Lancelot Du Lethe

November 19, 2001
Sir Thomas Malory meets Marion Zimmer Bradley head on in this unfocused retelling of the Arthurian legends. King began his version of the tales in Mad Merlin
(2000); here, amid much gratuitous bloodletting, he finishes the job. As the title indicates, the book adopts the perspective of Lancelot, Camelot's greatest knight. Son to the king of Benwick, he loses parents and kingdom while still a child, and is reared by an "Aunt Brigid" of Avalon. Lancelot's capture by the Four Queens, his rescue of Guinevere from Meleagaunce and other familiar adventures are intermixed with a mishmash of Roman, Celtic and Christian mythology, loosely glued together by a paramysticism reminiscent of Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Malory's and Bradley's works brilliantly exhibit their respective visions. Sadly, King's vision is less clear. In attempting to draw on Malory's heroic chivalry and Bradley's revisionist mysticism, he seeks the best of both worlds and ultimately achieves neither. King's flashes of brilliance, frequently found in his descriptions of natural images, don't compensate for a choppy, movie-influenced style that renders even potentially stirring scenes in laundry-list prose. Furthermore, too much of the book is devoted to a convoluted justification for Lancelot and Guinevere's betrayal of an unsympathetic King Arthur. Lovers of "The Matter of Britain" would do better to turn to King's sources rather than his results. (Dec. 13)FYI:King has won an Origins Award for his gaming fiction.