its teeth into the West, and you see all these Celtic and pre-Christian figures remixed as saints. It's deeply location-based and very personal. Knights, ladies, villains, monsters... these can all be absorbed into Arthuriana, as well. We like our own context, and the way these stories are written and shared really welcomes such remixing.

And what's fascinating to me, at least, is seeing it reshaped to either combat or acquiesce to current political, religious climates, etc. Courtly love was adored by the French, and during the 12th and 13th centuries, Lancelot and Guinevere's relationship was seen as sacred even though it very much lived outside the Christian marriage pact. But it shifts, especially by the time you get the Malory--and of course, it's primarily Guinevere who is demonized in that instance. Women are blamed for their power over men, rather than men given responsibility for their actions. So these changes aren't always for the better, but they do tell us a great deal about the cultures from which they're told. I'm curious to see what direction Arthuriana goes, considering the current political climate. Might vs. right has never been so essential.

We see it happening in real-time, to some extent, with comic books and superhero movies, film, and books, in the 20th and 21st centuries. They're, of course, building on thousands of years of myths, but given the acceleration of media production, we get remakes and retellings at breakneck pace. We no longer have to wait for the next minstrel hit to literally travel leagues, changing all along the way to better suit the audience.

8. What's next for you now that you have completed this trilogy?

The third book in my queer Regency witches series (Love in Netherford) is called The Game of Hearts, and that should be out later this year or early next. Then, well, I'm always working on something. I have a secondary world romantasy that needs some revisions, but I also haven't given up on Arthuriana yet. Lately, Palomydes, Tristan, and Isolde have been gnawing away at my consciousness. I've even been dreaming about them! And lots more of the Questing Beast. In addition, I have a few nonfiction projects I'd like to tackle. Ideas are never the issue!

9. (and the soft outro): Where can readers find you and your work?

My website is nataniabarron.com, and I'm @natania.bsky.social on BlueSky, @nataniabarron on Instagram, and @nataniabooks on TikTok. Both the Queens of Fate series and the Love in Netherford books can be found online, or at my publisher's website (Solaris/Rebellion - https://rebellionpublishing.com/)

Thank you, Natania!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: The Estate by Sarah Jost

A version of the story of a famous sculptor’s relationship with an even more famous one, using an art buyer’s ability to enter the worlds of art as her genre hook

Camille Leray has a special ability, one invaluable to her work as an art historian and seller. Not that many would believe her, even if she told her secret, but she can go into a demiplane of the artwork she studies. She can get a real psychological and social sense of what the artist was thinking and doing and trying to convey, by means of the interiority of their worlds. But when her gift goes badly wrong, and she is forced to take a job at an estate in Brittany, her gift unlocks the secret and mystery of her favorite, underappreciated artist... but at a heavy personal cost.

This is the story of Sarah Jost’s The Estate.

The novel revolves around several interesting, interlocking axes. We have Camille, whose personal history, and her gift and her need for money after a disaster at the auction, leads her to the titular Estate where she spent some time during her childhood. Camille’s time there, as well as her relationship, in various meters with Maxime Foucault, the head of the estate, past and present, drive a lot of the social and psychological heft of the novel. Camille is more than a little in love with Max, and the working out of that relationship, and how it relates to her gift and her interests, is a lot of what you are going to find here. This does move the novel somewhat out of pure genre fiction (although the elements to be discussed below certainly are). A comp mentioned in the publicity materials, and what occurred to me as being a good one as I read this book, is Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers. This novel does try to do with art history and art appreciation what that novel did with maps.

In keeping with the weight of the novel, and following that parallel, the mimetic elements really are strong here. We get a good third-person close POV look at Camille’s life, as her trip to the titular Estate brings up some good and some very bad memories in the process. There is an uncovering and unearthing process in the novel as we learn more about Camille even as we learn more about Maxime, his family in general, and more importantly their relationship with Constance Sorel, the focus of Camille’s artistic interest. Camille is a conflicted, interesting and engaging protagonist for most of the book (there is a later reversal that doesn’t seem well set up or paid for in advance that annoyed me). Besides Camille, a lot of the effort is put on Max, as well as his girlfriend Lila. The Camille-Lila relationship, as the novel goes on, becomes more and more central and important¹ to the culmination and denouement of the book.

