A rudderless nation, lost in uncertainty, searches for its next commander in chief. There’s an uneasy sense that the country’s glory days have passed, and that a monumental turn in history is coming — for good or for ill. How do you find a leader to unite such a fractured, polarized land? Such is the uneasy world of Arthurian England in “The Bright Sword,” the new novel by Lev Grossman.
The tale begins with Collum, a poor orphan who escapes an abusive home and flees to Camelot with nothing but a stolen suit of armor and the dream of serving King Arthur as knight of the Round Table. Just one problem: King Arthur is dead. Only a few ragged remnants of the Round Table are left, and no one has any idea who the next king will be.
The theme of an anxious nation searching for a leader when no one has a clear mandate to govern gives the novel a distinctly modern sense of angst. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could just make every candidate try to pull a sword out of a stone and be done with it? Despite his poor timing, Collum plows forward in his quest to join what’s left of the Round Table. He’s pinned all his hopes to the idea of Camelot, the idea that he can be a hero amongst this glorious brotherhood of legendary knights.
Yet the heroes of this book are largely broken, bitter men. Each knight in the story’s rather large ensemble gets their own tale in the form of a few flashback chapters, offering a tantalizing glimpse at how their past with Arthur shaped t.