Angry Planet - King Arthur at the End of the World

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Do you ever feel you’re living in a world where all the good stuff happened to the previous generation? Does it seem like America’s best days are behind it? Were you born into an empire just as it began to collapse?Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/We’d like to tell you about King Arthur.The story of Arthur has been told hundreds of times in everything from song to story to movie. That makes it a pretty big deal when someone can tell the story of the ancient British king with freshness and originality.Lev Grossman, author of the well-known The Magicians series, has done just that with The Bright Sword. While the characters may be familiar in large part, Sword will still keep you guessing all the way through.Angry Planet got a chance to speak with Grossman who shared insights into the book, how it was written and Arthur himself. Take a listen.“These stories about a lost golden age are a way of processing grief…grief, not over an apocalypse, but over massive change…I think that’s what stories like King Arthur are about.”We can’t stop talking about Station 11 for some reasonYes, Excalibur is the best Arthur adaptationWhy the fay are importantRadical social change and the apocalypseBuy The Bright Sword here.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Well, welcome to Angry Planet where we normally talk about nasty things. But this week actually we're going to do something a little bit different. We have Lev Grossman who has written, well, a number of terrific things and including magicians, which got turned into a TV show. But he really grabbed my attention with a new King Arthur book telling of Arthur or after Arthur. It's anyway, it's really fantastic. It's called The Bright Sword. And so I want to say thank you very much for coming on the show. And can I ask you to do something really? Can you try to sum this book up?

I'm absolutely terrible about it. and summing things up, specifically my own work. But if I were to have to try to sum up the Bright Sword, I would say that it's a novel set, it's a novel about King Arthur, but it's set mostly in the world after Arthur dies. And it concerns the few survivors of the age of Arthur, a handful of

of sort of motley knights who are left over after Arthur dies and Camelot Falls and they are tasked with building it back up, finding a new king, putting him on the throne and trying to bring back the age of Arthur. And in doing so, in doing so, they also look back on Arthur's life

and the key events in it, and they come to a new understanding of who he was and how he fell. It's just so fascinating from the very beginning. I mean, the book is, it all makes sense to me. I will let the reader decide for themselves, you know, whether it all. I just, it does go in a lot of different directions. It's not a traditional linear telling of the story at all. I mean, there is, you know, there is a beginning and middle and an end.

I don't mean to say otherwise, but there's just these wonderful interludes where all of a sudden you're with Arthur. And, you know, just a couple of pages before you were mourning his death. Now you're actually with him and living part of his life. And it's just so compelling. And can we talk a little bit actually about Arthur's story? transformation because you have you go with the sword and the stone telling of how he became king which is uh you know um i don't think every version of arthur talks agrees with that one but uh anyway could you talk about who arthur was in your telling and how he got to be king and then

a little bit about what kind of king he was sure this is probably the hardest problem that i felt like I had to nut out when I was writing this book, which took me almost 10 years to write. We think about, we don't know, we will never know whether there was a real historical author. But to the extent that we have theories about who he was, he probably lived in the 6th century, which depending on how fine and granular your knowledge of British history is. So this would be in the interlude, often known as the Dark Ages, between the departure of the Romans. The Romans ran Britain for about three and a half centuries. And then they left in a great big hurry, owing to some goth-related problems that they were having back in Rome.

And then there was a couple centuries where Britain was in complete turmoil. The Romans had left. The landscape was littered with the ruins that they left behind, the broken active. and temples and baths and things like that. And there was a great sort of internal struggle within Britain. Some people were sorry that the Romans left. Some people had sort of become Roman. Others were very Celtic.

They were very British. They were very much the kind of indigenous Iron Age Celts who had been there before the Romans arrived. And in the middle of this comes Arthur arrives. And he is in this strange position of he. himself is on the Roman side. He speaks Latin. He's a Christian. But he's ruling over this realm which he is discovering increasingly is more broken than he even realized. Arthur has on his side that he is utterly brilliant and a very good person. Early on in my working on this book,

I thought it might be clever or funny or interesting to have an Arthur who was a jerk. And I thought this Arthur fellow, he's been getting an easy ride for about a thousand years. I'm going to take him down a peg. Interestingly, it turned out to be the case that when you make Arthur into a jerk, he no longer, he ceases to be Arthur. So Arthur's really defining characteristics is his deep sense of goodness, of a desire to be good, and also that he's really, really good at being king. and yet despite those great things, we know from the start that he's doomed to fall.

