I enjoyed this book, and was at times delighted by it. Lev Grossman is best known for the "Magician" series, which I did not like at all, but this book is something very different and much more fun.
Imagine taking all the versions of the King Arthur story that you know – the high medieval knightly quests, the late medieval tragedy of Arthur's betrayal and fall, the "historical" Arthur defending post-Roman Britain against the Saxons, The Sword in the Stone, the feminist Arthurian books of the 1970s with Morgan le Fay as the protagonist, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – mashing them up together, and trying to set a story in that world. It's mad, but it worked well enough to hold my interest all the way through.
I especially liked two things about it. First, Grossman has done enough reading to have a real familiarity wth all the Arthurian worlds he invokes, not just the names and narratives but something of the style and attitude, and I very much enjoyed recognizing where all the patches in this quilt came from. Second, I thought Grossman's tone was perfect for a book like this. Mainly it was light, but it was serious enough when it needed to be to convey the wonder and high stakes of the story. Most of the story takes place after Arthur's death, and I felt the characters' struggle to figure out what the new world would be like. Camelot had been, they all recognize, a very special place and time, and they would like to go back to it but know that they cannot.
Quite a few reviewers declared The Bright Sword to be one of the best books of 2024, and I understand why.
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