Book review: The Road to Camlann by Rosemary Sutcliff

The fourteenth book I read in 2017 was the final book of Rosemary Sutcliff's Arthurian trilogy, The Road to Camlann.  Sutcliff picks up the story after the quest for the Grail, with the arrival of Mordred at Arthur's court and ends -- spoiler alert -- with everybody dying.

Like the second act of Into the Woods, The Road to Camlann is all about the second law of thermodynamics.  Nothing gold can stay.  Heroes get old and fail and die, and, Arthurian myth being as fatalist in its way as Greek tragedies, the seeds of those failures and deaths were planted years ago and have taken all this time to grow to maturity.  Long-hidden misdeeds are revealed; dormant feuds are rekindled; and the fellowship of the Round Table which once drew the greatest knights in the realm together will now be splintered apart.  Think of it as King Arthur: Civil War.

Arthur's illegitimate incestuous son/half-nephew Mordred is his downfall.  Coming to Camelot like a snake to the garden, he sets to manipulating everyone around him to expose the most widely-known secret in Britain: that Arthur's queen Guinevere has been cheating on him with his most loyal knight Sir Lancelot for years.

(Sidetrack: Just how loyal is he?  The legend insists he's the truest knight in Christendom, shy of his own illegitimate son Galahad, but I fail to see how anyone can be considered loyal to his superior when he's boinking said superior's wife.  Perhaps Lancelot and Guinevere's affair is meant to be solely emotional?  I have to lean in that direction, if only because every other time in the Arthurian legends someone has a one-night stand, pregnancy is the inevitable result.  Then again, Arthur's one sordid night with Morgan La Fey produced Mordred, but his long marriage to Guinevere fails to yield a single progeny.  Perhaps poor Guinevere is just barren.)

I like a happy ending, so this tale of people's own stupidity and misunderstandings leading to death and ruin doesn't do much for me.

Book review: The Light Beyond the Forest by Rosemary Sutcliff

The thirteenth book I read in 2017 was The Light Beyond the Forest, the middle volume of Rosemary Sutcliff's Arthurian trilogy.  This installment deals with the quest for the Holy Grail, which is undoubtedly the weirdest part of the Arthurian legend. 

In many ways, the Arthur cycle reminds me of episodic television dramas: each season has to "top" the previous one.  Whoever is behind the Grail stories obviously knew of Arthur but wanted to go one better, so the Grail cycle opens with the introduction of a new hero, Galahad, and a new (and better and weirder) sword in a stone, which only he can extract.  The rest of the knights of the Round Table go out on the quest, only to have it demonstrated to each of them respectively that they are not worthy of the quest. 

Galahad, however, encounters, yes, yet another sword which, like Excalibur, comes with an accessory of equal worth, as well as a sinless maiden, Percival's sister.  The emphasis on absolute moral purity is overwhelming in this cycle; the best salvation is clearly to be earned, while lesser men must depend on the grace of God.  Obviously, all the sinless people have to die, as being Too Good for This World, while the lesser folk carry back the tale of what was done. 

Book review: The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith

The twelfth book I read in 2017 was the eighth installment in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series, The Forgotten Affairs of Youth.  In this book, Isabel is called upon to discover the biological father of an adopted woman.  Along the way, she argues with Cat, continues her petty feud with Professor Lettuce, and finally marries Jamie, now that their son is two years old.  As usual with Isabel's investigations, there is much to do about very little.

Book review: The Sword and the Circle by Rosemary Sutcliff

The eleventh book I read in 2017 was the first installment of Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of the legends of King Arthur, The Sword and the Circle.  Until now, my only acquaintance with the Arthurian legends was via T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, which comprises only the first two chapters of this book; all the stories of the knights of the Round Table were unfamiliar to me, except for knowing a handful of them by name.

Carelessly, I had always assumed that the sword Arthur drew from the stone was Excalibur, but, no, Excalibur is another sword gotten from the Lady in the Lake -- and the true magic of Excalibur is in its scabbard, anyway.  Arthur and his knights wander around and do dumb things and get tricked into fighting each other a lot because they're so used to just attacking anything in armor that doesn't offer to yield first thing because toxic masculinity + honor culture.  And most of the women are manipulative temptresses.

Sutcliff is good at retelling the tales in modern English, but the stories themselves are too much like a slasher movie when the whole audience is screaming, "Don't open the door listen to the damsel!" but you know they're going to anyway.

Book review: Gertie's Leap to Greatness by Kate Beasley

The tenth book I read in 2017 was Gertie's Leap to Greatness, a children's book by new author Kate Beasley.  The book has justifiably drawn comparisons to Beverly Cleary's Ramona Quimby, but in the end, I found it disappointing.

Gertie lives in a small town in Alabama with her father's Aunt Rae and, much like Ramona, has big plans for establishing herself as the star of the class when fifth grade begins.  Also like Ramona, however, she finds herself outshined by a new girl who draws the attention of every child in her classroom.

Gertie's new rival is the daughter of a famous Hollywood director who is filming a movie with a famous child star "nearby," although we never see either the father or the young actress who has everyone starstruck.  Mary Sue quickly becomes the most popular girl in fifth grade and turns everyone else against Gertie, most notably in a cruel maneuver whereby the native Californian leads the children to denounce oil drilling as evil when she discovers that Gertie's father works on an offshore oil rig.

Frankly, given that this is a small coastal town, I find it tremendously hard to believe that no one else's family works for the oil company; I guess it's a one-man operation with Gertie's father all alone out there on the rig.  Rather than temper Mary Sue's radical environmentalism, the teacher showers her with praise for starting a Clean Earth Club to which everyone is invited but Gertie.  Stymied at being the most popular, Gertie decides to become the best student in the class, which makes one of her two friends turn against her because she is the smartest kid in class and -- thinks Gertie trying to get good grades is a personal attack, I guess?  Honestly, I'm reaching here for her motivation, and the author seems to feel that Jean, the smart friend, is justified in her anger.

Ultimately Gertie wins the starring role in the class play, her last chance at distinguishing herself, and Mary Sue throws a hissy fit, refuses to play any other part, and insults the teacher to her face for not making her the star.  However, when Gertie steals a bowl of candy from the principal's office, she is punished by having her part in the play taken away and given to Mary Sue, despite Mary Sue's own previous reprehensible behavior which saw her not punished at all.  Only then, on the night of the rehearsal, Mary Sue gets stage fright and, rather than take her part back, Gertie encourages Mary Sue enough to give her the courage to go on stage.

I'm sorry I just spoiled the ending, but ... I don't get what we're supposed to take from this story.  Mary Sue is appalling, but she secretly feels unloved by her workaholic father just like Gertie has been desperate to impress the mother who walked away from her family (and yet still lives in the same town without ever seeing Gertie), so Gertie's titular leap to greatness is her unselfish encouragement of Mary Sue, I guess.  All Gertie's dreams get dumped on, she ends up still an outcast, and I don't believe for a second that Mary Sue is going to amend her ways after the play; she's much more likely to exclude Gertie all the more because she saw Mary Sue vulnerable, which would be fatal to her image.  In my opinion, Gertie's sixth-grade year is going to be even worse than fifth.