So we look really at how Arthur has to try to come to terms with himself, the kind of trauma of his own family. The Arthur story is really a story about a great big, toxic, extended dysfunctional family. And then also, in the broader sense, he's struggling to come to terms with the history of violence in this nation that he's ruling over. This was a, he's in a post-colonial country that is, you know, still trying to figure out who and what it is after having been ruled by the Romans for so long. And the Anglo-Saxons are coming barreling down the pike, so they've got to figure it out as quickly as they can. It's a big challenge for Arthur, and it's no wonder that everything ended so tragically for him.

It took you 10 years to write this, you said. When did you start? Do you remember when it was kind of like the formulation of the idea and you begin kind of pecking away at this thing? Yeah. I mean, I find that novels, they don't have a single origin, much like the French Revolution. they have many, many causes and are over. And one of them simply had to do with my feeling that, well, Arthur is this story that is kind of, it gets reinvented every generation or so. Arthur, the first inklings of Arthur that we have in written history probably begin around the 7th or 8th century.

So we've been telling this story over and over again for something like 1,300 years. it's almost unique in that respect. But it's meaning changes. So, you know, early on, it's the kind of anthem of Welsh resistance against the Anglo-Saxons. It becomes a fable about kingship. With Tennyson, it becomes, I don't know, some Namby, Pambi-Bictorian thing about innocence and experience. T.H. White, it's about World War, the World Wars of the 20th century and the shadow of violence. Then it becomes about feminism and neo-paganism with the Miss of Avalon.

So there's this funny way in which the story of Arthur, while it's, it's, it's out, it's, it's outlines remain fairly constant. It's meaning changes. And it becomes sort of about the world in which it is being told. People often say about science fiction. It's said in the future, but it's really, really about the present. And you could say the same thing about Arthur. It's said in the past, but it's really about, about the present. And as I find of saying, every age gets the Arthur that it deserves.

And I began to wonder, I began to wonder whether we had got our Arthur yet. I grew up on the once-of-future king. Obviously, it's a huge fan of Mr. Vavlon, Mary Stewart, Bernard de Cornwell, the Winter King. And yet I still felt as though, did we have the Arthur that met us at this moment where we are? history and spoke to us where we are. And increasingly I began to feel as though that we didn't, or why hadn't had the Arthur that felt like it spoke, it spoke to me. And I guess I was thinking about Game of Thrones, as most people in the world were, about 10 years ago. And the way in which

it was about this massive succession crisis, it began with the death of the king and followed the, you know, the dissolution of the whole geopolitical situation in Westeros. And I asked myself a question really as a thought experiment. What if the king was King Arthur? What if the story, the story, if you began a story with Arthur's death? Because of course, the sort of history of the Arthurian tradition is in part people looking for blank spaces on that map. One of the great strokes of genius of THY, once a future king,

as he told the story of Arthur's childhood. When I read that as a kid, I didn't realize that he'd made all that stuff up. But no one had ever done that. No one had ever given us Arthur as a little boy who we could feel close to. And we could see him in this innocent moment before he had to take on his great burden. And all that stuff about him being truded by Merlin, he changed into animals. White made all that stuff up. And I realized that I was looking at another blank spot on the map, this moment after Arthur's death,

what happens to that world that he leaves behind? Which is, it's still Arthur's world, but it's, it's become, it's, it's become darkened and that sort of the center has failed to hold. There was something instantly modern about that, about that moment where the, you know, the defining institution that kept everything together had collapsed. It made me think of waiting for Goodell, one of my, which is sort of one of my touchstone. works of literature, even that sense that Arthur might return at any time to set things right. And we don't know. And we're just sitting waiting in this empty world and wondering if he's going to come back. Immediately, it spoke to me. I then, I started to think about who would be left alive? Who was the story about if it's not about Arthur? And then almost immediately, I felt the urge to

abandon the whole project because I realized that almost nobody was still alive at the end at the end of the story after the Battle of Cameland where Arthur is killed. Gawain is dead. Lionel Lamerack. Gallowad is long gone. Tristram's long gone. Lancelot is still alive because you can't kill that bastard, but he's in a month. So essentially retired.

There's almost nobody left. And so I thought, well, that's the end of that. It would seem like a good idea. Then I realized how wonderful to tell the story in a way, all the heroes are gone. The stage has been cleared. And there are a few surviving nights, but they're not the heroes. They're these people around the very edges of the story. They spent their whole lives at the edge of the great Arthurian epic with themselves, hardly getting a line of dialogue the whole way through.

