Book Review: To the Chapel Perilous
Mar. 1st, 2022 09:49 amNaomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous is a delightful and extremely odd book. Our heroes are Lienor Blanchmains and Dalyn, correspondents from the Camelot Chronicle and the Northern Pict respectively. (Do they fall in love? Yes. Did I like it? Surprisingly, yes!) Though they come from rival papers, they have both been assigned to cover the Grail quest… which, at the beginning of the book, is just coming to its end, as knight after knight emerges from the Chapel Perilous with grails in their hands.
What makes the book so odd and interesting is that it’s not an Arthurian modern AU. There are modern elements, chiefly the newspapers - Lienor in particular is a hardboiled newsgirl straight out of a 1930s movie and I love her. (So is her boss, Ygraine. I love all their chats.) But Lienor’s photographer is a dwarf , and Dalyn’s is a “Chad” which is referred to as if it’s a mythological creature I ought to know (possibly I should! I am not as up on my Arthuriana as I should be). Between the current slang meaning and the descriptions of the Chad oozing, I ended up envisioning a dudebro who degenerates into a sort of floating jellyfish creature somewhere around the waist, which was VERY entertaining.
Sometimes they travel the old-fashioned way, by horse, which takes weeks; but there’s also the option of the “Low Road,” a magical way that will get you where you’re going much faster. And the knights, of course, are straight out of legend, wearing armor and waving swords and worrying over the crop yields on their demesne.
Okay, Sir Bors is worrying about his crop yields. Sir Lancelot is too busy pining for Guinevere to worry about any such earthly thing. Lienor SUPER ships it, which is endearing, and made me care about Lancelot and Guinevere for probably the first time in my entire life. She loves them both so much! And she loves their love story! And she’s so crushed when the Queen is cross with her because she doesn’t like Lienor’s coverage of Lancelot’s Grail, even though Lienor told the story as well as she could and it all got chewed up by the subs… who are some other kind of unearthly magical creature and may literally chew on stories.
(I sometimes wished for more detailed description of the magical creatures in this world but it does make a more numinous and ominous atmosphere if all you know is that the subs who edit/censor the stories were maybe human once?? But now are… something else.)
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here about the distinction between “what the reporters see” and “what the reporters can actually report given the political slant of their newspapers” and “what the newspapers will then cherrypick from their reports to actually print.” And it was interesting, too, to see Lienor and Dalyn’s attitude toward this change: at the beginning they accept it, not exactly cheerfully but with resignation, as the price of playing the game, and actually seem to regard it as an interesting challenge to see how well they can game the system.
I strongly suspect that there’s a lot of interesting stuff about Arthuriana, too, but as above-mentioned I am not deeply embedded in the Arthurian mythos, so I know a lot of it flew right over my head. (Embarrassing but true: I still get all the G knights confused. Gareth, Galahad, Gaheris… I can tell Gawain apart because of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is not one of the stories Mitchison is remixing here, but at least it means I know which one he is.)![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants wrote an excellent review that deals with this side of the story in more depth.
Overall an excellent, odd, thought-provoking book. Definitely planning to read more Mitchison.
What makes the book so odd and interesting is that it’s not an Arthurian modern AU. There are modern elements, chiefly the newspapers - Lienor in particular is a hardboiled newsgirl straight out of a 1930s movie and I love her. (So is her boss, Ygraine. I love all their chats.) But Lienor’s photographer is a dwarf , and Dalyn’s is a “Chad” which is referred to as if it’s a mythological creature I ought to know (possibly I should! I am not as up on my Arthuriana as I should be). Between the current slang meaning and the descriptions of the Chad oozing, I ended up envisioning a dudebro who degenerates into a sort of floating jellyfish creature somewhere around the waist, which was VERY entertaining.
Sometimes they travel the old-fashioned way, by horse, which takes weeks; but there’s also the option of the “Low Road,” a magical way that will get you where you’re going much faster. And the knights, of course, are straight out of legend, wearing armor and waving swords and worrying over the crop yields on their demesne.
Okay, Sir Bors is worrying about his crop yields. Sir Lancelot is too busy pining for Guinevere to worry about any such earthly thing. Lienor SUPER ships it, which is endearing, and made me care about Lancelot and Guinevere for probably the first time in my entire life. She loves them both so much! And she loves their love story! And she’s so crushed when the Queen is cross with her because she doesn’t like Lienor’s coverage of Lancelot’s Grail, even though Lienor told the story as well as she could and it all got chewed up by the subs… who are some other kind of unearthly magical creature and may literally chew on stories.
(I sometimes wished for more detailed description of the magical creatures in this world but it does make a more numinous and ominous atmosphere if all you know is that the subs who edit/censor the stories were maybe human once?? But now are… something else.)
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here about the distinction between “what the reporters see” and “what the reporters can actually report given the political slant of their newspapers” and “what the newspapers will then cherrypick from their reports to actually print.” And it was interesting, too, to see Lienor and Dalyn’s attitude toward this change: at the beginning they accept it, not exactly cheerfully but with resignation, as the price of playing the game, and actually seem to regard it as an interesting challenge to see how well they can game the system.
I strongly suspect that there’s a lot of interesting stuff about Arthuriana, too, but as above-mentioned I am not deeply embedded in the Arthurian mythos, so I know a lot of it flew right over my head. (Embarrassing but true: I still get all the G knights confused. Gareth, Galahad, Gaheris… I can tell Gawain apart because of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is not one of the stories Mitchison is remixing here, but at least it means I know which one he is.)
skygiants wrote an excellent review that deals with this side of the story in more depth.Overall an excellent, odd, thought-provoking book. Definitely planning to read more Mitchison.
