Finding the Plot

May 2, 2022May 2, 2022 / Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

Getting Started

When we start reading a story (or watching one), we usually have some idea what it’s about. Chances are we picked it up based on a back-cover blurb or advertisement, or a review. But the blurbs and ads are often “teasers,” aimed at drawing us in and getting us to start the story. They may not really tell us where the plot is headed.

The genre may also give us a clue. If the tale is presented as a mystery, we expect a crime (generally a murder) which will be solved. If it’s a thriller or action epic, we’re prepared for physical challenges and victories. In a romance, we anticipate a successful love affair. But the details are unknown. And in stories without a strong genre identification, we may be less sure about where the story is going.

Consider the James Bond movies. Typically the film opens with an action sequence that may have little to do with the main plot. We can get quite a few minutes into the film before we know what the real plot is. There’s no danger of deterring us from watching; we all know what a James Bond story is like—that’s why we’re there. The action sequence is merely a genre-appropriate appetizer while we wait to get into the main story.

What I’m interested in here is the reader’s developing sense of what the main action or conflict is: what goings-on will make up the main business of the story. It’s not as intangible as the theme or “meaning” of the tale. It’s more concrete than that: the overall shape of the plot.

Sequential Plots

Some stories start out with one kind of plot, morph into another, and then take off in a third direction. This can result in a certain amount of reader whiplash, though an adroit author can carry it off. She may even gain points for taking the reader on a ride through unexpected twists and turns.

Diana Wynne Jones’s The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) is my favorite example. The first segment of this children’s fantasy novel is reminiscent of Dickens: the young Christopher, neglected by his parents, is used by a scheming uncle to bring back forbidden goods from alternate worlds. In the second phase of the book, Christopher is sent to a boarding school, where magic is one of the subjects routinely taught. This section recalls the classic British schoolboy tale, with the addition of magic; it’s a sort of predecessor of (and perhaps inspiration for) Harry Potter, which Jones’s book predates by about twelve years. The third part of the novel develops into a high-fantasy epic conflict. At the end Christopher is selected for the future role of “Chrestomanci,” a Sorcerer Supreme position in the British government.

On first reading, I found it a bit of a swerve to go from the narrative of a difficult childhood to that of a genial school-days story. When this evolved into a magical conflict of epic proportions, I was surprised again. But the story held together through the continuity of the strongly sympathetic character Christopher (and his alternate-universe friend Millie). The shifts in tone seemed natural concomitants of Christopher’s growing up and grappling with more mature problems.

In fact, starting on a small scale and gradually building up to grander events made the grander events more plausible, as in The Lord of the Rings. While the opening section of Christopher Chant wasn’t exactly realistic, the issues were more limited and personal. You had the sense of gradual expansion as the story went along.

C.S. Lewis provides a more pronounced example of this effect in the last novel of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength (1945). The novel starts out with extremely mundane matters of domestic ennui and academic politics. This establishes such a sense of realism and naturalness that the later fantastic developments, involving everything from cosmic entities and biological abominations to Merlin and Atlantis, gain plausibility from being built on so familiar a foundation.

Uncertainty About the Narrator

Another kind of story where it may be hard at first to make out the nature of the plot is the tale with an unreliable narrator.

Jo Walton’s Among Others (winner of the Best Novel Hugo Award in 2012) is a fantasy, but it’s set in the present day and much of the action is mundane. The main character, Morgana, is convinced that her mother is a witch. But for most of the book, I wasn’t entirely sure that was true; there was a distinct possibility that Mori was an unreliable narrator who was imagining the whole thing. Nor was it clear how the threat was going to be addressed. I only really grasped what the narrative arc was around p. 291 out of 302 pages—that is, at the very end.

The uncertainty didn’t impair my enjoyment of the story. Mori is an extremely sympathetic character, especially for those of us who loved F&SF back when those genres were considered odd and fans were regarded as uncool nerds. And the events of the tale are fascinating even when you aren’t quite sure they’re real. But the ambivalence of the plot kept me from forming a clear opinion about the book until the end.

The Nested or Layered Story

Occasionally a story will contain one or more other storylines—not like the explicit play within a play that occurs briefly in Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but more subtly interwoven. This structure can make it hard to detect where the real plot of the overall story is.

In Patti Callahan’s Once Upon a Wardrobe, an Oxford student’s younger brother, who doesn’t have long to live, asks her to find out where the idea of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (then just published) came from. The student, Meg Devonshire, tracks down the author, C.S. Lewis, and is drawn into hearing the story of Lewis’s life from Lewis himself. Sequences describing Lewis’s personal history are thus sandwiched with Meg’s reports to her brother. With the informal reportage building up to a kind of epiphany, one almost doesn’t notice that Meg’s own story is building toward a romance with a fellow student. The intertwined narrative arcs make it hard to guess in advance where the book will end up.

Much more complex is Jo Walton’s 2020 book Or What You Will, described in Wikipedia as a “metafictional fantasy novel.” The first-person narrator is a kind of character archetype in the mind of fantasy author Sylvia Harrison, the basis of characters in many of her stories. (The similarity of the imaginary Harrison’s oeuvre to that of the real-life Walton adds a further recursive layer to the story.) Fragments of Harrison’s personal history are intermixed with chapters about the story Harrison is writing, and also with the (fictional?) narrator’s plan to deliver Harrison from a fatal illness that may make this her last writing. Given these very different types of story, coexisting in the same book, it’s hard to know what kind of resolution we might expect. Yet in the end, as with Callahan’s book, the story works.

The Side Quest That Takes Over

We also see cases where what originally seemed to be a minor side trip or interruption turns out to be the main plot of the whole story. This can be irritating if we’re invested in what we thought was the original tale, and are waiting with mounting impatience for the interlude to conclude so as to get on with it. At some point we need to realize that the apparent side trip or side quest is the point.

I had that reaction when first reading Howl’s Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones, 1986). Near the beginning, the young heroine, Sophie, is magically transformed into an elderly woman. Somehow I didn’t expect that transformation to last long. But in fact Sophie continues as an old woman for almost the entire novel. It took me a while to stop waiting for the transformation to be reversed and to accept it as a central feature of the plot.