Wouldn't it be amazing? Take this little handful of people who have never been heroes and place them. someone in the center of the stage and say, now you have to become heroes. You have to see whether you can do what needs to be done. And I've always been a fan of stories that retellings that work through minor characters like Rosencrantz and Yildenstern, even like a wide surgassoc by Gene Reese, which retails Jane Eyre. From the point of view of the madwoman in the attic, these wonderful inversions, it gets you so much to go into these characters whose stories have never been told, often for actual reasons. Sir Palomides, they never make Palomites

the hero, because he's not white. But what if you placed him in the center of the story and made him the hero? And that's true of different ways, in different ways for all the characters. It suddenly seemed as though there was, even after 1300 years, there were so many stories it hadn't been told in this world. And suddenly it became very exciting to try to tell them. How did you decide that Betavir would have one hand? Is that actually part of the legend going back? I was just kind of struck by that from the very beginning.

There's a lot of the best stuff in this book is stuff that I didn't make up and never could have thought of. In the very earliest stories, Bedivir is one of the oldest Arthurian heroes. him and Kay and Arthur were sort of it from the very beginning. And in the very early stories, Bettevere is very handsome, and he's only got one hand. No one ever explains what happened to his other hand. But immediately,

he became interested. Well, he's got one hand. He's a disabled person in this world. Can we dig a little bit into what that experience would be like? So I can't take credit for that one. I did make him gay, though. He hadn't been gay. Or if he was gay, nobody was talking about it back in the day.

Yeah. And actually, you make his relationship with Arthur. I mean, it's very close. But, I mean, it's very close on two levels. I mean, Badevere seems to love him, love Arthur, just on a brotherly level. But also, I mean, you certainly, I'm guessing. I mean, there's a romantic love as well, right? Peter Bear has a

He has a passionate love for Arthur. Again, I thought a lot about, I thought a lot about T.H. White, who's one of my sort of formative influences as a writer. We don't know that much about White because there isn't a proper biography of him, but we're pretty sure that he was gay. And yet, when he tells the story of Arthur

and all these nights, he tells it in a very straight, heteronormative way. And I think that was because the world wasn't, ready to hear about knights who were gay, which meant that he had this, there was a whole world of feeling inside this guy, a whole world of experience that he couldn't put on the page because the world wasn't ready to hear it. And so if I was going to write a King Arthur story, one of the things that I was going to do was, well, the world's, it's ready to hear about a knight

who's gay, which obviously there were gay knights in the round table, gay people in the NBA, gay people in the NFL, it's going to be some gay people in the round table. What a wonderful opportunity, which White never had to tell that story. What's your favorite obscure reference point that you used for this novel? That's a good, let's see. That's a good question. I mean, the Arthur, the, the, the, Arthur is actually a very strange story for, if it's two reasons. One is that there's no real canonical telling of Arthur.

People are fond of saying that all Arthurian fiction is fan fiction, and it is probably true. There's no one telling that is definitive, and then you can do sort of variations on it. And the other thing about Arthur is that he's historically, he's sort of a jumble. He ought to be a proper dark ages, you know, a 6th century warlord. And that's what Bernard Cornwell makes him, basically. But really, he's kind of a mix because his, the version of Arthur that most of us know was told by people in the sort of 14th, 15th century, sort of high medieval people who then, who sort of imagined an Arthur who was living back then, but had, you know, played armor and went in tournaments and lived in castles and things like that. He's the kind of mashup of

sort of the 14th century and the 6th century. So this many reference points already kind of being mixed up together. I certainly, it was very important to me to, to have Arthur be have it be a kind of a post-apocalyptic story. Station 11, Emily St. John Mandel, that was a big influence on me for this story. And post-apocalyptic stories, still aware I can't say,

are very much in the kind of popular imagination right now. The Last of Us was something that I spent a lot of time watching and re-watching while I worked on this book. It was one of the things that felt very modern about this story, to think of it as a story that's taking place in the ruins of civilization.

When the Romans ran things in Britain, they were, you know, they were, they had, they had, you know, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had a right. They were very state of the art civilization at that time. And when they left, Britain fell back. It was very, it was like I am legend. They lost all that stuff and they fell back into the Iron Age, even though the ruins

of this advanced civilization were all around them. And I, it was, the, I think one of the key moments for me was when I realized that Arthur was living in a post-A, was he was living in a post-colonial nation. He was living in a nation that had thrown off the oppressors but didn't know any more, any longer who it was. And also that he was on the wrong side of that story, that he was, he was, Camelot was essentially a Roman outpost. And everybody there was still thinking themselves as Roman. and they were sort of what was left over of the colonial apparatus.