So I should discuss the genre elements here. Camille’s ability to enter demiplanes that represent the interiority of an artwork and the mind of the artist is something that she herself does not quite understand and does not (as Maxime sees it) use to its fullest potential. The book begins with Camille thinking that it is idiosyncratic and singular; the inciting incident above that goes badly wrong is that she brings someone else into the demiplane with her by accident. As the novel proceeds, she finds out inch by inch that her ability is greater than she realizes. The exploration of this power is a secondary concern, and always takes a back seat to the mimetic elements and storyline.

There is a technique to determine whether a novel or story is fantasy or science fiction, and that is simply: if you remove the genre elements completely, does it still work as a story? By that test, The Estate very nearly succeeds. You’d have to make some alterations to make the plot work, get Camille to the Estate, and propel the rest of the narrative and why Maxime is so interested in her. So, without alteration, no, the work doesn’t quite succeed, but with some adaptation, it probably could. So The Estate sits inside the porous barrier between genre and non-genre work² but it is within the line. It’s just not a very *strong* genre-focused work. It was a bit frustrating to me in that regard, in that Camille is not only afraid to extend her ability, but she seems absolutely terrified, without any backing information, to actually explore it deeply.³

There is a lesser and somewhat underutilized genre element here, and that is Arthuriana. What some casual fans of the Arthurian romances may not know is that much of the work of the early versions of the Romances were composed and set in Brittany and not England at all. The forest of Broceliande was inspired if not taken to be Paimont Forest in Brittany, and to this day there are things like monuments and sculptures devoted to the French romance tradition of the Arthurian legends throughout the forest.

This gives a good grounding for Jost to use Arthuriana both in the demiplanes of Constance Sorel and in the works themselves. There is a definite theme of things such as the relationship between Vivaine and Merlin that come up time and again in the novel. A real appreciation for those early French versions of the stories infuses the work that Sorel does, and throughout the novel as Leray engages with that work at the Estate. There are intimations and not-quite-fully-formed ideas about mapping some of that Arthuriana onto Leray’s own life, but I don’t think the novel *quite* gets to where it is pushing for in that regard.

I’ve waited to this point to discuss the focus of Camille’s interest, Constance Sorel, in more detail. Aside from the original focus for her for Arthuriana, Constance’s is not imaginary at all, but is rather an alternate version of a real artist, Camille Claudel (the fact that Camille Leray has the same first name as her is, I think, absolutely no accident). Camille Claudel had an intense and tragic relationship with an artist you most definitely have heard of: Auguste Rodin (yes, the Thinker guy). Claudel was an artist in her own right, but her relationship with Rodin and her eventual confinement in a mental institution consumed the last decades of her life. Much of her work has been destroyed, part of it by herself. Hers is a tragic, heartbreaking story that recontexualized, when I first found out about it, my love of Rodin’s work.

In the world of The Estate, Constance Sorel had a relationship with an artist named “Boisseau” and the lines of that relationship are very clear: Boisseau is the better-known artist, a rockstar of sculpture. This relationship ended badly, and Sorel, like her model, wound up first in exile in Brittany, in the very estate that is the center of the novel, and then finally in an asylum.

The novel missteps with this, I think. We mostly get stories of the Boisseau-Sorel relationship and the power of their art. But the novel doesn’t seem to know whether or not these are an alternate Rodin and Claudel or not, and that hurts the story. We get a mention of Rodin once by name (Leray says she sold a Rodin not long before the start of the book), as well as a mention of The Thinker and jokingly “The Gates of Whatnot” (clearly The Gates of Hell). But I am still not convinced that the Rodin sale line isn’t a typo and that it's supposed to be Boisseau and that Boisseau in this world is Rodin and therefore, Sorel is Claudel.