Off Armageddon Reef, first book in Safehold series, cover

Sometimes this is a matter of mistaking the main preoccupation of the author. David Weber’s Safehold series starts with the premise that alien invaders, attracted by Earth’s burgeoning technology, have wiped out the human race, with the exception of a secret colony planted on a distant Earthlike planet in hopes of growing back to a level capable of dealing with the invaders. The refugee world Safehold is deliberately kept under a rigid theocracy which suppresses technology, originally to avoid detection by the enemy, but later going far beyond that motive to a permanent proscription. One might expect that the main plotline of the series would involve reacquiring high technology and re-engaging the invaders. But so far the series has progressed through ten bulky books devoted almost entirely to detailing the military and political campaigns of a sort of Protestant Revolution to overthrow the dominant theocracy. I’m still waiting for the lengthy storyline to wrap around back to the plotline I want to see developed.

Similarly, John Ringo’s “Council Wars” series starts with an intriguing premise in which a high-tech near-future civilization on Earth collapses into a kind of pseudo-medieval chaos due to a conflict among the ruling council. In the initial high-tech utopia, people have entertained themselves by (among other things) participating in live-action game-playing, which involved biologically engineering dragons, randomly hiding useful minerals in artificial mountains, and so forth. The opening conflict thus sets up a situation in which the main characters need to operate in something rather like a D&D game or fantasy world, dragons and all, which they’d initially created themselves but no longer control. What baffled me as this story developed (four books so far) was that Ringo was more interested in military-SF preoccupations—what would combat be like using aircraft carriers with dragons instead of aircraft?—rather than riffing on the fantasy tropes themselves.

Defying Narrative Conventions

In some cases, writers seem to be determined to depart from traditional narrative conventions in ways that make the storyline obscure. I’m generally skeptical about such attempted departures—they often seem mannered or artificial—but there’s no denying they sometimes produce interesting results. Or What You Will, cited above, is an example of an odd approach that nonetheless presents an engrossing and satisfying tale.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, cover

This Is How You Lose the Time War, a Hugo-winning 2019 novella, is a peculiar kind of epistolary story that consists of deliberately obscure messages left for each other by two time-traveling agents of opposing empires. It’s not clear at first where the story is going, and the message-writing format deprives the reader of the background information that might normally help establish what’s going on. But Time War eventually develops into a kind of romance, as well as a meditation on war and politics, that’s definitely worth reading.

There Is No Plot

Finally, there’s a class of stories that don’t actually have an overall plot at all. This isn’t necessarily a fault, but can be a virtue: “a feature, not a bug.” In these kinds of stories, our natural tendency to look for a plot is bound to be frustrated.

A fellow writer on Critique Circle, reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, expressed puzzlement about the plot of the book. I responded that it’s like Winnie-the-Pooh: a collection of linked but separate episodes that don’t actually have an overall plot. There is a sort of overall character arc for Christopher Robin, but it’s not really a plot—just as The Wind in the Willows develops a coherent plot only toward the end, within the background created by a set of separate episodes. My fellow writer, who was quite familiar with children’s stories, grasped the point at once from the Pooh analogy.

"There Will Come Soft Rains," illustration — *“There Will Come Soft Rains”*

We also find the occasional short story that’s essentially a mood piece, evoking an emotion without actually depicting a sequence of events. In the science fiction canon, good examples include Arthur C. Clarke’s “History Lesson,” a meditation on the transience of the human species, and Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a moving story depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war. In these short pieces, however, there isn’t enough time to build up much readerly expectation to be frustrated; it quickly becomes clear that the point of the story is to express a mood rather than to tell a tale.

When the plotline of a story doesn’t immediately become clear, or is subverted, the best advice may be simply to roll with it and see what happens. And I give myself that advice occasionally when I’m puzzled with a tale.

Conclusion

This does, however, require us to trust the author. Knowing an author’s work can give me confidence that taking the time to read will be worth it in the end. Hearing that an author or a work is highly regarded by others may, to a lesser degree, give us a similar confidence. If the author is new to us, though, that trust may be harder to come by. Lacking a sense of direction, we may give up on a story prematurely. If a writer isn’t going to meet the reader’s ordinary expectations about where a story is going, they’ll need to find other ways to reassure the reader that the tale is worth the investment of time.

Meet Cute and Meet Hard

June 16, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

Two Ways to Meet

In The Holiday, Kate Winslet’s character Iris comes upon an old man who’s hobbling about his own neighborhood, having forgotten where his house is. (He’s a once-famous movie screenwriter, but she doesn’t know that yet.) When she takes him home, he remarks, “Well, this was some meet-cute.” And, having lampshaded the trope by name, he introduces Iris to one of the classic conventions of romantic comedy: the main characters’ first meeting is awkward, confusing, adorable, or just plain cute.

On the other hand, the romantic couple in adventure stories is often thrown together by the adventure itself. The meeting is not so much cute as conflict-driven: let’s call it a “meet-hard.” The two types of encounters are both unusual—not your average first date—and, though they are opposites in some sense, they have some features in common.

Bumping Into Each Other

The simplest case for the meet-cute, as TV Tropes notes, is for the characters literally to crash into each other by accident—coming around a corner, for instance. This gives us physical contact, the resulting embarrassment, and a way to get the characters interacting at once.

In Notting Hill (1999), Hugh Grant’s bookstore owner chats briefly with Julia Roberts’ movie star when she browses around his bookshop. But he kicks off the relationship when he later collides with her outside and (naturally) spills his drink on her, necessitating a costume change. In the Good Old Summertime, the musical version of the “Shop Around the Corner” story (1949), also has the main characters meet in a collision, causing them to take an instant dislike to each other (a sure sign of impending romance in a rom-com). The embarrassment factor is amplified by the fact that he then accidentally shreds her skirt.

But of course a couple can also “bump into” each other less literally. For my money, the most adorable meet ever may be in the Hollies’ 1966 song “Bus Stop” (hear it here). The singer offers to share his umbrella with a cute girl at the bus stop. They then continue using the umbrella throughout the summer, rain or shine, as a kind of running joke, not to mention a pretext for standing close together. I’d love to see this played out onscreen. P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It To Psmith (1923) has another umbrella scene, but even sillier: Psmith sees an attractive girl stranded by the rain and, in classic insouciant Psmith manner, steals someone else’s umbrella to offer her gallantly.