We are in the habit these days of rooting for the indigenous people, the people who threw off the oppressors and came into their own that way. Arthur was on the wrong side of that. He inherited the Roman legacy, and that's something that he has to spend a lot of time in the book kind of working through. But he also has this wonderful, your character, who's sort of an interlocutor in the book, protagonist. Sort of a protagonist?

You have to tell me, Sir Collum. Sir Collum is, I think, in creation of yours. And he is from the outer banks of nowhere, the island of Mull. I actually just was in Scotland for vacation. And I, yeah, that's nowhere, as far as I can tell you. and he has both a Christian he's got Christianity in his soul and at the same time he seems to come from a very very um Britonic or you know Celtic sort of a you know place and I just um can you talk a little bit about column in his role I mean he's the last point of enthusiasm for Arthur um and

And it's wonderful. And, you know, he begins just as a, this is a great Arthurian trope is that the handsome young man who rocks up at Camelot wanting to be part of the roundtable. It happens all the time in the stories. And columns one of those. But then, of course, you always want to complicate these things. So he does have this backstory where he comes from the north. And the north, of course, was the, I like to say the Romans rule Britain. They did rule Britain because they really, they were bits of.

it, they could never really take over. And that included pretty much everything north of Hadrian's wall. And they couldn't, they didn't really do the Hebrides, probably because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Really, there was nothing out there that they really needed. And so the Hebrides, the out-is, the out-isles, remained very Gaelic and very pagan. Colum, like many of us, had a lousy time during his childhood. And so in order to piss off those around him, even more, he decided that he was going to be pro-Camelot and pro-the-south, pro-Christianity, which is sort of the nearest thing to kind of punk rock that I think was available to people who were growing up on the people at that time. So, you know, he comes south and he's got a lot of trauma that he's processing.

And he's got a lot of ideals that he wants Arthur and Camelot to fulfill, which Arthur can't do because he is dead. And that, you know, presents enormous challenge to call him. And, of course, as for anybody who begins a novel bearing anything resembling an ideal, he obviously has a lot of complicated things that he has to learn and figure out along the way. And he does. And in many ways, he's also a shadow of Arthur. So Arthur, you know, was an orphan. He grew up more or less abused or at least miserable.

And then, you know, he, it's vaulted to the. the very heights of power. And, you know, ultimately he contains within him the seeds of his own destruction and he will fall. Column could have gone that way as well. And one of the things that I'm trying to do with his story is to kind of restage Arthur's story in a way, in a way. It's an echo of Arthur's story and see if I can't see a column towards a different outcome, different conclusion. And Collin, I think it's probably giving him a little bit away just to say he actually finds some, he may be the character who finds a little bit of happiness. It was so important to me.

So the conventional Arthur story, we all know how the Arthur story ends. The Mortarthur, as we say in Australia, the label says what's in the tin. You know, Arthur's going to die at the end. And that's the end of the story. And it was so important to me and so interesting to me. to see what happens when if you kept the cameras rolling. Arthur dies. We all feel absolutely terrible, and we do.

It's one of the greatest tragedies ever written. And we left mourning the golden age that was, and this great person who fell through no fault of his own, even though he was a very good guy. And that's the end of the story. What if you keep the cameras rolling? How does that change the story and what the story is about? And it becomes about something slightly different,

which is this question of once this sun has gone out and the pillar that held up the world has crumbled, well, for a certain amount of time, you have to spend sitting around mourning everything that was that you've lost one brief shining moment. But then you also have to figure out how to live in this world, which is broken apart. And where everything that you are accustomed to steering by is no longer available to you, how do you make your way through that world, this world without Arthur? And this was a very important question because that's the world that we live in. We live in the world after Arthur. And yet, we have to find a way forward, even though we don't have that star to steer by.

That's the challenge that's facing column. And one of the great things about that story is that it's not entirely, it's not entirely tragic. It's complicated. and it contains threads and elements of hope, which of course, you know, we have. There are some. Surely, I forget what they are at this exact moment, but there are definitely causes.

They're out there. They're out there. This is a trend I see in a lot of fiction right now. Not just post-apocalyptic. Post-apocalyptic stuff is always very popular, but also the sense that you are living in a world where the times are over, and a golden age has passed. And you got there just a little too late.

