A.A. Attanasio: The Perilous Order: Warriors of the Round Table (1999)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999
Review number: 370

The third of Attanasio's Arthur (Arthor in these novels) series tells the story of the first few years following the moment at which Merlin proclaimed him king, when he had just pulled the sword from the stone. It is the most difficult time of his reign, when he has to persuade the minor British kings to follow him, an untried teenager whose kinship to Uther is only attested by Merlin, against the Saxon invaders.

To bring about an alliance between these kings is Arthor's aim: this is the perilous order of the title, because of its fragility. But there is another reference in the legend, which Attanasio does not explicitly mention, to the idea that one of the seats at the Round Table is the Siege Perilous, in which to sit means death except to the pure knight destined to sit there.

A large part of the story focuses on the struggle between Merlin and Morgeu the Fey. This is Attanasio's treatment of one of the most powerful themes in the Arthurian legend, the incestuous relationship between Arthur and Morgeu before the former knows who either of them are. In the second book, Morgeu arranged for the child she bore to receive the reborn soul of her father Gorlois. (It is of course the mother Ygrane shared by the half-siblings.) This is to bring about revenge on Merlin, who she believes responsible for the death of Gorlois.

Merlin, knowing what the birth of Mordred will mean to Arthur, steals the soul of the baby, still in the womb. But things go wrong; the soul of Gorlois ends up in Merlin's body, and Merlin has to carry out an astral quest to recover his body.

The magical world is a particularly strong aspect of Attanasio's series, convincingly dovetailed with the mundane one inhabited by most of the characters most of the time. The contrast is heightened by the writing, with the magical beings coming across as more elemental than the humans. The strongest part of the novel is the powerful description of Cei, cast into hell by Morgeu, ending up in a decaying twentieth century inner city, meeting a disillusioned alcoholic Catholic priest.

A.A. Attanasio: Arthor (1995)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton,  1995
Review number: 76


This is the second book in Attanasio's Arthurian series, following on from The Dragon and the Unicorn. It is somewhat different in character than the first book, which was very much involved in the spiritual aspects of the Arthur-myth; now that Arthor has been born, the emphasis is far more on the human characters who will be carrying out the drama.

Arthor has been hidden away from the machinations of his half-sister, Morgeu, until he is old enough to take the throne. In his early teens, he grows up to be a formidable fighting machine devoid of fear or any human emotion, driven by the psychological need to show himself worthy of his foster father, the cheiftain Kyner.

As the time for him to assume the kingship approaches, Merlin goes in search of Arthor. He leaves behind him, to manage the cheiftains gathering at Camelot, my favourite character from the book. The mason Hannes, who helped Merlin build Camelot, extracted a promise from him to grant any one wish. What Hannes asks for is that he would be able to work magic, and Merlin reluctantly grants this wish, telling him that the responsibility will be far greater than he expects. Hannes has no time to get to learn hiow to use his magical abilities, and a lifetime of deferring to aristocratic clients makes it difficult for him to overawe them.

Arthor has been sent by Kyner to return a Saxon named Fen taken hostage by the Celts to his tribe. The Saxon tribe involved is particularly fierce, and Fen doesn't expect either of them to survive (they would consider Fen a coward for being captured rather than forcing his enemies to kill him).

The tribe has also captured a woman named Melania, who has control of a pair of spiritual beings, lamias, who live on the fresh blood of horrifically slaughtered human beings. In rescuing her, Arthor releases one of the lamias who posesses Fen in a rather complex way, forcing him to chase them to have a chance of getting rid of the creature.

I enjoyed the book. Though it lacks the sweep of The Dragon and the Unicorn, it spends much more time on the characters and gains in a different way through that. It's certainly easier to get into; the vast prologue in the earlier book makes very difficult reading.

A.A. Attanasio: The Dragon and the Unicorn (1994)

Edition: New English Library, 1994

Review number: 26

This is an Arthurian tale, the first of a series, telling the story of Merlin up until the birth of Arthur. It is apparent from the first page of the very long prologue that it is not a simple story, as it becomes when told by Mary Stewart, for example. Her approach was to minimise the supernatural as much as possible; Attanasio seeks to maximise it, while having some sort of pseudo-scientific justification for it. (For example, "demons" are alien creatures composed of energy rather than matter.)

Bleys, the teacher of Merlin, is a Chinese sage who finds a unicorn, another creature of energy, and steals its horn to gain immortality by losing his mortal body. He travels from Tibet, where the encounter happened, to Britain, in an attempt to escape the attention of the dragon, the energy-creature which inhabits the earth, and the source of the energy he used to become an immortal. He is also chasing the unicorn, whose help he needs to get free of the earth's magnetic field.

Merlin himself is a demon who is born in human form to defeat the Fury, which is the name Attanasio uses here for Odin, chief of the Norse gods (worshipped by the Saxons invading Britain). This he does by raising up Uther to be king over Britain in place of the corrupt Vortigern; the rest of the story will be pretty familiar to readers of other Arthur-related fantasy novels.

What Attanasio manages to do is to create an Arthur-myth completely different from any other retelling. (It is perhaps closest to that of Nikolai Tolstoy.) It can be rather heavy-going, but it is not surprising that it won awards; worth working to get into. It could definitely do with some trimming, particularly the prologue.