The recent Netflix rom-com Set It Up (2018) has the main characters deliberately arranging a meet-cute in an elevator as part of a plot to get their bosses to fall for each other. (It fails spectacularly.) In Serendipity (2001), one of my holiday-season favorites, the pair meet fighting over the last pair of black cashmere gloves at a department store.

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (And Back Again)

Resisting the temptation to highlight innumerable other favorite examples, I’ll point out some more exotic cases. The earnest trash-compactor robot in WALL-E (2008) meets the girl robot of his dreams, EVE, when she is dropped nearby to scout the long-defunct Earth for plant growth. He spends the next several sequences frantically dodging the suspicious droid’s laser blasts, before they get more comfortable with each other. Once EVE finds a sample and goes inert, we even see WALL-E gallantly shielding her from the rain with an ancient bumbershoot. There’s just something about umbrellas; most likely it’s that they represent a very mild way of depicting a damsel in distress.

In the best of Heinlein’s juveniles, Have Spacesuit—Will Travel (1958), high-schooler Clifford Russell is trying out a working spacesuit he’s won in a contest when he gets a distress call from someone who’s escaped from hostile aliens in their flying saucer. When he’s captured himself, he meets the caller, Peewee, a genius-level eleven-year-old. Given the characters’ respective ages, there is no actual romance in the usual sense, though they become fast friends—and there’s no question but that they’ll fall for each other when they get old enough. I’d classify this as a meet-cute on an intergalactic scale.

Vehicular breakdown is almost as good a way as umbrellas to create unexpected pairings. In Georgete Heyer’s Arabella (1949), the eponymous Arabella’s carriage breaks down near the country “hunting box” of the (formerly) jaded Robert Beaumaris. A recent romance in Wild Rose Press’s Deerbourne Inn series, Amber Daulton’s Lyrical Embrace (2019), has Erica Timberly’s car break down, in the rain, no less, occasioning her rescue by her rock-group idol, Dylan Haynes. (Unaccountably, he doesn’t offer an umbrella.) Angela Quarles’ steampunk romance Steam Me Up, Rawley (2015) drops the hero into the heroine’s lap in a malfunctioning balloon, this being steampunk.

The Meeting of Adventure

By the time we get to carriage or automobile mishaps (not to mention flying saucers), we’re edging into the territory of the adventure romance. (Which may where I should have classified Have Spacesuit, except that the incident, the setting, and the characters are just so darn cute.) The “meet-hard” in an adventure story puts romantic interests together in exigent circumstances, defining their initial relationship in a different way.

There’s an entire subgenre of adventure romance stories. Goodreads lists (at this writing) 1,344 entries in the category “Popular Adventure Romance Books.” And that’s just the popular ones, apparently. However, that’s not precisely what I’m referring to here. In some cases—The Hunger Games is near the top of Goodreads’ list—the eventual lovers already know each other before the adventure begins. Here, I’m classifying an “adventure romance” as a romance in which the characters meet on or because of the adventure.

I think of the movie Speed (1994) as a classic example. Most of the action takes place on a bus equipped with a bomb that’ll go off if the bus’s speedometer drops below 50 miles per hour. Keanu Reeves’ character Jack Traven gets on the bus because he’s a police officer. His opposite number, Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock), is merely a passenger who ends up driving the bus. They bond over the course of the incident and are ready for a real date by the finale.

The adventure romance may shade over into a rescue romance, in which one character saves the other from some unfortunate fate, minor or major. But this doesn’t have to be the case; it’s just as likely the protagonists will end up cooperating in achieving their goal, becoming what TV Tropes calls a “Battle Couple.”

A Precarious Bond

Speed neatly illustrates (and lampshades) the great strength of the adventure romance: the stress and camaraderie of the adventure brings the couple together as “Fire-Forged Friends.” I’m especially fond of this trope (see The World Around the Corner and Rescue Redux). At the end of Speed, Jack tells Annie he’s heard that relationships “based on intense experiences” don’t work out, although they go ahead anyway. Interestingly, the sequel bears that out; Annie has a new boyfriend—though that seems to have been a function of actor issues (Reeves declined to appear).

A similar issue about the stability of adventure romances comes up in the sequel to National Treasure (2004), in which characters played by Nicholas Cage and Diane Kruger came together over a plot to steal the original Declaration of Independence. Their relationship has fallen apart by the time National Treasure 2 (1007) rolls around, but a new adventure gives them an opportunity to rekindle the spark.

Extraordinary Adventures

Since F&SF specializes in adventure, we see the meet-hard frequently in science fiction or fantasy works. In the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books, A Princess of Mars (1912), John Carter meets Dejah Thoris when she is captured by the green Martians among whom Carter is living, and he becomes her defender.

The principal couple in E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space (first published 1928, revised book ed. 1946), Dick Seaton and Dorothy Vaneman, are already engaged when the story starts. However, when Dorothy is kidnapped and Dick sets out in pursuit accompanied by his fast friend, Martin Crane, it turns out that Dorothy has a lovely fellow captive, Margaret Spencer. Peggy and Martin form their own bond in the course of their epic space trip, and under these stressful conditions, it develops quickly enough that we get to see a double wedding on the planet Osnome.

The boy Shasta in The Horse and His Boy (1954), one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnian chronicles, meets an aristocratic Calormene girl, Aravis, on the road (ch. 2), and they share the adventures from then on. These characters are also too young for an actual romance, but Lewis dryly tells us at the end that “years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”

Another independent heroine, Eilonwy, has grown up living with a formidable witch, which is where Taran the young hero meets her in Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three (1964). She engineers Taran’s escape, which in only the start of five novels’ worth of achievements and escapades, with a marriage at the end (once they’ve grown up). Don’t even look at the Disney movie version of the story, but I do highly recommend Dawn Davidson’s graphic-novel adaptation, only partway through but very promising.

And, for an example that’s had a wider audience, in the Marvel movie Thor (2011) Jane Foster discovers the hero in the desert, where he’s just been dropped by an Einstein-Rosen wormhole. Their adventures continue through two movies, although by the third episode, lamentably, they seem to have broken up.

Only Slightly Extraordinary Adventures

Not all stories of adventure need to have fantastic elements—although by definition an adventure takes us out of ordinary, mundane life. The dangers and thrills of the real world are quite enough.