Why do you think that resonates so much right now? It's such a good question. It's such a good question. And of course, to some extent, that has always been the story that we have always told. It's always the Arthur story is that the golden age has passed. And here we are just born just a little bit too late. but I think that you look back to the sort of founding

parents of the modern fantasy novel, people like Tolkien and Lewis. These were people who are, I think, what they were working through in books like the Narnia books and the Lord of the Rings was the fact that their world that they lived in had utterly changed. These were people who had grown up, had been born into the Victorian era, and they had watched as their world was, I mean, gas lamps were

replaced by electricity. They watched cities getting electrified. Forces were placed by cars. They saw up close the advent of mechanized warfare and the arrival of mass media, radio and television. So these were people who's, the world that they lived in was totally unrecognizable to them by the time they reached adulthood. And as a result, they wrote about a kind of idealized version of the past that they felt was this world that they'd lost. And I actually think that we are living in a similar moment.

Our world has not been transformed in that same way. Our world doesn't really look that different from when I was a kid in the 1970s. But there has been an kind of invisible cataclysm because informationally the world is totally different from what we we grew up with. And I think these stories about a lost golden age are a way of processing grief, of grief over not necessarily an apocalypse, but massive change, which we are still sort of struggling generationally to process and understand. And I think that's what stories like King Arthur are

about, certainly what a book like the Bright Sword is about. It's also about the stories we tell about that idealized past, right? And what becomes of those stories and the life that they kind of have on their own, right? Yes, I would say that if it has been pointed out to me that there is a theme running through my books, not just The Bright Sword, but also the magician's books. And it has to do with stories. on the one hand how compelling and seductive they are, both quenchant from the magicians and also column, were people who grew up on stories

and then are kind of having their nose is rubbed in the reality that it's behind the stories. And so the books become, on some level, almost about the difference between fiction and reality. We see now, certainly in contemporary politics, how incredibly powerful good storytelling is. say what you like about Trump and his people, they're incredible storytellers. And the stories they tell are so compelling that even when we are confronted with evidence

to the contrary, it's very difficult to let go of those stories because they are so powerful. And I suppose people do it on the left and the right. But it's almost, you know, you were watching play out this enormous titanic struggle between different narratives about what's happening in the world. And it sort of, it makes you think about how powerful stories are and how they shape our history in this incredibly important way.

I was just thinking how important negativity seems to be in the way successful stories work. Well, and you mentioned Station 11 as a touchpoint as well, which is odd because it's come up like three times on the show in the past month, and we're not a show that talks about fiction all that often, but it keeps coming back. And that story's like big rejection of cynicism. I think in the face of the post-apocalyptic and living when the good times are over, I think,

is an important piece of it. So I'm just wondering what do you think of that? for me it's not so much about about um uh for for me it's it's about accepting complexity um it's so it demands so much uh it's it's it's easier to talk in absolutes um these are the band guys and these are the good guys um this is this person's fault um not that person's fault um uh it's it's it demands so much less work of us um from us as human beings to think in those absolute terms. And one thing that I think is being forced on the characters in the Bright Sword is complexity. They would like, you know, for example, you know, they want Britain to be for the British, to, you know, to put it that way.

they'd like everybody in Britain to be to be British, to be Brythonic, and everybody else to clear out, please. And as it turns out, they're not going to get that story. Instead, their nation is going to be something that is more complex. And there's a bit where they talk about later on, fairly late in the book, but I don't think it's a spoiler to point out that the Celts had not actually been in Britain for that long. you know, when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, they'd been there probably, they'd been there for maybe a thousand years. And before that, the Celts had shown up and they probably kicked out the Beaker people or whoever was there. So this idea of a simple story where we're born here and everyone else comes from somewhere else, obviously the story of any nation is more complicated than that.

When the Anglo-Saxons arrived, one of the things that they did was they called the Celtic people the Welsh. And the Welsh in Anglo-Saxon was the word for foreigner. So the Anglo-Saxons arrived and said, well, this is our, we're the native, with the indigenous people now. And you guys who happen to be here before us, you're the foreigners now. It's very difficult to process this idea that everybody is to some extent foreign and everybody, to some extent, belongs here. but that's the It's almost like the it's almost like the whole concept

as a construct as opposed to a deep truth how are you know interesting for some reason it's very challenging process as humans and I say this not at all ironically to sit with that complexity and live with it

even though the world is really demanding that we do that All right angry planet listeners we're going to pause there for a break we'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. We are on again with Lev Grossman. Could I ask you a little bit about the role of magic in the book? Because it's a wonderful mix of sharp swords and flaming swords.

I mean, you know, and I've read tellings of Arthur that don't have very much magic at all. no room for it and they're trying somehow to make Arthur just more real than real. But what's the role of magic in the book for you? What makes it important? Why does it have to be there? This was very important for me. I felt as though, you know, the last few decades, we've gotten a lot of very hard-boiled Arthur's.

