By Force Alone
Knights back in the day
RELEASED 5 MARCH 516 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Lavie Tidhar Publisher Head Of Zeus
Populism. Fundamentalism. Climate change. We are cursed to live in interesting times. In such days, it’s all too tempting to look backwards to the certainties of national foundation myths, to days before the cascade effect of years of disappointment kicked in – to when we were better. Except, as Lavie Tidhar’s new take on the legend of King Arthur reminds us, there never were such days.
By Force Alone is set in the earliest years between the end of Roman rule in Britannia and the unifying emergence of Alfred. It’s a lawless time, when petty warlords, including one Uther Pendragon, style themselves kings. In truth, Uther is a chancer and a shagger, which is how he comes to father Arthur, latterly a street kid loosely affiliated to gangsters in venal Londinium.
Arthur grows up in brutish environs. This is a lads’ world of Lock, Stock posturing that, ironically, is far more adroitly realised than anything in Guy
Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword – partly because Tidhar thankfully doesn’t trade on the tired trope of real men respecting the reasons why their frenemies just punched them.
Instead, he offers us postRoman Britannia as a desolate wasteland with space for all kinds of stories, different mythologies, to mutate and grow. The result is a kind of post-truth fantasy landscape where, for instance, the idea of fools’ gold gets wrapped up with aliens, a radioactive no-go area where only the bravest scavengers venture, a dragon sighting and the hunt for the Holy Grail.
At times it’s almost too much, as you find yourself scrambling to work out which stories Tidhar is riffing on – something he’s clearly aware of when he archly offers, in his afterword, his congratulations to those readers who find “a great many and various references scattered throughout the novel”. At other points, the novel comes perilously close to being overwhelmed by a kind of satirical bleakness; without giving too much away, even the pulling-out of the famous sword in the stone is a con.
That it never actually is overwhelmed is partly down to Tidhar employing lighter humour as well. His Lancelot, for example, is a ninja warrior, his Guinevere a killer – the writer is clearly having fun here.
But it’s serious fun. To return to the central figure of Arthur: here is a once and future king who is ruthless in pursuit of power – and even painted as someone rather dull, because he’s so singleminded that he’s barely interested in anything other than his own perceived needs. As for Merlin, he’s no wise wizard, but a fey creature who feeds off Arthur’s power and so has to serve the master he seeks to control at every turn. Really, are these the kinds of people you want to have defining the nation’s story?
Which is perhaps the most apposite question you can ask in an era when so many reactionary forces are looking back to imagined golden ages from the past for inspiration. Tidhar never lands direct political punches – this is, after all, a fantasy book that takes different iterations of the Arthurian myths down the years as its starting points – but the very tone and shape of the book are a reminder that we need to treat national myths with caution.
This is maybe something that’s easier to see when, like Tidhar, you’re an émigré from a nation – Israel in his case – founded too recently for the violence of that process to have been lost to time. Whatever Tidhar’s thoughts on that idea, this is a novel that demands your attention and proves that sometimes when a writer has the audacity to revisit stories that others would avoid for fear of over-familiarity, they can steal the power of the oldest tales. Jonathan Wright
Uther Pendragon is a chancer and a shagger