One of my favorite comedy-romance-adventures is the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone, in which romance novelist Joan Wilder ventures out of her quiet writer’s world to come to the aid of her sister, captured by smugglers in South America. The bus she’s riding in Colombia crashes into a jeep driven by an exotic-bird smuggler, Jack T. Colton. (I will leave to the reader the task of deciding whether this should count as a bump-into-each-other encounter, or a vehicular failure.) Jack and Joan end up as unlikely partners in a progressively (sorry, I can’t avoid it) wilder series of escapades that end in a romance—although this couple, too, will have to wait for a sequel to fully seal the deal.

As noted above, there are lots of romance novels in this category as well. Many of them start with the mundane and develop complications as they go; for example, Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer’s Don’t Look Down (2006), which starts out filming a movie and ends up with (as Goodreads puts it) “trying to find out who’s taking ‘shooting a movie’ much too literally.”

There is a sort of degenerate form of the adventure romance (in the mathematical, not the moral, sense) in which characters that are thrown together in a thriller automatically pair up, whether there’s a reason for it or not. A writer can lean on the “forged in fire” trope without doing the work of showing how the characters are actually drawn together by the excitement. For example, I have on my shelf Gardner F. Fox’s The Hunter Out of Time (1965), which made an impression on me as a kid but which, in retrospect, I have to think of as a potboiler. When the time agent from the future who meets “adventurer” Kevin Cord turns out to be a beautiful girl, one is hardly surprised they end up falling for each other, basically because they’re there.

Some of these examples illustrate the gray area between the meet-cute and the meet-hard. Whether cuteness or crisis predominates depends on the context of the story. For example, the leads in The Wedding Planner (2001) meet when Mary (Jennifer Lopez) gets her high-heeled shoe stuck in a manhole cover and “Eddie” Edison pulls her out of the way of a speeding dumpster. It’s a genuine danger, but it doesn’t lead to a series of adventures; the overall setting is comic (as is the danger). On the other hand, the leads in Ready Player One (2011) meet in a gaming context, but their developing relationship is action-driven.

Where the Meets Meet

The meet-cute and the meet-hard share some features with respect to how they function in a story.

The style of the meeting can help set the tone for the story: comic, adventurous, or something else. This is true even in the mixed cases. Mary’s predicament in The Wedding Planner is slightly silly: she’s pinned down by getting her heel stuck, and the onrushing menace is not a Mack truck but a mundane dumpster. Similarly, Wade and Samantha in Ready Player One meet via action games; that tone is maintained when the action spills over into real life and real danger.

Both meet-cute and meet-hard have the effect of accelerating a relationship. They put the characters in contact with each other in a distinctive and memorable way. The quirkiness of the encounter, something the characters have in common, cuts short the process of “getting to know you” with which ordinary relationships begin. This is especially useful in movies, or short stories, where a limited time is available for a “slow burn” relationship to form. In that respect, these devices are similar to the love-at-first-sight convention (the “stroke of lightning”).

Finally, these non-ordinary meetings reveal something about the characters: how they deal with unusual situations. Are they self-conscious or self-confident? Do they come up with quick solutions to problems (whether or not involving umbrellas)? Do they know how to take action in a crisis? And, not least, do they have a sense of humor? The exceptional nature of the first meeting shows us more about the participants than we’d see if they simply met at work, say, or introduced themselves in a bar.

Either the meet-cute or the meet-hard, then, can kick off a romance with style—though very different types of romance may develop.

The Great American Read

September 16, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

PBS is conducting a poll asking about our favorite novels in connection with a TV mini-series, “The Great American Read.” Through October 17, we can vote each day for one or more of 100 candidates. I haven’t watched the TV shows—but the poll alone is fascinating.

In my area, Fairfax County Public Libraries is running its own variant. They’ve broken down the 100 books and series into brackets, like a tournament. We vote on a series of pairs—which of the two we prefer—and the candidates get whittled gradually down to a climactic final round. They’re about halfway through at the moment.

The Best and the Best-Loved

Looking at somebody else’s “Top Ten” (or Top 100, or generally Top N) list is always interesting. We may be talking about books, classic rock songs, movie heroes and villains, or almost anything: the most common reaction, I suspect, is when we look at some of the entries and ask ourselves, how could that possibly have gotten on the list? Or, conversely, how could they ever have left out this?

Obviously a list of the “twelve tallest buildings” or “five longest rivers” is going to be relatively uncontroversial. But when there’s no quantitative measure that can be applied, the lists are bound to have a subjective element. Reading them stimulates us to ask—what could were the listmakers have been thinking when they made those choices?

With the Great American Read (“TGAR”), the subjective side is even more emphasized, because the list (and the poll) is about “America’s 100 best-loved novels,” not the best novels. The criteria aren’t the same. There are books we respect, but don’t like. My favorite piece of music, as it happens, isn’t what I would judge the greatest piece of music. A more personal appeal is involved.

Someone for Everyone

It’s clear that PBS was at pains to include something for everyone. The books cover a wide range of genres. The list includes plenty of “classics”—the ones we got assigned in high school—and also a lot of popular volumes that couldn’t be considered classics by any stretch of the imagination. (I suspect there are no high-school reading curricula that include Fifty Shades of Grey.)

In other words, we’ve got our “guilty pleasures” right alongside acknowledged masterpieces. I always enjoy the way alphabetical listings produce similarly odd bedfellows: on my bookshelf, Jane Austen rubs shoulders with Isaac Asimov, while Tolkien is bracketed by James Thurber and A.E. van Vogt.

Almost any reader should find something to vote for in the TGAR collection. If you don’t like Tom Sawyer, how about Alice in Wonderland? Not enthused about The Godfather—try The Pilgrim’s Progress? If you’re not in the mood for 1984, maybe you’ll find Anne of Green Gables more congenial.

By the same token, I’m guessing almost no one would accept every book on the list as a favorite. If there’s someone whose personal top ten list includes The Handmaid’s Tale, Atlas Shrugged, and The Chronicles of Narnia, I’d like to meet them.

The F&SF Division

In my own sandbox, the science fiction and fantasy field, the listmakers came up with an interesting cross-section. I was a little surprised to see Asimov’s Foundation series on the list: it’s great stuff, and an SF classic, but I’d have thought it was “inside baseball,” widely known only among card-carrying fans. Another classic, Frank Herbert’s Dune, is probably more widely read. (I notice the entry for Dune is not marked as a series, which is a good thing. While there are quite a few follow-on Dune books, after the original the quality drops off exponentially.)