They've had the magic boiled right out of them. It's a very cool thing to do when Bernard Cornwell, you know, strips away all that stuff from Arthur and puts him back where he historically would have been. It's amazing what he does. It's very powerful, and I would never do it anywhere near as well as he did. But I grew up with a Once and Future King, which is a very magical, very romantic story. And it was important to me to restore the magic. I think Aaron Sorkin, when he readed the book of Camelot, the musical, he also took a

all of the magic. I wanted magic in my Arthur, and I wanted two flavors of magic. One of the things that's so fascinating about Arthur's world in the classic tellings like Mallory, is that you have magic on the one hand, you have the fairies, and you have the enchantresses and all that stuff, and then you have gone. And God is very present in Arthur's world. He's not a distant God. There's no question in anybody's mind whether God exists or not, because God is, he's right

over there. I mean, he's always sticking his oar in and sending miracles and angels and things like that. So you have this wonderfully complex world that has this strand, it has the sort of the warp of magic through it, but then the weft of the divine in it. And these two supernatural elements are trying, again, to find some way to coexist in a way that feels kind of stable and not destructive. So on the one hand, I'm just a huge nerd from magic, and I am just very fond of it in the books that I both read and write. And yet it also comes to stand in in some ways for different worldviews. You know, the world that the Christians promised when they arrived in Britain was, well, this world is going to be relatively crap that you're in right now. But if you play by the rules, the next world is going to be incredible.

You're not going to believe how great it is. Whereas on the other hand, you have the pagans who are not really concerned with the afterlife, and they are very committed to the world that we are in now. And finding sort of joy and pleasure and richness there, the pagans have a thousand gods. There's a god in the hill, there's a god in the tree, there's a god in the river. Christians have the one God who is somewhere you know

beckoning you on to that to that future world which nobody's ever seen so it was fairly important I love magic it looks great feels great it's a lot of fun when the story gets boring you can always stick in some magic and everything gets excited

hopefully also it stands in for something it means something it has to do with this question of how one is to live and to experience life and I don't mean to stick it to the Christians in any sense at all. The only reason that Arthur knows what it is to be good is because he has the Christian God to tell him that. The pagans, they're not that great on the topic of who is good and who's evil, because they are themselves very human gods.

They're very, very fallible. One thing you can say about the Christian God is he's not very fallible. And you run into the great confrontation between the Christian God. and the local gods at this incredible scene. The survivors of Camelot are looking for a quick fix, I think, in some sense, by going on a quest for the spear that was used to poke Christ in the side. And if only they could find the spear, I don't know how that works, honestly, but... It's a powerful Christian relic.

That's how these things work. No, that's great. And you just have this wonderful confrontation of, you know, there's the spear. It's actually sitting there on a table. And there's long genus. I'm going to pronounce his name that way. No idea. And with his spear.

And then the actual angels come down on the one side to fight against a giant. and all these spirits. And it's this wonderful confrontation. I just was wondering, you know, how did that play out in your mind? I mean, was it as much fun to think about as it was to read? It's, you know, on the one hand, it's all, it's, it's very Arthurian. I mean, it's very, Mary Mallory to have, to have fairies and angels in the same book. And somehow, he always stage manages things so that the,

the fairies leave as soon as the angels arrive and they never properly meet each other. Something I was strongly committed to when I began writing this book was that an angel was going to fight a fairy. And we were going to see what that looked like. You know, enough throat clearing. Let's have a little mixed martial arts here. And sometimes you just think of something visually and it's just so compelling that you know that it needs to happen. But I also felt as though this was

it was simply a confrontation on the one hand that would be amazingly dramatic but on the other hand between two irreconcilable worlds and world views that were kind of in the same place and needed to sort of hash

things out once and for all and it's important to me that I handle it I'm not a Christian myself And so it was very important that I handled this in a way that somehow felt respectful and proper to the, for lack of a word, the mythology of the Christian story. And I hope I did my best with it. Mallory plays very fast and loose with it. And I'm pretty sure at one point he trots on Jesus and gives him a whole monologue although he doesn't call him Jesus.

