There’s just something about King Arthur that stirs the imagination. Arthurian legends have been written and rewritten for centuries. Having recently read the 20th century’s Once and Future King, I was excited to hear Lev Grossman’s take.

In The Magicians, Grossman took elements of Narnia and Harry Potter and combined them in a dark, irreverent, angsty way. He performs a similar move in The Bright Sword, taking 6th Century heroes and rewriting them as petty and frustrated antiheroes. Sometimes this works—there are literal laugh-out-loud moments in this book.

At other times, the rewritten characters were too jarring for their context. This came to a head when Dinadan’s back story was told. It’s revealed that he was a genetic female, born into the wrong body. Rewriting postmodern gender identity arguments back into the round table bent the context of 6th Century England to the breaking point.

Speaking of back stories, this is fundamental to the structure of the book. Chapters following the main plot alternate with chapters describing the history of each of the main characters. While some of the stories are engaging—and I could imagine it working in a television miniseries—it forced the momentum of the book to stutter. I found myself putting the book down repeatedly every time I had to jump back to someone else’s tale.

The overarching narrative of Grossman’s Bright Sword is to portray how the world is progressing, leaving religion behind. The fragmentation left in it’s wake is melancholic and lackluster—whether written into the Arthur narrative or experienced today.

Grossman, Lev. The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur. Viking, 2024. epub.