The reason why this matters is that Rodin and Claudel’s relationship is never mentioned, even if Boisseau and Sorel’s relationship rhymes with it. If Rodin and Claudel existed in this world, for real, they would be a touchstone, a reference point, something for Camille Leray to hang her hat on and use. “Constance Sorel, as denied in her time just as Camille Claudel was, another woman deemed the mistress of a Great Man and whose art was denigrated and denied.” It’d be an obvious thing to mention and to think about. But this never happens, and with just one named reference to Rodin... it remains frustratingly unclear. And I think that is a real misstep.

My theory is that the Rodin line is a typo, and Rodin and Claudel don’t exist in the world of this book, but Sorel and Boisseau do.

The novel does additionally suffer, I think, for trying to fit Camille Claudel a.k.a. Constance Sorel onto the life and final fate of our heroine Camille herself. For all that we go through this journey of discovery of an artist’s true power, on top of all this, the novel seems to want to cast Camille Leray as a latter-day Constance Sorel, and Camille Claudel in the same breath, to the point of echoing Constance’s life and trying to give herself a better ending. Constance has a lifelong friendship that falls apart due to Constance being institutionalized (just as Camille Claudel was), but Camille Leray seems to be reaching for the same sort of friendship with Lila and succeeds. Instead of being pleased by the echoes and resonances, they instead seem to be an ill-suited frame fo Camille Leray’s life and fate that did not, for me, satisfy.⁴

I can hope that the book will bring more attention to Camille Claudel through her fictionalized version as Constance Sorel in the book, since her story is a tragedy (and sadly she destroyed much of her work). The thesis of the book, that Constance Sorel was an unsung genius of sculpture, appears to be the author talking about Camille Claudel’s work and place in history, and one that I can agree with. In the end, this book attempts to recapture and bring Claudel back to prominence through her fictionalized version and Camille Leray’s story.

So, if you are interested especially in art, particularly Rodin and Claudel, and don’t mind some not-always-well-used genre elements in a work that’s really about rehabilitating Claudel more than anything else, this is the book for you.

Side note: The Getty Museum and Art Institute of Chicago did a retrospective of Claudel’s work at the end of 2023. I wish I had known about it; it would have been worth a trip to Chicago to see.

Also side note: I did a Six Books with Sarah Jost in 2023, in connection with her book Five First Chances.

Highlights:

• Strong story about a fictionalized version of an underappreciated artist.

• Passionate and deep mimetic story about an art historian and her gift.

• Not as genre as it might be, and not as effectively as it might be.

Reference: Jost, Sarah. The Estate [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

1. I should emphatically note that it is not a queer relationship in any way, although, given my reading habits and expectations lately in reading a lot of queer-friendly genre work, I was *expecting* the slow-build intensification of Lila and Camille to go that way... but it does not. 

2. People like the esteemed Gary K. Wolfe would say that there is no such barrier, having written articles and even a book on the subject. I’d love to know his take on this book in that spirit. 

3. To take an idea from this. Suppose you had a door in your wardrobe to another world, be it C. S. Lewis, Seanan McGuire, or multiverse style. Would you poke your head through it, look at the world of the other side but never go further than a few feet from the portal, and yet still keep coming back and just repeating that same process? That’s how Camille feels like she has a relationship with her power. She doesn’t reject it outright, but seems to really limit any idea of trying other things for a lot of her life and a lot of the book.

4. So the Camille-Lila relationship is clearly meant to be an echo of Constance-Anne. The latter one is clearly platonic, and thus, as per footnote 1, the Camille-Lila remains strictly platonic, even if I read it coding as being potentially queer.

Review: For Love of Magic by Simon Green

A myth about understanding why we love myths—a metamyth, if you will

Fantasy is a genre built on myth. That is what J. R. R. Tolkien was quite explicitly doing with The Lord of the Rings, and in traditional Western fantasy the myths of Western Europe are reinterpreted in any number of ways. In non-Western fantastic literature, the same is done to the mythologies of a variety of other cultures. Here, that concern is made more explicit than most fantasy, of any tradition, in Simon Green’s novella For Love of Magic.

For Love of Magic starts off with what appears to be a fairly standard urban fantasy setup: a magical painting has begun to cause problems in a museum in London, and His Majesty’s government calls in the freelance magic hunter to solve the problem. This opening scene alone is inventive, if not the most original, by virtue of it involving our esteemed magic hunter literally walking into the painting and forcing what’s on the other end into a shape that is more amenable to the non-magical world.