I didn't go that far. I didn't have a giant punch Jesus, although it had crossed my mind to do that. Why was it important to get the fay in the fairy in the book? And I'm wondering if you talk a little bit more about the origins of that in the Arthurian legends. Did you put it at Mallory's feet earlier? Yes, but of course, you can walk it back further. Something that's going on in the Arthur's stories, and one of the things, and it's something that makes the story just incredibly,

vibrant and strong, is that it is a braiding together of, on the one hand, Christian mythology and narrative elements and also pagan ones. This is a story that evolved in Britain at a time when both of those mythologies were very, very present. And so you get these really powerful symbols like the Grail. The Grail is nominally, it's given a Christian gloss and Christian backstory, as the cup that Christ's strength out of the last supper, but it's also, it's, it, it has immediate antecedents as a, as a, as a piece of pagan mythology. And these, and there's many, many examples like that. The whole business of Bedevere returning,

Excalibur to the water at the end of the, at the end of Arthur's story, that's a well-documented pagan ritual that existed in Britain before the Romans ever came. So this braiding together of Christian and pagan, it's something that is in the subtext of Arthur and it gives it this incredibly powerful symbology. And it was just important to me to try to surface some of that subtext, which is one of those things that modern writers like to do and to make it a little bit more explicit it and try to work out in a way that's sort of above the line and try to figure out what it means. You, speaking of the Grail, you turn the Grail quest into this horribly tragic thing with a body count that takes out a significant part of the roundtable just by itself.

What was the Grail Quest really about in your book? And what was the point? It's a marvelous story and it's an amazing story. And I think something that we've often lost in modern retellings of it is how incredibly tragic it was. And again, this is here I'm keeping faith with Mallory and not adding anything. When God shows the not. Knights the Grail. It is, you know, it's just, it's, it's, it's like a, it's like he's given them a taste of heroin. They've seen it and they must seek it. They, they, it's, it's so unbelievably

compelling and beautiful that they have to run out and see it, except for Arthur. Arthur's the only one who says, I'm not doing this guy. It's not going to work out well. And he's right. As Arthur is almost always right. So in Mallory and in most of the early tellings, it's an absolute disaster for the roundtable. You have anywhere from a half to two-thirds of the knights on the table die in the course of this quest. It is a test that God has sent the table, basically, and the table just flunks in the most resounding possible way. Only three knights actually get there at the end, Lancelot, Percival, and Boers. And Percival and Gallowhead, who's the number two and number one seed,

it is immediately determined they are basically too good for this damn dirty world. And they die. They go to heaven. And God says, well, you guys have been done absolutely awfully. Just these few guys have done well. I'm going to take those guys. And I'm also going to take the Grail. And I'm going to leave Britain forever.

And Mallory is very explicit. There are no adventures after the Grail adventure. That is the last one. And once the knights have gone on that adventure, which we often, you know, we tend to think of as the greatest adventure that the that the roundtable ever has they come they slink

back from that adventure and more than half the table is dead they have basically failed God has said we're done with you guys you did so terribly and that's really the beginning of the end for Camelot after they have no more marvels they have no more miracles

there's no more glory for them to seek and that's when they start turning on each other that's when Lanselon and Gwynnevere start getting tangled up and Mordred and aggravane and things really start going downhill. In a way, in a way, that is the end of the Arthur story. It's the quest for the Holy Ground. And everything else is this sordid epilogue, which just ties up whatever dangling strings were left. This is not a radical interpretation.

If you go into the scholarly literature about the quest, this is sort of how people read it. But it's not how we think about it generally. But as novelists, too, I wanted to rub everybody's nose in it, the fact that the question was a noble endeavor, but in the end, a terrible disaster. You mentioned Guinevere. Just one thing I wanted to say sort of quickly was that the misogyny. Where was the misogyny in this? Right, exactly. I mean, all of the tellings I'd seen at read, and, I mean, there's at least a hint of it. But there's, I mean, Guinevere is virtuous, smart. You know, she's actually fleshed out to a certain extent, which Guinevere most certainly is, I mean, usually a stick figure.

And Morgan Le Fay is also, you know, fleshed out and has motivations beyond simply wanting to be evil. So, yeah, I mean, did you feel the misogyny was missed or were you going to put it in a second volume or you know as when you when you take on an authoritarian tail you like to feel that you're innovating or or um

taking it to new places in fact the idea of having strong women of course uh Biss of Avalon is you know where that with truly begins but some things you just they ain't broke it's it's rare that you can steal a white

steal a march on T.H. White his his guinevere was absolutely terrible um really lacking in any character or backbone of any kind. Another resolution I made for myself, in addition to an angel fighting a fairy, was that Gwynnevere was going to be toughest nails and absolutely the smartest person in the kingdom of Britain. It's smarter even, I think, than Arthur.

