[music]

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. Lev Grossman, The New York Times bestselling author of the series The Magicians, has just released a new book. It's called The Bright Sword, and it's his latest book that adapts the legend of King Arthur. As I read this novel, I was struck by the different ways Grossman invites us to rethink the significance of being legendary.

Our main character, Collum, is traveling from the small isle of Mull, bound on a journey to live out legendary dreams as a knight in Camelot, but Collum arrives to find Camelot in shambles. King Arthur is dead. Opposing forces approach. Only a handful of knights have survived, most of them secondary players. Collum joins them as they search for a way to keep Camelot alive. Along the way, he grapples with how to find hope when the legends you rely on no longer exist, if, in fact, they ever did.

A New York Times review says, we didn't need to know what happened after Arthur died, but Arthuriana is far richer for the fact that Grossman, like countless storytellers before him, couldn't let the dream of Camelot go. Here with us to discuss The Bright Sword is author Lev Grossman. Lev, hi. Welcome to All Of It.

Lev Grossman: Thank you. Thank you, it's good to be here.

Kousha Navidar: It's great to have you. I was reading this book. On the very first page of your book, there is a letter you wrote to the reader, and the first sentence of that book is you saying, "This book took me 10 years to write." Now, with a story that's around a thousand years old, I'm not sure if 10 years is a lot of time or astoundingly little. What do you think?

Lev Grossman: You could look at it either way. It's charitable of you to say. Yes, it is just an eye blink in the great history of King Arthur, but it did take me quite a long time. I think part of that had to do with-- There's quite a lot of research that goes into telling a story like this, which has to be grounded in quite a lot of historical detail. Then it was also a great challenge for me just to, sort of, throw my arms around this, as you say, thousand-year-old tradition, and think about what it means, and especially think about what it means now that we're telling this world very different from the world in which the story of Arthur was first told. The story of Arthur has this funny property that it kind of takes on different meanings in different historical moments, and I was sort of on a bit of a quest to figure out what it means now.

Kousha Navidar: How did you go about that? One part that I think is interesting. I read in an interview with Vulture, you talked about loving the book The Once and Future King by T.H. White, kind of, as you mentioned, written in a different time. I imagine you were a pretty big King Arthur fan before you read this book. What did you think needed to be updated about it?

Lev Grossman: I was always a huge King Arthur fan, and I'm such a big fan still of The Once and Future King. One of the things that T.H. White did that was so brilliant was to find new blank space on the map. He told the story of Arthur's childhood, which nobody had ever done before, and it added a whole new dimension to the story. I began to find myself getting interested in what happened after Arthur's death and the kind of darkened, broken world that he left behind. What happened to those few knights who survived, and how did they cope living in this world in which the light had gone out and the worst had happened?

Kousha Navidar: How did you choose which knights to bring to the fore in this case?

Lev Grossman: Well, when I thought about writing in this world after Arthur's death, the first thing I realized was that almost everybody died with him, and this caused me to panic because there was nobody left to tell the story about. I began to realize what a wonderful opportunity it was, because with all the traditional heroes gone, Galahad is gone, Gawain is gone, Lancelot not dead, but retired, you had this opportunity to bring to the center of the stage knights who have always been at the edge, who have always been secondary characters, marginal characters who've never really had their stories told. They're not used to being the heroes, but now they have no choice. They must become heroes, and there was something very appealing to me about that.

Kousha Navidar: Was there one character in particular that you're thinking of? Because there's so many of these knights, especially that are secondary. I really hadn't heard of them. There's Sir Bedivere, who I had heard of before, but then there's also Sir Palomides, who traveled from Baghdad to Britain. There's Sir Dagonet, who's the fool, among others. Is there one character in particular that you're especially proud or were excited about adapting?

Lev Grossman: Well, I do love Sir Palomides quite a lot. He is always there around the edges of the story. He is a Muslim. He is in Britain. No one has ever really explained what he was doing in Britain at Arthur's time or what he was looking for. He's generally used as kind of comic relief. He's in love with Iseult, which Tristram is also in love with Iseult. Iseult doesn't have any time for him, and he's always getting beaten up.

