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When Lavie Tidhar set out to write his own Arthurian legend, he wanted to cut through the nationalistic myth-making into the bone of the original stories.
“It’s supposed to be about chivalry and honor, and it’s . . . it’s not!” He told Clarkesworld. “Everyone else was doing the story the way we’re told it goes, not the way it actually goes.”
“Arthur’s too dumb to be afraid of anything,” another character thinks during the future king’s childhood. Tidhar’s Arthur is barbaric, lacks introspection, and follows in the footsteps of both his fathers (Uther and the pimp Hector). People in the world of the novel revere knights because they’re powerful, with the best weapons and the best access to equipment and food. But the word is also always equivalent with mobster, with kings as bosses. Tidhar tosses “an offer you couldn’t refuse” in there for fun, one of the many rapid fire pop culture references Tidhar describes as “‘equipoise’..a condition of being a 21st Century writer.” Camelot becomes a paradise of vice, its cornerstone a brothel.
So, what’s the theme in all this? The title tells it. Characters are driven by a lot of base needs — greed, hunger, lust — but power rules above all. Even the treatment of fantasy reflects this theme. A fairy land exists, but humans made it with their own dreams, and it’s just as perverse as the natural world. Leprechauns and stranger creatures inhabit the story but fall sway to power just like anything else. In a particularly striking subversion, leprechauns exist but their gold is real ore mined by enslaved leprechauns.
And that power is never an inherently English thing. Tidhar comments on English nationalism by saying, over and over, that it’s a derivation of the ancient Greek and Roman empires that laid the groundwork, with nothing in Arthur’s time to set it apart. What remains of the island’s best infrastructure is all on a Roman model that gives the novel a post-apocalyptic flavor of chaotic gangs roaming around after the fall of civilization. King Arthur, who fights the Romans in some version of the story, here claws out an empire in a land they no longer care to rule. Yet nor can it be interpreted as shifting the patriotism onto the Romans, who receive their own share of scathing epithets.
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