Compliments &… (Avalon Review I)
Flashes of fulfilling its potential.
Today I’d like to jump on the popular topic, only a few weeks late (probably), because that’s my usual course of action. Daily Wire, with whom I have no contentions at all, has put out their ‘Pendragon Cycle’ TV series, based on the first two books of the eponymous series by Stephen Lawhead. Now, I’ve read that series (as well as most of Lawhead’s other writing), and up until the past week I’d have identified books 1 and 6 as my all-time favorites (albeit only one half of Book 1, because I cared little for the Taleisin half of the plot). Then I re-read Avalon, book 6, and… it has really big issues. I can see why I liked it, but it’s definitely gone down in the rankings.
Opening Compliments
Avalon has an arresting premise- King Arthur returned- and it has flashes of fulfilling that potential. More, it has all sorts of ideas which (as we’ll consider later) could be really and exceptionally amazing. The book has an effective antagonist (the secondary antagonist, unfortunately, and sabotaged by #1), a few striking side characters, and a willingness to kill likeable characters, if only the peripheral ones (unfortunately, more on that later). I loved this book for a reason, a decade or so ago, and I re-read it multiple times.
Further, the book is readable and far from unendurable. I re-read it in a day or so, popping back in with interest. Some of that was nostalgia (there’s always something interesting about half-remembering what will come), some of that was the alternative (lawschool casebooks are rarely riveting), but the story is genuinely easy to read, even if I caught myself skimming a section or two in the later parts of the book, when I was starting to recognize the problems which earlier I had hoped would be remedied by what would come.
The Funny-Irrelevant
Avalon takes place in a hypothetical near-future Britain and revolves on a political struggle in that context. The result is interesting, in light of ongoing British politics, which I follow at a distance and with some enthusiasm. Far more people with English names in the story’s politics than in the real England.
Age Ratings: A Note
Avalon is a book I don’t really recommend against reading. For some, it could be an enjoyable and even mildly profitable experience, because the story is heavily flawed, not bad. But I’d be hard-pressed to say when to read it, particularly in light of the rest of the Pendragon Cycle, as one quality recommends a younger age and the other an older age. The younger age is recommended because the reader will likely have the work less affected by its flaws (we all have something we read as a kid which, in retrospect, was only OK or decent, not mindblowing). The older age is recommended because Lawhead occasionally gives sensory glimpses of the physique of seduction, a little more explicit than might be necessary in certain cases, enough I don’t blanket recommend his work (though what I remember as the most explicit, the crusader-rose series, is thankfully the worst-written, in my memory). Avalon has a single flash of such, one hardly lewd, but still….
Three articles here on writing sex in fiction:
