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A great book and a novel twist on the Arthurian legend.

The story stretches from Lancelot’s torrid early childhood, through the relative safety of his early teens and a blossoming love that will shape his life, to his role as ‘lord of war’ and his part in both Arthur’s and Briton’s fate. Underlying the whole book is the unchanging devotion of a young boy.

There’s no need to summarise the plot more than that, you can read the book for that. So, what did I think?

• The prose is beautiful.
• The battles and duels are excruciatingly good.
• The ‘training montage’ of his childhood and his relationship with his mentor are very well done. (In particular what Lancelot does for the man at the end of Pelleas’s life.)
• The background, myths, history and omens are woven into the text exceedingly well.
• Similarly, the technical elements of the world are present but don’t dominate.
• There is a huge cast of well-rounded characters to love, hate and mourn.
• There is frustrated love and impotent rage; vengeance, sacrifice and betrayal.
• Some people get their comeuppance, others, maddeningly, do not. Still more remain devious and obtuse throughout.

All in all, I liked it a lot.

A stunning cover.

That said, there are a few minor issues.

The first is the pace. It ranges from blindingly fast in some sections to slow in others. Some ebb and flow is good, but the contrast is occasionally too much.

One reason for this is the prose – as stunning as it is, it can take up too much space e.g. when describing nature. Up to a point, a tree is a tree. Move on.

Also relating to the pace is the sentence structure. On the whole, it is used well and varies considerably. From punchy fragments. To longer sentences that have minimum punctuation and stretch on and on and on but are difficult to follow until the next full stop heaves into sight.

One last gripe – the section just past the halfway mark. It felt as if people were being moved around for the final, relentless push to the last battle. Lancelot’s childhood is a little guilty of this prolonged scene setting, too. I didn’t mind this as much. Why? Because, it seethes with the bubbling emotions between the teenagers on an island which I’m not even going to attempt to spell.

(Shout out to the proofreader, by the way. Keeping track of the spellings of the names in the book cannot have been easy.)

I want to stress, though, that these gripes are minor. Once all the characters have been built and shuffled into place, when Lancelot’s old enemies unite with his new ones, and Guinevere reenters his life, the book builds relentlessly to one inescapable conclusion: ruin.

All in all, Lancelot is dauntingly good.

I’ve already pre-ordered the next in the series and have an eye on the rest of the author’s novels.

Not to mention all the books mentioned in the back matter…

*sigh*

Too many books, too little time.

#thestruggleisreal

A short review of a short book. In short, I liked it.

Here’s a slightly longer version.

Luke Scull achieves a lot in a short space of time. A Ring to Rule Them All contains hard-bitten warriors and moral dilemmas. The latter can be seen as treachery or honour depending on whose side you are. There’s humour to balance out a horrific event. The story has violence. There is a sense of history and depth to the world of the Grim Company, which is impressive in a such a short work. I never got the sense I was being overwhelmed with information or names that have more punctuation in them than letters. And there’s a resolution to the story that sets it up nicely for more.

In short (there’s that word again), I was impressed. I’ll be reading more by this author.

Just look at that cover!

*swoon*

OK. Now the dust has settled from the tsunami of words I hit you with in my last post*, I thought I’d follow up The World’ Shortest Film review with a slightly longer one.

The Witcher.

I haven’t read the books so was coming at this cold.**

Short version: I’m glad I stuck with it.

Long version:

It started badly. I was prepared to quit after the first episode. The dialogue was clunky. There were too many manly grunts. Too many sections of ‘and now I will tell you my back story’. There were jumps in the plot that made no sense. More cliches than you could shake a magic stick at. I had the feeling I was being asked to care about people I knew nothing about. The scenery felt cheap. And the eyes! Seriously, what was going on with all those random eye colours?

The highlight of the episode was a great tweet about the episode by Joe Abercrombie: ‘the incel mage and his garden of boobies’. But otherwise, apart from the fight at the end (and I got the feeling that we were building up to that for almost an hour), I didn’t enjoy it.

I didn’t enjoy episodes 2 or 3, either.

I was encouraged to stick with it, so I did. (I didn’t need much encouragement, to be fair. It’s an affliction of mine, I rarely don’t finish books, either.) And, part-way through episode 4, things seemed to click.

The time lines converged. The people I felt I was being asked to care about in episode one I now cared about. Some of the monsters were suitably horrible. Some of the choices facing the protagonists also. The fight scenes were enjoyable. There were still moments when I found myself thinking: ‘what just happened?’ or ‘why did he/she/it do that?’ or ‘that makes no sense’. But, by then, I could roll with it.

Why the change? Mark Lawrence may explain it better. He made a good point in that The Witcher is almost like a fairy tale and in fairy tales somethings ‘just are’. If you can accept that the reason behind an action is ‘because’, then it makes sense. It took me a while to get there with this series.

As for those Hunting for a New Game of Thrones. This is not the show you’re looking for.

To paraphrase Mark Lawrence again – the shows are different beasts. GoT is essentially dirty politics (Would sir like a side-serving of cynicism to go with his tautology?) with some magic and dragons thrown in to spice it up, The Witcher reverses it. Maybe this will change in future series, but so far one is fantastical, the other fantastic. (At least until the last season, but that’s another post)

I’ll get round to reading the books at some point but for now I’ll stick with the show. And after a slow start, I’m actually looking forwards to seeing where it goes.

 

*That was ironical.**

**If you are one of the people who thinks not having read the books invalidates an opinion of the show, why? Shouldn’t the Netflix series stand on its own? Or do you believe that you can only have an opinion on something if you have read/ watched/ encountered the source material? Not read the James Bond books? Can’t comment on the films. Same applies for The Godfather, Jason Bourne series, Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Trainspotting, Harry Potter, Twilight, LOTR etc etc I’m not looking for a fight, this is a genuine question.

***So was that. 🙂