It's played for laughs in the old versions, but of course, you can tell that there's this very intensely rich and moving story that this man is going through that's just waiting to be told. I couldn't resist telling it, and because he comes from Baghdad, which at that time, in the early Middle Ages, was a civilization far more advanced than Europe. They were working on calculus and surgery and astronomy on a level that no one in Europe was doing. When Palomides turns up at Camelot, everyone there looks like a barbarian to him. He knows so much more than they do, and yet, once he gets there, he can't leave because he conceives this incredible passion for a woman there.

Kousha Navidar: You get to the heart of it, I think I would say, like with each of these characters, there's this humanity that you really pull. For instance, you're talking about Palomides. It's love that keeps him in a foreign land in a kind of way. How did you think about where that humanity would be for each of the characters? Did you start out saying, okay, I'm going to start out with what I know of them, and then fill in the blanks, or was that kind of already there and it was just for you to work around the edges, so to speak?

Lev Grossman: It's incredible after more than a thousand years, how many stories are left to be told about Arthur's world. I mentioned T.H. White before. Something that always struck me was that White, to the extent that we know, there's not really a proper biography of him, but we're fairly sure that he was gay or his sexuality was complex in some way. Yet everybody in the stories that he tells are very straight. It's all very heteronormative.

There was a whole realm of his life and his experience, his feelings that he couldn't write about, and I realized that I could, that I could tell stories about sexuality and gender in this world, just for example, that hadn't been told before. You realize that there are probably people on the Round Table who have feelings they can't express, the aspects of their identity they're made to feel ashamed of. There was so much human story to tell, and once I started looking for it, it just was everywhere.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wow. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword. It's out now. It's Lev Grossman's adaptation of the legends of King Arthur.

Lev, I want to go to another character, kind of the character that we see this whole story through, Collum, the hopeful, young, aspiring knight who's traveling to Camelot. I have to say, I was so excited during the book when you introduced Collum as being from the isle of Mull. Collum calls Mull a "cold, humpy place of treeless green hills." Easter egg, my wife has family from Mull, and I've been lucky to visit. It is humpy. It is also beautiful. I was wondering, why'd you choose this island as Collum's starting spot? Where do we meet him in his life when the story starts?

Lev Grossman: There's references throughout the legends about this place called the Out Isles, which we more or less assume is the Hebrides. I love the idea of somebody coming from the very edge of the world, a total hick, coming and wanting to join the Round Table. Then, of course, Mull also, it's in the north, and Camelot is very strongly identified with the south, with the Romans who occupied Britain for so long.

Camelot is not very popular in the north of Britain, and for Collum to want to join the Round Table, to be a Christian when everyone around him is Pagan, it's almost a very subversive idea. It's almost like a sort of punk rock idea. He's going to rebel against everybody around him and do this thing that everyone disapproves of. I felt it was an interesting angle from which to come into the Round Table. Of course, we, as the reader, come with him because we're outsiders to the Round Table, too, and we're kind of going on that same journey.

Kousha Navidar: The very first chapter, we meet Collum in a fight to the death, especially death by combat in this story feels like a stark and gruesome fact in life in your version of Camelot. Do you think that's a departure from older tellings of the Camelot we're used to, or has that always been there?

Lev Grossman: Well, it's always been there. If you read Malory or the older texts, there's quite a body count getting wrapped up. I think it's rare that we go inside the mind of somebody who might be killing another person for the first time. Someone like Collum, who is a knight in training, has trained since he was eight years old to wield the sword and to fight, but only at this moment does it really become apparent to him what it is that he's been learning to do once he's already done it. He finds it very hard to process when he has that experience. It's a story again that maybe it's not that it's never been told, but maybe it hasn't been told enough.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Do you know where you wanted Collum to end from the start, before you started writing, or did his character surprise you in any way?

Lev Grossman: When you're writing a novel, some of the stories in it you'll tell because you know where they're going, and then others, it's because you want to know where they're going to go. In Collum, it was the latter case. Collum is a little bit, in some ways, a shadow of King Arthur. There are aspects of his life which are similar to Arthur's, and we all know how Arthur's story ends. It ends with Arthur's tragic death. I wondered if there was a way for Collum to find his way to a different kind of ending, and that was something I wanted to find out.

Kousha Navidar: I'm so happy that you brought up King Arthur, because I'm sure listeners right now are wondering, is King Arthur even in this book? He certainly is in the book, but he's more of a footnote than a starring character. We do see him in a bunch of flashbacks, and there was one line that really stuck out when talking about Arthur, and this is from Guinevere's perspective. Guinevere is his wife, for listeners who aren't familiar.

