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Book Review: The Squire's Tales
Aug. 23rd, 2022 05:23 pmBarred from more active employment by my shoulder injury (got an X-ray; it’s not broken; I have regained most of my range of motion and some of my muscle strength, though it still hurts), I spent the last four days reading more or less non-stop, and motored through Gerald Morris’s entire ten-book Squire’s Tales series. These are more-or-less straightforward retellings of classic King Arthur stories, braided together into novels, and I’ve read enough retellings now not only to enjoy the stories, but to find an extra level of pleasure in the choices that the author has made in the retelling.
Who is the author’s favorite knight? Gawain of Orkney, and Gerald Morris never loses the chance to remind us that Gawain, not that Johnny-come-lately upstart Lancelot, is the best knight in Camelot.
Which other knights does the author love? Morris loves grumpy seneschal Kai, and feels that Kai’s combat skills have been unfairly denigrated in later sources, and therefore occasionally reminds us that Kai killed TWO of the five kings at the Battle of the Five Kings early in Arthur’s reign. He also loves Parsifal, and in fact is generally drawn to fish out of water stories. There is a second knight, Beaufils, who shares Parsifal’s “raised in the woods by mother and never saw another human being till he left home” backstory, and when Palomides arrives in England from the Holy Land (he’s curious about the knights he fought against in the Crusades), he also brings a bemused outsider’s point of view to the world of knighthood. (It occurs to me that his traveling companion Dinadan, a knight who would really rather be a minstrel, is an outsider in another way.)
Morris also loves Gaheris, which is a bold choice. Most people plume for Gareth as second-best Orkney brother, but Morris can’t get over Gareth’s stupidity in not falling in love with Lynet when they went on a whole entire adventure together, and instead falling for her sister Lyonesse whose only real character trait is “beautiful.” (In general Morris is a substance over style guy, to the point of finding style suspicious for its own sake.)
He also, perhaps surprisingly, loves Lancelot, once Lancelot realizes that he’s made a complete ass of himself by trying to embody the image of the perfect knight - winner of tournaments! courtly lover of the most unattainable lady around! - which neglecting the substance of knighthood, which is using one’s strength to protect the weak.
How does the author feel about courtly love? Stupid! Destructive! Incredibly selfish! Morris is emphatically not on Team OT3. He is on Team What If You Honor-Obsessed Chuckleheads Honored Marriage Vows, Hmmm?
How does the author feel about Mordred? The actual worst. He and his armies wander the countryside killing unarmed peasants, occasionally leaving a few survivors specifically so they can inform said survivors that these evil, marauding knights were sent by King Arthur, because Mordred doesn’t want to merely overthrow his uncle-father, he wants to utterly destroy his reputation too.
(Sidebar: how does the author feel about incest? An astute reader who paid attention to Morris’s family tree a couple of books back could figure out that Morgause and Arthur are half-siblings, but Morris absolutely does not draw attention to this fact when he’s revealing Mordred’s parentage. In fact, Arthur didn’t know himself until the Big Reveal: Morgause didn’t bother to tell him at the time. What makes this weird is that Morris’s Morgan La Fay, here a chaotic neutral enchantress who trains a few other characters in the enchanting arts but is also maybe a little bit too into vengeance, is canonically in love with her half-brother Arthur. Maybe Morris found an unrequited and unconsummated crush a less icky way to get in the contractually required Arthurian levels of incest than doubling down on the Morgause/Arthur thing.)
Morris describes his use of history as “like the meat in stew” - there’s a little thrown in for savor, but for the most part he’s aiming to capture for a young modern-day audience something of the feel of the original stories, full of magic and adventure. For me, at least, he succeeded: one can always quibble (the female characters struck me as very nineties, which is both good and bad), but overall I found them fun, fast-paced, and absorbing, just the right tonic when I needed something to distract me from my external woes.
(Well, okay, “fun” is maybe the wrong word for the last book, but that’s just what happens when you go all the way to the end of the Camelot story.)
And they introduced me to a lot of new Arthurian stories, too! I’d never even heard of Beaufils, for instance. No matter how much Arthuriana you read, there’s always more out there.
Who is the author’s favorite knight? Gawain of Orkney, and Gerald Morris never loses the chance to remind us that Gawain, not that Johnny-come-lately upstart Lancelot, is the best knight in Camelot.
Which other knights does the author love? Morris loves grumpy seneschal Kai, and feels that Kai’s combat skills have been unfairly denigrated in later sources, and therefore occasionally reminds us that Kai killed TWO of the five kings at the Battle of the Five Kings early in Arthur’s reign. He also loves Parsifal, and in fact is generally drawn to fish out of water stories. There is a second knight, Beaufils, who shares Parsifal’s “raised in the woods by mother and never saw another human being till he left home” backstory, and when Palomides arrives in England from the Holy Land (he’s curious about the knights he fought against in the Crusades), he also brings a bemused outsider’s point of view to the world of knighthood. (It occurs to me that his traveling companion Dinadan, a knight who would really rather be a minstrel, is an outsider in another way.)
Morris also loves Gaheris, which is a bold choice. Most people plume for Gareth as second-best Orkney brother, but Morris can’t get over Gareth’s stupidity in not falling in love with Lynet when they went on a whole entire adventure together, and instead falling for her sister Lyonesse whose only real character trait is “beautiful.” (In general Morris is a substance over style guy, to the point of finding style suspicious for its own sake.)
He also, perhaps surprisingly, loves Lancelot, once Lancelot realizes that he’s made a complete ass of himself by trying to embody the image of the perfect knight - winner of tournaments! courtly lover of the most unattainable lady around! - which neglecting the substance of knighthood, which is using one’s strength to protect the weak.
How does the author feel about courtly love? Stupid! Destructive! Incredibly selfish! Morris is emphatically not on Team OT3. He is on Team What If You Honor-Obsessed Chuckleheads Honored Marriage Vows, Hmmm?
How does the author feel about Mordred? The actual worst. He and his armies wander the countryside killing unarmed peasants, occasionally leaving a few survivors specifically so they can inform said survivors that these evil, marauding knights were sent by King Arthur, because Mordred doesn’t want to merely overthrow his uncle-father, he wants to utterly destroy his reputation too.
(Sidebar: how does the author feel about incest? An astute reader who paid attention to Morris’s family tree a couple of books back could figure out that Morgause and Arthur are half-siblings, but Morris absolutely does not draw attention to this fact when he’s revealing Mordred’s parentage. In fact, Arthur didn’t know himself until the Big Reveal: Morgause didn’t bother to tell him at the time. What makes this weird is that Morris’s Morgan La Fay, here a chaotic neutral enchantress who trains a few other characters in the enchanting arts but is also maybe a little bit too into vengeance, is canonically in love with her half-brother Arthur. Maybe Morris found an unrequited and unconsummated crush a less icky way to get in the contractually required Arthurian levels of incest than doubling down on the Morgause/Arthur thing.)
Morris describes his use of history as “like the meat in stew” - there’s a little thrown in for savor, but for the most part he’s aiming to capture for a young modern-day audience something of the feel of the original stories, full of magic and adventure. For me, at least, he succeeded: one can always quibble (the female characters struck me as very nineties, which is both good and bad), but overall I found them fun, fast-paced, and absorbing, just the right tonic when I needed something to distract me from my external woes.
(Well, okay, “fun” is maybe the wrong word for the last book, but that’s just what happens when you go all the way to the end of the Camelot story.)
And they introduced me to a lot of new Arthurian stories, too! I’d never even heard of Beaufils, for instance. No matter how much Arthuriana you read, there’s always more out there.