Other SF picks are more contemporary. We’ve got The Martian, which I’ve mentioned before, and Ready Player One, which was just made into a movie this year—both good choices (by my lights), though not yet perhaps seasoned enough to be classics like the Asimov and Herbert entries.

We’ve got the comedic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the classic Frankenstein, the satirical Sirens of Titan, the young adult Hunger Games, SF horror in Jurassic Park, dystopian tales in both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. We have what you might call prehistorical fiction, The Clan of the Cave Bear, which I’d class as a variety of SF, and time-travel romance in Outlander (also recently come to video). A Dean Koontz novel, Watchers, which I’d never heard of, may represent the SF thriller. Then there’s Atlas Shrugged, which probably belongs in SF given a technological premise, although these days it’s more often thought of as a political tract.

Of course it’s always possible to regret the omissions—Heinlein or Brin or Bujold, for example—but a list of 100 nationwide favorites in all genres is never going to be able to pick up every quality work. Since the TGAR candidates were largely chosen by a random survey of 7200 Americans, it’s easy to see why more widely-read examples are favored, whether or not they represent the highest quality. The focus on American readers also introduces some selection bias, which might account for omitting, say, Arthur C. Clarke.

Over in fantasy, the “high fantasy” epic is well represented by The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), with the children’s division held down by the Narnia tales and Harry Potter. Again, there are some familiar subgenres: satire (Gulliver’s Travels), whimsy or children’s books (Alice, The Little Prince), horror (The Stand), young adult (Twilight).

I was a little surprised to see three entries in what one might call the Christian fantasy column: The Shack, Left Behind, and something called Mind Invaders. When an item turns up that you’ve never heard of, it’s a useful reminder of how far-ranging people’s tastes really are.

An Author’s Range

The list can also spark some interesting reflections on the range of a prolific author. Probably most people would pick Dune as Frank Herbert’s leading entry, and Pride and Prejudice as the most well-loved of Austen’s several great novels. But the only candidate for Dickens on the list, for example, is Great Expectations.

Now, I’m fond of Dickens, but Great Expectations isn’t one of the stories I particularly like. Yet it does seem to come up frequently whenever Dickens is mentioned. (I don’t even hear quite as much about A Tale of Two Cities, which we did read in high school—possibly chosen for school because it’s relatively short; assigning a class one of Dickens’ doorstoppers would have consumed an entire semester’s worth of reading time.) Is Expectations really representative of Dickens’ best? I’d have picked Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend, say, if I’d been in on the original survey. Or David Copperfield, maybe, as the most accessible to a modern reader. But, again, the list suggests there’s a reservoir of interest in Expectations that I just don’t happen to share—a broadening thought.

In a similar way, it may be harder to come up with the most representative Stephen King or Mark Twain novel—there are so many of them. (The listmakers did confine themselves deliberately to one entry per author, which makes sense.) Even within a single author’s oeuvre, it’s intriguing to see which work a majority of readers picked as outstanding.

Incommensurable Goods

After enough of this kind of reflection, we may find ourselves with a certain skepticism about the whole comparison process.

The Fairfax County bracket system, entertaining as it is, only strengthens this impression. There is a sorting algorithm to create a ranking by going down the list and placing each item in turn in relation to those above it. And it’s fun to weigh random pairs of works against each other, even within the particular classifications the libraries used (Classics, Midcentury, Late Century, Contemporary).

But the match-up process yields some odd results. (I understand sports tournament designers also have to take care to ensure good playoffs.) There’s some plausibility in a face-off between Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. But what should we make of pitting Anne of Green Gables against War and Peace? The Great Gatsby against Alice? In some cases the entries hardly seem to be in the same weight class, so to speak. It strikes me as a no-brainer to match The Lord of the Rings against Where the Red Fern Grows, a novel I’ve never heard of.

Even within a given author’s work, one can wonder about how conclusive a comparison actually is. There’s a scale factor that makes some matches clear: Asimov’s sweeping Foundation series seems a more logical “top” candidate than even an excellent short story like “The Last Question” or “Robbie,” just because of its greater scope and size. But it can be hard to decide between stories on the same scale—two great short stories, say, or two very different novels.

At this point I’m reminded of an argument made by philosopher John Finnis in his Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980). Noting that one of the classic objections against utilitarianism (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) is the inability in practice to reduce all possible good and bad things to a uniform measure of “utility,” Finnis takes the position that there are a number of categories of human goods that can’t be reduced to each other. His list of such goods includes life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion (ch. IV.2, pp. 86-90). These goods aren’t interchangeable. They are literally “incommensurable”—they can’t be measured against each other.

It’s possible that some similar principle of incommensurability applies to the books we’ve been discussing. Would I want to give up, say, Pride and Prejudice in favor of The Lord of the Rings, or vice versa? They’re unique achievements, and we realize something quite different from reading each of them. We might be able to create some rather vague order of precedence—for example, by the traditional question of what one book you’d want to have with you if marooned on a desert island. But that’s not the same sort of comparison as equating a dollar with ten dimes.

On the other hand, the fun of weighing (note the measurement analogy) one story against another suggests there’s some common element, or elements, in our enjoyment of a good book. If nothing else, such match-ups can get some entertaining discussions going.

Arthur’s Eternal Triangle

July 2, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 6 Comments

Assessing the Problem

The “Eternal Triangle” gets its name from its reliable omnipresence as a romantic trope. Two men love the same woman, or two women love the same man; and the two may themselves be friends.

There’s endless fuel for drama here. As Wikipedia observes, “The term ‘love triangle’ generally connotes an arrangement unsuitable to one or more of the people involved.” As a result, some kind of resolution seems to be needed. (In the Western tradition, at least, simply setting up a menage à trois isn’t generally regarded as an option.)

Typically, a storyteller resolves the situation by having one “leg” of the triangle win out. It’s easier to do this if the third party, the one left out, is painted as undesirable or disreputable—they deserve to lose. But, on the other hand, the dramatic effect is heightened when the competing persons are each worthy of respect. Thus Aragorn says of Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings: “Few other griefs among the ill chances of this world have more bitterness and shame for a man’s heart than to behold the love of a lady so fair and brave that cannot be returned.” (Return of the King, V.8, “The Houses of Healing)

We’ve touched lightly before on the central role of the Eternal Triangle in the Arthurian tales. One of the reasons we continue to be fascinated with the Arthuriad is the unresolvable romance at its center. Typically we like and admire all three characters—Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot. But there seems to be no way to bring about a happy ending for everybody. This part of the tragedy tends to preoccupy modern audiences more than the political or social tragedy of the fall of Camelot; it’s more personal.