Guinevere says or thinks, "What a thing it was to be married to a king, to be the only other person who knew his secret, though it lay right out in the open every day for all to see, which was that he was just a man and nothing more." That line really stuck out. I was wondering, what does that line mean to you in terms of how you handled Arthur as a character? Do you think that's a line whose significance extends beyond Arthur in your story?

Lev Grossman: Arthur is a challenging character to write in a way. I almost thought of him as a little bit like Sherlock Holmes. He's a human being, clearly, and yet, his abilities go just a little bit beyond the ordinary. Of course, Arthur almost his defining characteristic is his desire to be good, to be a good person, to be good almost fighting the headwind of his own kind of frail humanity. He's desperate to be a good person and to be looked on with favor by God, because he's a very Christian king.

In some ways, it's frustrating to him, his own failings, but not for Guinevere. I feel as though Guinevere often gets short shrift in Arthur stories because so much of Arthur's downfall is bound up with her. It was very important to me that Guinevere and Arthur have a proper marriage. These are two people who know each other better than anybody else in the world. They love each other, and she can see this about Arthur. To her, it's not weakness. It's what she loves about him.

Kousha Navidar: The Guinevere in The Bright Sword is also much more approachable than the Guinevere of legend. You write of Guinevere's approach to religion had always been pragmatic, as it was to all things. As a princess, she'd expected to marry for politics, not true love. Likewise, as a Christian, she didn't feel the need to be virtue incarnate. She wanted to achieve goodness, not perfection. After all, if God had nothing to forgive her for, then how would he maintain his hard-earned reputation for mercy? What was important to you in creating this Guinevere, beyond everything that you said?

Lev Grossman: As I said, Guinevere often gets short shrift. She is often a pawn of more powerful men, a pawn kind of her own passion. She doesn't always seem to really fully see what's going on around her. When I started this book, it was very important to me that Guinevere would be tough as nails, and the most intelligent person in Britain, who sees everything even more than Arthur, and what I imagined her life to be like. She's married to this guy, Arthur, a great, good man. She loves him, but Arthur has this obsession with being good, and of serving God, of being a perfect Christian king.

Guinevere is a realist, and she looks at this guy, and just every once in a while, I think she has to think to herself, can you just give it a rest? Can you be a good enough king and not a perfect king? There's a point elsewhere where she remarks that, look, if there's a third party in this marriage, it's not Lancelot, it's God, because Arthur's passionate love for God. It's almost more than she can deal with.

Kousha Navidar: Throughout the story, God really does play a big part. Religion, in general, it seems like throughout the whole book, there is this kind of like fracture between those who believe in the gods of old, and those who believe in Jesus and Christianity. Thematically, how did you think about distinguishing between the religion and also all of the magic that is happening in the backdrop of the story?

Lev Grossman: It's such an excellent question. One of the things that is so fascinating and rich and distinctive about Arthur's world is that it does have these two kinds of supernatural forces in it. On the one hand, there's magic and the fairies, the power that is indigenous to Britain and goes back to the Iron Age. On the other hand, there's God. There's the presence of a divine being, and God in King Arthur, he's not a remote God, he's not a distant God. He's paying attention and he cares about how things go, and he's always sending miracles and wonders and generally sticking his oar in.

You have these two powerful presences, and they do represent, and I think there is some historical basis for this two kind of world views. The pagan gods are very appealing. We love to tell stories about Greek myths and things like that, but they're sort of like us. They're not really more virtuous than us. Sometimes they're quite a bit less virtuous than us. They're a bit sort of like us. They really live for this world that we're in now. They're not so concerned with the afterlife. Whereas God represents an ideal, which is something quite new. His promise to you if you are a good person is not a reward now in this world, in the present moment. It's something deferred that's going to be in the future.

I think it's almost two ways of thinking about life and experience, and those two ways. If you've ever wondered what would happen if a fairy and an angel got in a big fight together, I can promise you that the answer is in The Bright Sword. I felt as though this question of these competing worldviews had to come to a head.

Kousha Navidar: You know that theme that you're talking about of promise and of that different ways of thinking about the world, that's kind of a theme that a lot of readers will be familiar with in your writing. I'm thinking of The Magicians, even in that series, and now with Bright Sword. It seems like a lot of your character's development comes from grappling with promise, with big expectations, with disappointment. There's Quentin and the magicians being so excited about magic, Collum in The Bright Sword being so excited about King Arthur. Did you see that parallel while you were writing? What do you make of it?