But that is only the opening salvo of a barrage of interesting magical set-pieces. Our protagonist is rapidly sucked into a war that has lasted for eons, between those who want to see magic gone and those who want a better coexistence between the magical and the mundane. This war has suddenly escalated: the opponents of magic have now found a way to travel through time, trying to erase that which made magic meaningful—to erase myth, to erase heroism and whimsy. Our protagonists simply cannot allow that.

It is here that For Love of Magic begins to really shine, as it sets out to interrogate the meaning of myth. That is why you find yourself sent back in time to Roman Britain, where you meet Boudica, as well as King Arthur and Robin Hood, among other figures of British mythology, not quite as you remember them, because time has done a number on how we perceive them. These were men and women, all too human, as Green stresses, who have become something else as time marched inexorably on, becoming the heroes, myths, and legends of British culture, and those of its former colonies.

Green is willing to show heroism become a burden, not so much literally as metaphorically through the incursions of the time travelers. These are people who have become special in a time when their Lord-knows-how-many generations of their descendants have passed on, with their own long lines of descendants likewise. They have become pawns in a war far more literal than what we call ‘culture wars,’ a conflict that truly deserves that title over the role of magic in human society. They are burdened with the vicious arguments of their progeny, but unlike the cold and silent statues of our day, be they in Bristol or Charlottesville, these heroes get to speak back and fight back.

The action in this slim little volume is well depicted, never bogged down in the minutiae that can tank a good action sequence. Green’s writing is brisk when it needs to be in these dynamic scenes, and tender when it needs to be among some of the character moments, be they concerned with romance or with the gravity of the situation. It is a style, indeed a combination, that feels properly heroic, with the gravitas that such a story naturally needs. Green never lets the story feel puny.

If anything, I’m disappointed this book wasn’t longer. There are many more British legends he could have gone with. The last one he depicts, while written by a British author (although not within Britain), struck me as a very odd choice for this sort of book, and some of the setting of that story is brought to Britain in a way that feels odd. Indeed, it’s a format that could have made for a much longer book, and part of me really wants to read that book (I can think of at least one British literary legend in the public domain that wasn’t in it, and frankly I was surprised that this figure was omitted). I don’t know whether Green is planning any sequels, but he really should be, for there are so many directions this story could go. There are other British myths, but also myths of other countries (his Wikipedia page mentions he studied American literature in university, in addition to British literature). Indeed, I daresay this novel could set up a whole shared universe like that of the late Eric Flint’s 1632 series.

For Love of Magic is a book that is not particularly original in a number of elements, but makes up for all of that in its bold use of intertextuality and its investment in understanding why its audience reads stories like this. It is fantasy that doesn’t just crib from mythology, but engages with and even probes these stories for why they became myths. It is a fantasy that is in many ways more self-aware than its contemporaries, and is all the better for it. Now only if Green could write another one…

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Reference: Green, Simon. For Love of Magic [Baen, 2023].

The Once But Never Again King - Two Modern Imaginings of the Arthur Mythos

A look at two works who ask the question - what if King Arthur was a dickhead, and someone to be kept from returning to aid the realm at all costs?

King Arthur has... a complicated place in our modern imagination about mythology. Even more than many of the things we retell, his canon of works is cobbled together from a lot of different sources, different times and different places, long before we get anywhere close to the modern era. He occupies a strange position between myth and reality, with the constant lingering wonder... was he a historical figure at all? Was he purely myth? Was he something in between? His stories, and those of the knights and wizards and fairies and ladies around him have been told and retold in Welsh and English and French throughout the centuries, and occupy a very particular set of places in various national consciousnesses. Speaking purely for England, the general consciousness line of belief (or at least awareness of the story) is that he sleeps, and will rise once again when the nation is in peril.

This presumes that a warrior king from the arse end of the dark ages would continue to be useful in countering future peril, which may have been a reasonable belief at the inception of the myths, but is a rather more dubious one when examined critically, or just pedantically, by the modern reader and reteller.

