Tidhar, Lavie. By Force Alone. Tor/Tom Doherty Books, 2020. 416 pages, $27.99. ISBN: 9781250753458.
This is a dark fantasy novel that retells the
traditional Arthurian story, from Uther Pendragon’s taking the kingship of
Britain to Arthur’s final battle at Camlann, with incidents and characters
drawn from a wide range of medieval sources. Here you will find new treatments
of the familiar figures at every turn, but unless your tastes run to the grim
and gory, you may have some difficulty digesting this version. The story is set
in a post-Roman Britain more fully conceived than that of most Dark Age
historical and fantasy novels, and the action shifts, not always smoothly,
between the natural and supernatural worlds. Both offer more than a little
gratuitous ugliness in the form of mutilation, murder, cannibalism, general bad
behavior and rather too much excrement.
The McGuffin in this story is the grail—here a
skystone or UFO that fell to earth in Uther’s reign and which somehow became
both the source of gold and radioactive mutations, but that’s just one of many
original takes. The sword in the stone, the Lady in the Lake, the Questing
Beast, the Green Knight, even Glastonbury Well are given new and typically
perverted twists, because this is not a novel that loves the tradition. It is
basically a series of incidents hung on the bare bones of the legend. Britain
and Fairyland coexist uneasily here. Londinium, the setting for much of the early
story, is a mess of Roman remains, crime-ridden slums and mob-ruled trades—a
sordid, cheerless place. The castles of the other world are not much better.
Arthur, when we meet him (and who never develops
much distinctive character) leads a teenage protection racket and a round table
of petty thieves and drug dealers before taking charge of the city and dealing
with rival kings. Merlin, the offspring of a human and some unidentified
unhuman, is a major figure throughout, but one whose powers and motives are
never well-defined or of great consequence. The same is true of other
supernatural creatures—Nimue, Morgause, Morgan, Cath Palug—who interfere with
the mere mortals apparently by whim.
Guinevere is here a leader of a girl gang, Sir Kay
the obligatory gay, Owain and Agravain are thugs, and so on. Lancelot has
perhaps the most developed character through an elaborate back story which has
him serving his master, Joseph of Arimathea, but there is little that
distinguishes even Lancelot as a distinct personality. The dialogue of all of
them, as well as the voice of the narrator, is in the naughtiness mode of
teenage boys. The obscenities are so plentiful that any shock value has been
wrung out of them by chapter two, so thereafter there’s little effect at all.
Tidhar is a cut above the writers of most modern
fantasy in his descriptive abilities and understanding of the historical
background of his tale, and he is a writer of solid prose. He incorporates,
often unobtrusively, allusions not only to obscure medieval material, but also
to Greek and Roman philosophers, Biblical writing and early Christian
apocrypha, and even, if you’re attentive, to T.S. Eliot and Kurt Vonnegut. The
book has its admirers—the back of the jacket is covered in favorable quotes—and
when the writing is good, I tend to become a slow reader. I’m also always
interested in new treatments of the legend, but with By Force Alone, I
found myself rushing to its end.
Dan Nastali
Independent scholar
Kansas City, MO