The ways in which various authors have tried to manage the matter thus provides a useful survey of ways to address a romantic triangle generally.

Tragedy

One perfectly viable option is to give up the idea of a happy ending and treat the story as an unresolvable tragedy. This is how the basic Arthurian story works in Malory. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958) follows the same path. White’s sympathy for all three characters is evident. But he doesn’t allow them an easy out. The story concludes as a tragedy—and a very good one. I believe the musical Camelot (1960), based on White, follows a similar course: no romance survives the ending.

The thoroughly weird movie Excalibur (1981) also follows Malory in this respect and accepts the tragic ending. Lancelot dies. Arthur, of course, dies too—or at least sails off to Avalon; as usual, whether Arthur will actually return in some fashion remains a mystery. (In C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra (1943), Arthur is mentioned as residing with other luminaries on the paradisiacal planet Venus, awaiting his return at the Second Coming.) Guinevere joins a nunnery, as per the basic legend. The characters are disposed of, but no romance remains.

There is, however, a curious scene toward the end of Excalibur, at about 1:59, in which Arthur visits Guinevere in her nunnery, just before the final battle. She says she loved him as a king, sometimes as a husband. He says that someday, when he has finished his kingly duty of making a myth that will inspire later generations, he likes to think that he could come back to her, to meet her merely as a man. She nods. The scene hints that the romance might somehow be resolved after their deaths. We’ll consider that idea further below.

But the distinction between Arthur’s roles as king and as husband also illustrates a different approach: one can write the story in such a way that Arthur transcends romance. This seems to have been Charles Williams’ view in his uncompleted essay The Figure of Arthur (published in 1974 in the combined volume Taliessin through Logres; The Region of the Summer Stars; Arthurian Torso). In Williams’ view of the myth, Arthur “was not to love, in that kind, at all” (p. 230). Arthur may be destined purely to serve as a model of the Good King, not to fall in love.

Yet the romancers continue to treat Arthur’s and Guinevere’s marriage as a love story. The triangle is not so easily disposed of.

Saving a Romance

If we do want a genuine romance, one way is to give Lancelot and Guinevere a happy ending, and essentially write off Arthur. We see this in First Knight (1995). Arthur, played by the redoubtable Sean Connery, seems genuinely fond of Guinevere (Julia Ormond). But he’s much older than she is (Connery was 65 at the time, Ormond 30). Lancelot (Richard Gere), much nearer her age, plays his usual role in rescuing Guinevere from various distresses. When Arthur dies, he commends Guinevere to Lancelot’s care. At the conclusion, contrary to the usual storyline, those two seem free to pair off, giving the audience the qualified satisfaction of a fulfilled romance. (Exactly what would have happened to the polity of Camelot in this alternate Arthurian history isn’t discussed.)

Another way is to dodge the issue entirely by simply leaving Lancelot out of the triangle. King Arthur (2004) depicts Arthur and Guinevere as true lovers, what TV Tropes calls a “Battle Couple.” After adventures, heroic last stands, and the arrival of The Cavalry, the movie ends with the wedding of Arthur and Guinevere. Lancelot is in the band of knights, but he doesn’t yet have a crush on Guinevere, or vice versa; so we have the rare case where the Arthur-Guinevere relationship is preserved. It’s a conventional happy ending, but it requires a considerable departure from the basic Arthurian story.

Arthur’s Alternative

A different way to resolve the triangle is to add a fourth party, who can take over the member of the triangle who’s left behind. I’ve seen a couple of cases where the author gives Arthur an alternative love, letting Lancelot and Guinevere fall where they may. Ideally, the alternative is really Arthur’s first love, predating the whole Guinevere-Lancelot thing. Joan Wolf’s The Road to Avalon (1988) has Arthur growing up with a strong and admirable girl named Morgan—a complete rewrite of Morgan le Fay, who usually serves as a villain. Arthur falls in love with this Morgan, and she with him. Things look bright until, just after pledging their troth, they discover that Morgan is actually his half-aunt, too closely related for marriage. Oops.

Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere is a political necessity; it’s not a betrayal, because he cannot marry Morgan. In this version, Guinevere (Gwenhwyfar) is a not-especially-likable nonentity, who finds her love with Bedwyr (or Bedivere), a historically earlier version of Lancelot. While the story cleaves close enough to the myth to prohibit a really happy ending, Arthur does at least find his true love, of sorts, with Morgan.

Mary Jo Putney takes a more romantic tack with her short story Avalon (1998). This time “Morgana” is identified with the Lady of the Lake, the mysterious personage frequently depicted as giving Arthur Excalibur. She dwells in Avalon, a faerie realm set apart from the mundane world. In this story, Arthur sleeps with Morgana at the beginning, long before his political marriage to Guinevere, and returns to her at the end, at his “death.” But he can be healed in Avalon, as some of the older tales suggest, and thus survives to a genuine “happy ever after” with Morgana.

The Fionavar Tapestry

I’ve saved for last this powerful and daunting trilogy (1984-86) by Guy Gavriel Kay, who helped Christopher Tolkien prepare The Silmarillion for publication. Kay’s approach is unique: he takes up the tragedy head-on, but offers a strange kind of hope at the end.

Five college students from our world are transported to another universe, Fionavar, which is said to be the first or most fundamental of all worlds—a little like Roger Zelazny’s Amber. To win the battle against evil in Fionavar, they must summon “The Warrior. Who always dies, and is not allowed to rest” (Summer Tree, p. 123). He fights in many worlds, because of “a great wrong done at the very beginning of his days,” but can only be called at darkest need, by magic, by his secret name. This Warrior is Arthur, and his secret name (rather unexpectedly) is “Childslayer”—based on an episode from Malory (Chapter I.XXVII) that is usually omitted from an Arthurian tale, in which the young Arthur, panicked at discovering that Mordred has been born, orders a whole set of newborns sent off in a ship to their deaths, rather like Herod.