Which is exactly what's being done in Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee, and Once & Future, a comic series by Kieron Gillen, with art by Dan Mora and colours by Tamra Bonvillain. While they come at the problem from two very different angles, these are both works that wonder if Arthur... might not be the solution to our problems after all, and think about exactly what causes people to think he would be any help, and what sort of peril prompts people to think "oh, if only Arthur were here, he'd solve it". Both particularly dwell on the Saxons, as well as concepts of race and belonging to the realm, with Once & Future particularly having an interest in the idea of "purity" and identity, and what it means to a modern audience as well as to an ancient king. Both are also primarily interested in Arthur as a figure in English mythology - though very aware of his roots in Welsh stories, as well as later French tales - and in the modern English consciousness.

In Perilous Times, we follow Sir Kay, newly resurrected because of peril to the realm, a state that has happened numerous times since his original burial, for various levels of threat, as well as the also-resurrected and somewhat antagonistic Lancelot. We also follow Mariam, a near future eco-protester, who understands the world the knights have risen into, blighted by climate change and corporate greed, and who desperately wants to solve the problems of the world around her, but feels powerless to affect the necessary change. There's a running theme through the story of people absolutely failing to work together, no matter that it serves their best interests, and at times, this is used as motivation for bringing Arthur back - after all, he was a great uniter of men, could he not rally the disparate forces to work together against their problems? But it is left to those who knew him best, Lancelot and Kay, to be the voices constantly pushing back on this idea. We don't need Arthur, not just yet. He might be difficult. He might make it worse. He might not be the man we need, not now, not for the moment. They carry unease through much of the story, reluctance to deal with him as a complex, real, deeply flawed man, in the face of many other people's idealisation of him as simply a myth.

In Once & Future, which is, as yet, unfinished, we take a somewhat different tack. Our historian protagonist learns, rather abruptly, that his family have long been charged with defending the land from incursions of various avatars from stories, which these days mostly resolves into his grandmother and an excess of weaponry kicking fictional ass. They learn that a group of... neonazi racists, let's be honest about it, want to bring back Arthur as a tool for ethnic cleansing, and it is their job to stop this at all costs, because the stories are Bad News, and Arthur doubly so.

One of the things they both address really well, albeit in different ways, is ideas about diversity and "foreignness" and what that means in the past and the present. For Perilous Times, this means having a black Sir Kay as a viewpoint character (as well as Mariam for our modern view) and getting his internal monologue commentary on modern racial divisions, and his thoughts on how that compared to his own time, his Numidian heritage, and differing conceptualisations about it. It doesn't come up frequently, but getting it from Kay's perspective gives us a valuable source which - in narrative - is an irrefutably knowledgeable one, and when he says "the racism is worse now, as well as different", the narrative has to believe him. He's lived through a lot of British history, so we have to accept that he knows what he's on about, as far as the story goes. It's a nice way to bring in the author's presumed knowledge about historical views on race (given his academic focus is on Arthurian myth, I'm going to assume he's coming from a place of a lot more expertise than I could possibly have here), giving it both in-story authority but also making it feel a natural introduction into the text. 

For Once & Future, it's handled a bit more... on the nose. A group of people try to summon Arthur back. Why? They want him to rid England of the people they consider undesirable and too foreign. However, in the act of doing so, they are killed... because Arthur sees in them Saxon blood, and considers them to be the invaders, the foreigners, the problem. This is all part of a plot by someone with a lot more knowledge about how these things work than her unwitting racist stooges, but it's a very blunt intro into a lot of what the series is about - people want to use Arthur, whether ideologically or, in this case, literally, to reinforce their own notions of the idealised England. But he, someone with his own cultural context, beliefs and prejudices, simply does not conform. Not because he isn't prejudiced, simply that his prejudices are different, based on different concerns, and... well... a lot more enacted with the bloody sword the moment he rocks up.

The Arthur of Perilous Times is used just as much by those around him, and has just as many of his own prejudices to bring to the table. The secret corporate overlords of this near future want him as a convenient rallying point for the racist factions of England, and he is entirely willing to play that part, when his ego is tended to and the right persuasions are put into his ear. He has no issue with Kay as a black man - he is far more bothered by Kay as his elder brother figure and the man who seems to think he knows better than Arthur - but he is absolutely happy to serve as a racist figurehead, or doesn't particularly care that he is doing so, because he cares about other things entirely.

