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‘By Force Alone,’ by Lavie Tidhar book review


Tidhar is playing what-if with the legend: What if these people were just people, rather than long shadows thrown across invented history? What if King Arthur were not High King because he was chosen by destiny so much as that he fought for it and won? What if women were not just abstract objects to possess, but people with their own agency and motive force and career goals? What if the Grail were not a holy Christian relic but something entirely different, alien, with its own compelling and corrupting power?

This kind of retelling offers a wealth of opportunity to examine aspects of the familiar story in a completely new light, and is both exciting and enormously satisfying to read. It reminds me of Katherine Addison’s recently released “Angel of the Crows” in the level of creative insight and detail involved in the reimagination of a well-known narrative. Of particular interest is the way Tidhar flips Arthur and Merlin on the moral axis: His Merlin is manipulative, parasitic, using both Uther and subsequently Arthur to get what he wants, drumming up xenophobic hatred among the locals to support Arthur’s cause, while Arthur is a murderous gang leader who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. Despite the complete break with the original version, their relationship still works: king to trusted magical adviser.

The prose style is half of what makes the book so powerful. Tidhar is both clean and poetic, elegantly sparse but deeply evocative. Every phrase is load-bearing. The profanity serves its purpose. He switches between point-of-view characters and authorial voice seamlessly, using short almost-choppy sentences to give a sense of inevitable forward movement, events lensing into one another. The frequent references to Greek philosophy in the narration both serve to underline the post-Roman intellectual landscape of the time and to create a kind of distance between the reader and the text, which increases that slightly dreamy sense of inexorable direction. This story is going to happen; the terrible ending is going to occur, and we — and the characters — are swept along with it.

The narrative slows down a little and becomes less clear once we approach the Grail, but picks up again afterward, accelerating toward Camlann: inevitable, not just because we know the plot but because by now Merlin and Arthur have fought, schemed, murdered, lied and antagonized their way into a corner. There is no way out but one, and that is the ending of the story.

By Force Alone



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