She, more than anybody, sees what's going on and where things are heading. Because of her place in a patriarchal world, there's less that she can do about it. but I think that by the end she has seized a good amount of agency. And I found that quite satisfying. And I think it's true of Morgan as well. Ed of Nimueh, who is again, one of these stories, Merlin is very badly behaved. Even in Mallory, in our most beloved tellings of the story,

his behavior towards women is just, it's not acceptable. and it was something that I had to go into a bit. And Nimmei is a wonderful character. She does something nobody else does, which is that she beats Merlin at his own game. And she's a real... When you look at who's left after the Battle of Camelon, the fact that Nimue is still there,

it's a real gift because she's truly a fascinating, fascinating person. Do you have a favorite movie or television adaptation of this story? It's a good question There are some recent ones Which I understand are very good I went on a bit of Arthurian fast I didn't watch

The Green Knight I didn't watch the The guy Richie I think you can You were all right in skipping that one I think That's what I hear But I felt if I saw something good

That they did Then I would feel that I couldn't do it Because I'd be taking it from them I hear the Merlin TV shows very good It has lots and lots of fans And so when I think about King Arthur on screen, probably I have to go back to I have to go back to Excalibur, which was a movie that I saw when I was far too young to see a movie. I find that to be true of a lot of people. My parents took me to see it without having a good idea of what was actually going to happen.

And I found it in some ways very confusing, but it's a very good telling of the story and actually does some things that I'd never. that I retrospect I realize we're quite new. But it really engages with the tradition in this powerful way. And it's got Patrick Stewart in it, which I always like to see. I think I like about Excalibur specifically, especially seeing in the theater as a child. I think it must have been the visual of it, the spectacle of it, the wide angle. And these shots that are almost like paintings, especially when he died. and he and Mordred embrace

with the spears is such a wonderful shot. And I feel like I have not seen since that one a big screen adaptation that quite grasps like the mythic quality of it. You know, we've got, you have

some interesting things like the green well, the green knight, but that's like a side, you know, a side story. Very good and also very mythic. But I don't see a lot of great adaptations of it on screen. lately and I'm wondering why you think why you might think that he might be being treated so

so shabbily by Hollywood why are we getting these Guy Ritchie adaptations and there's one really bad one in the 2000s that was like a gritty retelling I mean I think in part it is that

Hollywood was doing something that I experimented with which is which was taking Arthur down a peg and saying well we're going to do a grounded version of Arthur. And as it turns out, Arthur is always, you know, he's slightly more than human. He's a very slightly celestial being. And actually, it turns out,

I think that's quite essential to the Arthur story. And I think it's something that when you're working fast with a lot of money and you're having to pitch producers, I think the idea of making it gritty Arthur, it sounds like a really good idea. and I sounded like a great idea to me when I started out. Fortunately, I had 10 years in which to write this book, and I didn't have to pitch producers on it.

So eventually I found my way to, I think, what it was a more authentic telling of the story. But I understand why people go for the gritty author because it seems like a good idea at the time, like so many things do. And I actually would be remiss if I didn't mention Monty Python the Holy Grail, which is a truly, truly brilliant Arthurian story. Not respectful exactly.

But if you try to write a King Arthur story, if you ever have that experience, you will realize that they have done clever things in that book, in that movie that are just cleverer than anybody else. And they obviously had a very good understanding of medieval history. I used an epigraph from Monty Python in the Bright Sword. just because nobody else was quite as smart in how they thought about that story. Actually, it just exactly what you were saying about Arthur and how he's just towers a little bit above everybody else. You know, how do you know that he's the king?

He's the one who doesn't have any shit on him. Exactly. And at the same time, you know, strange women, you know, lying in ponds, distributing swords, not a great basis for a system of government, ultimately. So true, as it turns out. It's very true. You'd need something more than that, as we all, as Arthur found out. He has to be an ideal for him to work. It's part of the appeal in general.

Even if you're telling a story when that ideal falls short, the ideal exists, right? I think that idea of trying to be better than you are, of trying to, of fighting the headwind of your own human, fallen nature in pursuit of something greater. I think that's quite essential to the Arthur story. And ultimately, it's not a sentimental story. It's a very real story. And I think it's probably what's the heart of the story. And people do it. Even I try to be quite clever and disillusioned in the Brintzor. It's what people are doing.

Because, you know, we do it all the time. It's what we do as people. Well, Lev Grossman, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show to talk to us about this. And I really enjoyed your book very, very much. And you should thank The Washington Post. They gave you such a great review. And I was reading The Washington Post, and I said, oh, my God, I have to buy this book immediately. And so I just enjoyed it very, very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's it's so good to hear that.

And I do thank the Washington Post. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields. A little help from Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. And if you like the show, Angry Planet Pod.com is where you kick us a little extra cash, helps us keep doing the show. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an Ingrid planet. Stay safe until then.