So what unites them here is the twin ideas of Arthur as a) someone whose own notions of what matters, who the enemy is, are very detached from our modern ones but b) someone nonetheless around whom those modern ones are catalysed, and potentially c) someone who can be used to further modern racism, regardless of his own views and context. And so, in both stories, Arthur is the problem, but Arthur is also a maguffin and an unwitting patsy for the plots around him.

And this is, I think, what makes both such interesting stories, because even as they overturn the idea of Arthur as shining knight and saviour, they play into the stories we have, and connect this modern inversion very closely to the originals. In Once & Future, both Merlin and Nimue (or at least, someone from the modern world who has stepped into the role of Nimue) are involved in guiding Arthur to their own ends, and in Perilous Times, it's Nimue who exists as someone who has lived in both past and present, alongside modern powerful men - so both stories link in to Arthur's susceptibility to seduction and thus distraction and persuasion.

In this, they are both perfect examples of retellings - or reimaginings - by taking something there in the original stories, and using it as the fulcrum through which to shift everything else in the tale. It grounds a lot of the wider-ranging changes by keeping them ideologically and thematically always tied back to something original, and means that they do always feel like they are reimagining something we are familiar with, rather than simply using the semblance to do something entirely unconnected.

And, like a lot of fiction, they use the past and the future to talk about the present. By being a perennial figure in British myth, Arthur is an ideal vessel for this sort of concern. His continued links with the very vague notion of "threats to the realm" makes him infinitely repurposeable for examining modern issues, and equally so for examining how he might be misused or unsuited to the problems. That modern Britain is experiencing an increasing wave of xenophobia and insularity makes it an excellent moment to choose to ask whether Arthur is really the person we want to hope for to solve our problems, and also to re-examine ourselves and the lies that make up the ideologies that fuel these hatreds - the very man who could be imagined as wanting what they want, could just as equally turn around and view them as the enemy they consider others to be. So, instead, these are two stories that hold up Arthur as an emblem of the rot, of the way that patriotism, nationalism, and hyperawareness of "threat" to the realm recur. They show us instead that even in his own stories, he wasn't the perfect king. He was flawed, he always has been flawed, and so, the idea that he can save us is just as broken - we are reaching back to an imagined saviour who wasn't what we conceive him to be, to be again the king he never was.

In many ways, these two stories are doing what a lot of our Greek mythology retellings claim, but fail to achieve - genuinely making us look at a figure from the past and re-examine why they're the hero. To do this, they choose to take that step further away in their setting and in their trappings, but that doesn't mean they aren't still thematically tied to them. They achieve a more interesting conclusion by being willing to change more.

This isn't to say they're both great stories - Perilous Times particularly has some issues in terms of pacing, humour and worldbuilding that do not always make it a brilliant read - but they do both contain the kernel of a really interesting idea, and one that bears examining further.

--

References: 

Thomas D. Lee, Perilous Times, [Orbit, 2023]

Kieron Gillen, Once & Future, [Boom! Studios, ongoing]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

 

Microreview [book]: Queen of None by Natania Barron

Natania Barron’s Queen of None explores a highly underutilized, if not outright forgotten figure in Arthuriana, to create a potent story from a new and fresh perspective. 

The basic lines of the major figures of King Arthur’s court are pretty well known. Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon. His wife, Guinevere. Gawain, the Green Knight. Lancelot, who fell in love with the Queen. Galahad, Lance’s son. Bedevere, Arthur’s closest ally  And of course Morgan Le Fay, Arthur’s half-sister. And Mordred, Arthur’s son, fated to bring the fall of Camelot.

It emerges, if you read the early sources, there are other figures in Arthuriana that did not extend into the later takes on Arthur. Not only the Welsh stuff, but it turns out that Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of the History of the Kings of England, stated that Arthur had another, full sister, Anna. This is a character that disappears from later Arthur texts, or gets melded into characters like Morgause. But what would she have been like if she was a character in full flesh and form, coming back to Camelot after being married to King Lot of the distant Orkney islands, but now returned to Arthur’s Court?

