pagesofjulia

I received a special copy of this book from one of my very best friends. It was originally published the year after I was born – not new, but an important classic. The Mists of Avalon is a ~900 page retelling of the legends of King Arthur, his Companion Knights, including Sir Lancelot, and the Round Table – but from the perspectives of the women involved, including Queen Guinevere (here Gwenhwyfar), Arthur’s mother the Queen Igraine and her sisters, Queen Morgause and Avalon’s Lady of the Lake Viviane… and most centrally, Arthur’s half-sister and lover, Morgaine, who we have also known as Morgan la Fay or Morgaine of the Fairies, and Viviane’s sometime successor as Lady of the Lake. Among others. (Sorry. These name changes are a bit to follow. Lancelot here is Lancelet, etc.)

I generally stay away from books of this length in recent years – I don’t know when I last read a book of 900 pages. It took some adjustment around paid reviews and deadlines, but I’m grateful I was able to find time for this one. It took a little over two weeks, while crocheting a blanket (!) and spending days on an excavator in the woods! But was worth every minute. I enjoyed being able to sink into a story this sprawling, which does call for some in-depth engagement, as we follow generations and lifetimes, a quite convoluted family tree, and shifting allegiances (and names).

My own background with the Arthurian legends is weak, although I definitely loved T.H. White’s The Once and Future King when I was young (high school? earlier still? that one over 600 pages), and I remember an illustrated book of the tales of the knights of the Round Table at some point… I have a loose sense of the romance and idealism of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Camelot, but brought no muddied plotlines to this reading. It seems The Mists of Avalon is understood partly as corrective to Morgaine’s reputation as evil sorceress from previous tellings.

There’s no question that Bradley’s is a big, complicated, engrossing story. Its prologue begins with a brief, italicized reminiscence of Morgaine’s from later in her very long life; these retrospective views will punctuate the book. Then we move (with book one, “Mistress of Magic”) to Igraine, who will be mother to both Morgaine and Arthur, when she is a teenaged bride to the much older and coarse Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. Igraine was raised on Avalon, that magical, misty island where an ancient, pagan, woman-centered religion has long been fostered. She has some priestess training and some of the Sight, but it’s been her duty to be a wife and a mother: her daughter Morgaine is Gorlois’s child, and she will later marry Britain’s High King Uther and have a second child who will become the fabled King Arthur. So we begin with Morgaine’s infancy and before Arthur’s birth. I will begin fast-forwarding here… much has been written about this book, and you don’t need my plot summary.

Morgaine will become a priestess of Avalon, and she will become very powerful indeed, but will have to serve the Goddess in ways that pain her deeply. In four parts – “Mistress of Magic,” “The High Queen,” “The King Stag,” and “The Prisoner in the Oak,” we see her play the role of the maiden, the mother, and the crone. She is fierce in her protection and promotion of the religion in which she is trained. It is central to the story of Arthur’s reign, in this telling, that (under Gwenhwyfar’s influence) he shepherds Britain toward a homogenous Christian faith, away from a diversity of indigenous traditions, including the goddess cult of Avalon, and Morgaine fights that transition mightily. Her story is, I think, a tragedy, and includes strong threads of that classic tragic element, hubris (a term Arthur invokes once).

Bradley has chosen to tell this story mostly in a series of close-third-person perspectives, so that the reader can see the thoughts and feelings of one character and then another (the exception being those italicized first-person moments with an older Morgaine), so that we understand that each is dealing with insecurities and ultimately, mostly, good intentions, which heightens the sense of tragedy: that both Arthur and Morgaine want the best for Britain, that Viviane knows she will hurt her beloved niece Morgaine but feels it necessary for the greater good. It is a very fine literary trick to set up no absolute villains or heroes, but rather to offer us flawed humans who try hard and fail. It is hard, though, not to sympathize with the side that wishes to preserve its tradition as one of several, rather than the one that wants to squash out all but one religion.

There are many plot threads, romances, love affairs, couples that produce children (all-important heirs) and those that don’t. There are many themes, a number of which involve women’s various roles in society: to bear children, to be chaste, to support their mates, to participate in political machinations (or not), to be involved in one religion or another. An important difference between the rites of Avalon and those of Christianity centers on sex, which is either a grievous sin in all contexts except strict (marital) reproduction, or a beautiful celebration of life, the natural world, the God and the Goddess coming together. [Same-sex encounters are not many, but also not absent. No surprise that Avalon and Christianity handle them in different ways.] Morgaine’s tradition is inherently feminist, and at odds with Christianity, in that it holds that women belong to no man and may take lovers as they choose and as serves their worship and their life’s work.

This is a work of fantasy (as in magic and sorcery), and a classic retold, as well as historical fiction, as Arthur’s legend offers a version of how the Great Britain we know today came to be. Bradley’s work offers another take, in which a brave woman undertakes to defend indigenous traditions in a time of political and religious upheaval. The outcome, I think, doesn’t change much, but the way we view the different players involved matters a great deal. It’s also, of course, about human relationships. Morgaine, Arthur, Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet go back to childhood together, and there is a refrain late in the book of recalling the few of them who had once been young together. There’s a pretty strong thread of sympathies between friends, lovers, enemies, and those who move between those categories, even when they wind up killing one another.

Bradley’s storytelling is absorbing. It was easy to fall into a world very different from my own here, in the details of women’s lives in royal castles – dark, monotonous, filled with gossip and spinning and sex that’s not entirely consensual, even for privileged women – and in the rapture of Avalon’s powerful priestesses. The mysticism of that religion, the spell of Goddess-blessed sex, and the strong feelings of characters willing to die for their beliefs are all evocatively told. The romance, intrigue and pathos of that famous love triangle between Arthur, Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet is powerful and discomfiting. Heavier scenes are as well written as the light-hearted and humorous ones; Bradley’s characters’ humanity is always present. It was a hell of a journey, and I’m glad to have made it.

Whew. Thanks, Liz.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: classics retold, fantasy, gender, historical fiction, Liz | Leave a comment »