Lev Grossman: It's funny how little insight a writer has into their own work. It really wasn't aware of it until right towards that I was finishing the book. It is true, one of the things that both of these characters do, they have grown up on stories about Fillory, sort of an enchanted land or the Round Table, and then they have the experience of coming into contact with the reality.

The books, I think, in both cases, become, in part, about what is the difference between fiction and reality? What is the difference between stories and our own actual lives? Once we become aware of that difference, how do we cope with it? How do we find a way forward and find happiness in this world which is not as perfect or as enchanted and as satisfying as maybe we'd been led to believe? There are answers. It's not sort of fiction is amazing and our lives are terrible. It's much more complicated than that.

Kousha Navidar: There's also-- Oh, sorry. Sorry. No, go ahead, and I'll mute here.

Lev Grossman: There are particular satisfactions, I think, to the real world over fiction.

Kousha Navidar: I was going to say there's also this opportunity to see your characters demonstrate grit is what I would call it. I think it's easy and inviting to invest in your characters because we see them exhibit grit so often. It's interesting for me because you've exhibited grit in your own career, holding multiple jobs, finding a foothold through journalism, publishing multiple books before your first big hit. I'm wondering, how did grit show up for you in writing this new book, in The Bright Sword?

Lev Grossman: It comes back, I think, a bit to the big conceit of the book, which is that although it does tell many of the stories of Arthur's age and the age of Camelot, it also widens the lens. It looks into what happens afterwards. The ordinary story about King Arthur ends with his death, and everyone is very sad, and we mourn the passing of him and his great age. It's incredibly moving.

I wanted to look at this question of what it's like for the people who have to live on, who have to live in this world from which where the light has gone out, and the world has lost its way, because there must be a way to find your way forward. You can't simply look at the past and what has been lost. You have to figure out how to live and move forward, because that world without Arthur in it, that's our world as well. We don't have someone like Arthur in our world. We, too, are lost in that same darkness, but we do find ways to live and move forward.

Kousha Navidar: It invokes a historical note that you wrote in the book. You write that nations come and go, and centuries and traditions and kings and writers, but King Arthur always returns. What do you think makes Arthur so enduring? You answered this a little bit, but I was wondering if you could elaborate on why do we need Arthur to return and save us?

Lev Grossman: It's an excellent question, and the reason why I know that it's good is that I don't quite know the answer. There are a few, and one, I think, has to do with goodness. This idea of someone wanting to be good and yet discovering that in the complexity of the real world, it's not always obvious what being good means.

The other thing I'd say about it is that the Arthur story, fundamentally, it's a story about a family. I became very obsessed with Succession, the TV show, when I was writing this, because it is a story about a family, a terribly dysfunctional, blended, extended, toxic family. In some level, Arthur is just somebody who's dealing with the fallout of coming from a family like this and trying to be a whole person when he's inherited this legacy, which is so difficult and painful. I feel as though messed up families are a transhistorical phenomenon which will never not be relevant and fascinating.

Kousha Navidar: You watched a lot of Succession, and that inspired part of The Bright Sword? Is that fair to say?

Lev Grossman: I think that's fair, yes.

Kousha Navidar: Was there a specific character from the Succession that we can see in The Bright Sword in some way?

Lev Grossman: Well, everyone has a Succession character with them. Mine is Roman, and there's a few Romans in this book. Of course, looming over it is the kind of monstrous father image which is Arthur's father, who was Uther. We don't see him so much in person, but we feel his effects everywhere. He looms over the landscape, having been this incredibly charismatic and powerful, and really awful person, I think that you can see the parallels with Succession pretty clearly. I think it's a bit more of a hopeful book than Succession was a hopeful show. I hope that it was more hopeful than that, but they certainly share a lot of emotional territory.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Though the hope definitely does come through. I'm looking at the clock. We'll have to wrap it up there. Thank you so much, Lev. My guest has been Lev Grossman. His new book, The Bright Sword, is a reimagining of the legend of King Arthur. Really enjoyed this one, and we appreciate you coming on. Thanks again.

Lev Grossman: Thank you. Thank you.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.