Anna’s story is the heart of Queen of None, by Natania Barron.

Natania has a MA in English with an emphasis on Medieval Literature, so tackling Arthuriana is in the very center of her wheelhouse. I had never heard of Anna before this book, and with such scant text on her as her before she gets dropped, combined with other characters, transmorgified, or plain forgotten, the author’s tack on the character is delightfully metatextual: Anna, you see, is given a prophecy by Merlin that she will be utterly forgotten. And when she comes back from the end of nowhere, the Orkney islands, with her dead husband’s crown to lay at Arthur’s feet, her goal is to avoid that erasure from the world and history. 

This character oriented plotting, a hallmark of Barron’s fiction, gets a full Arthurian workout as we get a unique perspective on Camelot (here, Carelon). Gawain here is Anna’s son, for instance, and the author explores how Anna relates to the other women in Arthur’s court, and those who come to court. This is a novel that makes me think of The White Princess TV series, where we see a story that we know from a strongly female oriented perspective, giving new light, new life and new interpretations of various characters and relationships.

One way in which Barron does that that I want to highlight and talk about briefly, is how the author decidedly queers Camelot. The center of this, is Anna’s realization that, as the novel progresses, is that her brother has her re-married to Lance because he wants to keep Lancelot in his Court, not only because of his sword arm, but because he lusts after him as well. Lanceloch (Lancelot), whose vows of chastity has made his own martial bed with Anna a cold one at best, and is thus caught on the horns. There is other queer eye in the novel, but having the Arthur-Anna-Lanceloch relationship firmly queer is a strong and bold choice that helps drive the character relationships and the plot and fleshes out the world.

And such a world. Carelon straddles lines and boundaries. It’s not the gritty, end of Roman Ages Britain Camelot that is popular nowadays, and it is not the fully romanticized view of those times, turning them into faux Medieval times, either. Magic is strange, dangerous and relatively “low” - very much in the sword and sorcery sort of mold. Anna herself has been using magic, even without her knowing, subtly.. As the novel progresses and her desire to escape the prophecy of Merlin, and her opposition to Merlin, she winds up making a choice to learn even more magic, a magic that will eventually change the face of her, Merlin and Carelon. 

And it is that slow burning campaign and the magic that she weaves of Anna’s that is the real story of the novel. For, you see, Anna realizes that to tangle with Merlin, she needs to become someone else, and so she crafts a magic that allows her to slip into another person, a new person, a person who might get close enough to Merlin in order to exact her retribution.

You already know the name, if you’ve read the Arthurian mythos. Anna creates, and inhabits a young woman named Nimue.

The author relishes in Anna/Nimue’s world and her, THEIR, interactions with the characters and giving us a full and rich picture of her life, but the novel has a slow and building tempo that accelerates as Anna’s goals start to become within reach. But as Anna and Nimue continue their slow approach, the boundaries between the two become blurred and just who really is the real person, the real force at court becomes not at all clear, even for Nimue supposedly being Anna’s servant. The use of point of view, switching between Anna’s first person and Nimue’s third person, is a masterful use of language to their stories as they wind up their plot.

Along that way, intersecting stories of the rest of the Court, come in and out. This feels like the inverse of a typical Arthurian novel, where Arthur and Gwen are a center and side characters’ stories intersect tangentially with theirs. Here, the tangents are elements of the Arthurian mythos that are more typically foregrounded. The novel spans years, decades, even in this under-represented pair of perspectives and Barron makes Carelon and it’s cast of characters seem as new and untrodden as when I first saw the banners of the knights of the  Round Table at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Arms and Armor wing and asked what they were. That is no mean feat.

---

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for a unique and amazingly vivid perspective on Arthuriana that rewards readers familiar with the mythos.

+1 for excellent use of language and point of view to immerse the reader into the characters and story.

Penalties: -1 Novel pacing is decidedly draggy in parts. 

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 well worth your time and attention

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Reference: Barron, Natania. The Queen of None [Vernacular Books 2021]