It’s revealed in the second volume, The Wandering Fire, that one of the five students, Jennifer Lowell, is actually a reincarnation of Guinevere. Moreover, it becomes necessary to summon Lancelot, as well, awakened from an enchanted sleep. These three have met and fought the Dark heroically in many worlds, but always suffering in their doomed triangular relationship, as a punishment for their several sins (Arthur here is guilty of an even worse crime than his betrayal by the other two). All three love each other; “making all the angles equal, shaped most perfectly for grief” (Wandering Fire, p. 122). Indeed, theirs is the “[s]addest story of all the long tales told” (Wandering Fire, p. 187).

Kay doesn’t blink the tragedy. It would be an understatement to say that there’s enormous suffering and sorrow in this story. But there is astonishing moral and physical courage and heroism as well—as in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. And Kay stresses (in his idiosyncratic way) the factor of free will in the “weaving” of the universe. Even the fate of Arthur and his companions is not forever foredoomed.

Once the threat to Fionavar has been vanquished, a new way opens. All three of them can leave the worlds forever, together, and fight no more. In the most Tolkien-like moment of the story, the three sail off into eternity, rising along what Tolkien called the Straight Road into the West (The Darkest Road, p. 332).

The scene is so moving that one hardly notices Kay has not actually resolved the romantic triangle at all. Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot are surely worthy of Paradise—but we have no clue as to who ends up with whom. Is the only way to resolve this triangle to transcend it to some conclusion beyond mortal comprehension?

Lancelot’s Alternative?

I want to mention one possibility that I haven’t seen tried in a modern story (although, in the innumerable variations on the Arthuriad, it’s quite possible that there’s an instance out there). Instead of coming up with an alternative for Arthur, one might try presenting an alternative for Lancelot, allowing Arthur and Guinevere to come back together as true lovers—perhaps sadder and wiser after what, in such a plot, would be a temporary breach of faith among the three of them.

The concept can in fact be found in a very old source: Williams mentions a French lay called Lanval (ca. 1170-1215), in which a Lancelot-equivalent, desired by the queen, ends up himself riding off to Avalon with a fairy mistress. But this is a quite different version of the Arthurian story. Is there an opening for a Lancelot-mate in the more canonical range of variations?

There’s Elaine. In Malory, Elaine falls in love with Lancelot and tricks him into sleeping with her thinking she’s Guinevere. Their son is Galahad, and in Malory they actually live together for some time as man and wife. Could something be made of this?

White’s Once and Future King treats Elaine as a weak and helpless character, hardly worthy of Lancelot. But she could easily be amped up to modern standards as a stronger individual. If Guinevere can be a Celtic warrior maid or a Canadian college student, Elaine could certainly be revised to an inventive author’s taste. Her relationship with Lancelot need not be the failed, one-sided romance depicted by White; she could become Lancelot’s real love.

Actually, there’s an interesting hint in The Fionavar Tapestry. A seemingly pointless side story concerns a kind of Luthien-figure, the supernally beautiful elf Leyse of the Swan Mark. She meets Lancelot briefly in the woods and falls in love with him—but of course he’s otherwise occupied. Leyse then herself sails off into the West (The Darkest Road, p. 233). It occurred to me that the name “Leyse” faintly resembles “Elaine”; and in preparing this post, I noticed her description on Wikipedia specifically refers to Elaine—although not necessarily the same Elaine (there are several characters by that name in the Arthuriad). If she too ends up in the West, the Isles of the Blest, or whatever unearthly paradise Kay’s world accommodates—is it conceivable that she provides a quadrilateral solution to the Eternal Triangle?

There always seem to be more possibilities to be explored—which is what makes this myth so fruitful.

Arthurian Variations (Part I)

January 2, 2017May 28, 2017 / Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

A Multitude of Arthurs

A few months ago I mentioned that the tales of King Arthur and his court—the Arthuriad—make up one of the most adaptable mythologies of all. We can take a look at some of these variations (Part I), and follow up by considering what makes these legends so endlessly fascinating and malleable (Part II).

Wikipedia hosts two separate pages that enumerate versions of the Arthuriad: List of works based on Arthurian legends and List of media based on Arthurian legend. Tendrils of the Arthurian tree reach into such distant nooks as “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” which relies centrally on the Grail legend.

And new branches keep sprouting: a new film version is coming out from Warner Bros. in 2017. Even Tolkien worked on one, which I blush to admit I haven’t read: The Fall of Arthur (composed in the 1930s, published 2013). The introduction to my copy of The Mabinogion sums it up: Arthur “is at the centre of British story.” (Tr. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, Everyman’s Library, 1949, 1974, p. xxv.)

History of the Myth

The Arthuriad grew from many sources. A number of originally unconnected legends were gradually brought together under one roof—one reason there’s such a plenitude of material in the legendry. A few brief mentions of Arthur in medieval histories gave rise to tales and poems in England, in France, and in Wales. Writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory assembled these various tales into more or less connected narratives.

The resulting mythology is the central part of the “Matter of Britain”—one of the three subjects that the medievals considered of paramount importance for literary development, along with the “Matter of France” (tales of Charlemagne and his court) and the “Matter of Rome” (the ancient myths that focused on the Trojan War and its ramifications).

It would take a scholarly treatise to deal with this history, not a blog post, even if I were qualified to write such an account. Here I just want to note a few of the more interesting variations I’ve come across.

The High Road and the Low Road

I like to divide treatments of the Arthuriad into “high road” and “low road” versions. On the high road we find the kind of setting that we usually think of in connection with the mythical Round Table: knights in plate mail, ladies in silks and satins, magic from Merlin to the Green Knight round every corner. This is Malory’s version, which reflected the customs and cultural level of Malory’s own time, rather than the historical setting in which Arthur was supposed to be placed.

The low road takes us to adaptations that hew more closely to actual history. Here the writer seeks to make an Arthurian chronicle compatible with what we know of the real fifth or sixth century. Magic and mysticism are minimized, and naturalistic explanations may be given for paranatural features of the original legends, such as the Sword in the Stone. Contemporary retellings generally prefer the low road, grittier and less idealized than the plate-mail versions.

On the High Road

The high-fantasy Arthur is exemplified by Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur), which holds a central place: to quote Charles Williams in The Figure of Arthur (p. 246), “it is Malory’s book which is for English readers the record book of Arthur and of the Grail.” Traditional versions, particularly in the movies, tend to track Malory—at least in part, because no single novel or movie can possibly touch on the vast trove of material in Le Morte d’Arthur.

The trouble is that Malory is hard to read. The language is archaic, and the mode of storytelling is far removed from contemporary styles. Malory spends inordinate amounts of time on things like catalogues of knights at a tournament, and less than we would expect on characters’ thoughts and motivations. We are thus inclined to search for a version more accessible to the modern reader.

A leading candidate is T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. I grew up with White and still think of his as the canonical version. It generated two popular movies—Lerner & Loewe’s musical “Camelot,” and Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone.”

Personally, I’m not pleased with either of those dramatic offspring. The treatment of the main characters in “Camelot”is terrible (at least in the movie version), and “The Sword in the Stone” is Disneyfied in the bad sense, written down and trivialized.

There’s a different problem with the book itself: The Once and Future King is very nearly a spoof of the Arthuriad. White does a very good job with the main characters, but he fills the book with deliberate anachronisms and doesn’t take the actual quests and missions of the knights very seriously. He keeps poking fun at Malory’s text. The spoofery is often justified, and generally good fun. But it does make White’s fanciful “high road” version a secondary rendering—parasitic, in a sense, on the original—and not really a good candidate for a ‘centric’ version. (Not to mention the oddity of Part V, the “Book of Merlyn,” which was not published until after White’s death and conflicts in tone and substance, to my mind, with the main novel.)

John Steinbeck began a treatment that can be found under the title The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. This might have been a candidate for a canonical modern version, if Steinbeck had ever completed it. The book starts as a quasi-translation of Malory, but starts to develop more independently as it goes along. It didn’t get very far, however, before Steinbeck abandoned it—perhaps because he hadn’t decided whether to keep diverging from his source material.

On the screen, the 1995 film “First Knight,” with Sean Connery and Richard Gere, may be the best modern example of the high-road approach. The main plot of the story is the tragic love story of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, though in this iteration Lancelot and Guinevere are left alive and apparently free to marry at Arthur’s death—an example of how those who favor romantic happy endings try to sort out the central romantic triangle. Along with some gritty realism, the film does give us an idealized Camelot, shown more straightforwardly than in most modern adaptations.

On the Low Road

1981’s “Excalibur” may have started the trend toward more realistic versions in the movies. Based purely on Malory, according to Wikipedia, the movie includes more explicit violence and more primitive settings than in “First Knight” or “Camelot.” Nonetheless, “Excalibur” does incorporate the Grail theme and the mystical notion of the Fisher-King.

A more recent example of the low-road movie is “King Arthur.” Here Arthur is a Roman warleader, upholding the last of the fading Roman civilization in Britain, and Guinevere is a Celtic warrior maiden. In this version, Lancelot dies (without real romantic entanglement) and the movie ends with Arthur and Guinevere’s marriage, stopping short of all the difficult tragic material later in the legend.

On the book side, the low road may be represented by Mary Stewart’s quintet that begins with The Crystal Cave. In one classic example of a non-magical explanation for a traditional scene, Merlin leaves the sword Caliburn for many years in a cave where dripping water gradually deposits a limestone crust over the blade, from which Arthur breaks it free when he recovers the sword—a neat nod to Malory’s magical sword in the stone.

More Exotic Variants

It really gets interesting when authors start tugging and pulling at the legend to develop stories that depart more strikingly from the Malory-based legends.

One of my favorites is The Road to Avalon (1988), by Joan Wolf. This novel takes a low-road approach, with almost nothing in the way of magic or the paranormal. Here again Arthur is primarily a warleader, Comes Brittaniarum. But he is also fiercely dedicated to preserving against barbarism the civilized culture represented by Rome—an aspect we shall have occasion to revisit.

Arthur’s task is to unite the British people against the Saxons. (These Saxons are the invading enemy at this time, but they’ve become the defenders against barbarism by the time of King Alfred, and the underdogs by Robin Hood’s period. British history is complicated.)

Wolf’s character treatment is what’s most interesting. Here Morgan (usually “Morgan le Fay,” portrayed as a dangerous fairy or sorceress) is the female lead and Arthur’s real true love. Gwenhwyfar is sympathetic, if a little shallow, but she never did have much more than a dynastic connection with Arthur, which makes her unfaithfulness with Bedwyr (this version’s Lancelot) more palatable. In other words, the traditional romantic triangle is skewed—to the good, in this case.

In Wolf, Mordred, usually the arch-enemy, is a likable boy; Agravaine is the real villain. There’s a Round Table, for the right reason (to make those who sit at it equals, with no “head of the table” precedence). But there are no knights in the plate-mail sense. Religion hardly plays a role, much less the Grail. But the story is very satisfying, and is followed by two sequels, one set in the generation after Arthur and the other taking up the life of Alfred.

There are lots more. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon is a feminist version, again with Morgaine as the heroine. Stephen Lawhead’s five-book Pendragon Cycle starts out in Atlantis—from which we can see how eccentric the plotline has become. The Last Legion (both book and movie) again stress the Roman connection, with the last emperor of Rome traveling to Britain to found the dynasty that will produce Arthur. And of course, in the slapstick comedy category, we have Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The Future King

I’ve seen surprisingly few stories that build on the tradition of Arthur as the “once and future king”—rex quondam rexque futurus. Arthur is supposed to return; but the tales generally leave him ambiguously ensconced in Avalon. In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, we do see a revived Merlin in the present day, and we’re told in Perelandra that Arthur waits on Venus to come back to Earth for a final battle—but we don’t see that in the stories.

Tim Powers’ oddball The Drawing of the Dark has an eccentric return for Arthur—focusing mostly on beer. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry promotes a resolution of the Arthurian tragedy that takes place in another world, but draws in characters from our contemporary world. I remember fondly, for some reason, a 1970 children’s book by Tom McGowen, Sir MacHinery, in which an experimental robot is perceived by a group of present-day Scottish Brownies as an armored knight—the crate is stenciled MACHINERY—where the inventor happens to bear the name Simon Arthur Smith.

But I haven’t run across as many stories about the return of Arthur as one might expect. Some interesting potential there . . .

The Next Step

This spate of examples illustrates the wide range of variations to which the Arthurian legends are susceptible. What makes them so adaptable, and so attractive to storytellers of all kinds? We’ll take those questions up in the next episode.

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