Destiny must be integrated.

Lawhead’s Avalon has a double problem with the numinous, with the spiritual sense it delivers to the reader. On the one hand, it falls short of what it promises, and that’s about the greatest sin a story can commit while being technically competent. On the other hand, it speaks voluminously and pressingly upon a vision of kingship which should ascend, by application and magnitude in the narrative, into worldview, but I came away in the end unsure if the author actually believed it himself or not. I came away feeling rather as if I’d read pro forma royalism, which is not at all congruent with the sort of Arthur story Avalon promises.

Also, this got split into two because I wrote a double-length feature and then expanded the first part.

Destiny

 Avalon promises a sense of destiny. The story revolves, after all, around the destined King Arthur. But destiny is a tricky sense to convey to the reader. Fail on one side, and the reader doesn’t believe it; fail on the other, and the reader perceives it as mere ex machina, the world pressing the characters. Destiny must be within the characters and their actions, not outside of them, and Avalon rarely manages this.

The problem of conveying destiny without conveying deus ex machina has a solution: the destined must fit his destiny. The destined conqueror need not be the whole of his own success, but he must be a man who, un-destined, would still be worthy of the destiny, good or bad. (There’s a different variant where fate, as a foe, is the question- but today we discuss something more true to life.) The destined king must be a king indeed.

In this respect, I direct your attention to Sandy Arbuthnot, among my favorite fictional characters, particularly his appearances in Greenmantle and The Courts of the Morning (by John Buchan).  Sandy has no destiny, as James, Avalon’s protagonist, is supposed to have, but Sandy is a king. Indeed, Sandy’s struggle in story after story is that he is a king, but he is not in his own kingdom, and so though he conquers, he cannot taste the true fruits of his victory but must run off across the earth for another haven, at least until….

(Go read the books!)

The crucial point here is that destiny avoids deus ex machina only by the one who is destined being worthy of that destiny. Arthur re-born must be a man who, if he were not Arthur and had not Arthur’s destiny, would still stand head-and-shoulders above men, a leader undoubted. Here, the literary idea of destiny is by necessity and nature mimicking our reality: God predestines, and His destiny works out in the actions of men, so that the just receive justice and the wicked likewise. God predestines men, and men live out that predestination according to their natures, growing according to His plan to fulfil the lives He ordained. Story-destiny, likewise, must work out not as an intervention of the world or the author but as an integrated part of those who are destined, a proper outworking of their natures.

(Destiny, note, need not be grand, and neither need its instruments be. What is required is that the instrument fit the result; destiny’s tools must be of a character with destiny’s purpose. A man may be destined to ruin by pettiness; then let him be petty. A man may be destined to save the world unnoticed; so let him walk in sterling character, but never seen. A man may be destined to fail his greatest task; then let him have cracks which render his virtues vain. Destiny and destined must match; that is all.)

Avalon asserts destiny constantly and relentlessly. The main character all but has it as a superpower. But this destiny becomes an assertion of the narrative rather than of a trait of the world. The protagonist never integrates destiny into himself; he never internalizes it. One senses him a man carried by destiny, not a man of destiny, and so he fades from importance and worth.

The story is more than its assertion of destiny, thankfully, and its other parts, many decently done and a few quite well done, keep it from full ruin, concealing the rotten scaffold. The alien nature of the destiny, however, hurts the story badly. The book feels as if it should compel the reader with a sense of merited inevitability, of the hero showing in his actions and character the instrument which is destined, and then it just goes along unexceptionally, with superficial appeal to destiny that does not transcend appeal. 

The interesting part of this in application is that very great things can be accomplished by very mean instruments, as when God brings the gospel by the mouth of a sinner, but still the character of the instrument is means of the decree’s fulfillment, and congruent to the shape of that fulfilment.

God bless.