Lev Grossman’s Magicians When it was released in 2009, at a surprising time, Harry Potter and the Deathly HallowsThe final volume was released in paperback. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince It finally made it onto the big screen. Fans were lamenting the approaching Harry Potter vacuum. Grossman said at the time: time The author, a senior book reviewer for magazine, former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, and Nerd World blogger, takes us from Brooklyn to Fillory, a magical, adult world filled with wizards and villains, sex, drugs, and single-malt Scotch. His “wildly brilliant” 17-year-old protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, enrolls in Brakebills School of Wizardry on the Hudson River instead of Princeton, thus beginning an epic best-selling trilogy that was followed by a Syfy TV series that ran for five seasons until 2020.
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and Shining SwordGrossman returns to fantasy quest fiction, this time tackling the canon of Arthurian legend in a book that took him a decade to write. In a world where King Arthur and most of the Knights of the Round Table are dead and a young outsider takes on an unimaginable quest, his fascinating reinterpretation of the legend is once again timely for a “real” world facing an unimaginable future. (Yes, a TV series is in the works, too.) Grossman was back in Brooklyn to celebrate the book’s release, so our conversation spanned continents (he and his family live in Australia).
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Jane Siabatali: How has this pandemic and time of upheaval affected your life, work, writing, and publishing? Shining Sword?
Lev Grossman: It’s not getting better! In 2020, while the kids were out of school, work on the book came to a near halt. In some ways, novel-writing is a momentum game, and I lost a lot of momentum. I also wasn’t able to travel to England to do research as much as I would have liked; I had to Google birds and wildflowers a lot.
I wanted to know what would happen to those who had to continue living after the end of the world.
If the chaos includes the inauguration of President Trump, that is definitely Shining Sword Like America, Britain in Arthur’s time was a country deeply divided within itself.
JC: From the world of “Harry Potter for Adults” Magicians What is this trilogy that begins in Brooklyn, stretches to the fantasy world of Fillory, and into the realm of Arthurian legend?
LG: I’ve been writing The Magicians books on and off for ten years, but The Magicians and I needed some time apart. King Arthur was one of my first readership loves, and I felt he had something to say about this historical moment we’re in, and I wanted to find out what it was.
JC: You said it took you 10 years to write this book – what happened?
LG: That’s a good question, even if it’s a bit of a tough one. Of course, a lot of research has gone into it. Arthur’s time was a very strange and complicated time in British history, when the Romans left, the Saxons came, and society basically fell apart during that time.
Also, I needed to find my Arthur. He’s a difficult character. In some ways it’s like a Harry Potter story, where you have an abused, anonymous orphan who turns out to be a famous hero, but his new life comes with a lot of baggage and history and trauma. What is it like playing Arthur? There isn’t much to learn from the medieval sources. He doesn’t have many monologues. Shakespeare never wrote an Arthurian play.
JC: We’ve spoken before about the influence of The Chronicles of Narnia on The Magicians trilogy. What canon of Arthurian legend precedes this new work – TH White, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Thomas Malory, Tennyson, Mary Stewart, Rosemary Sutcliffe, etc. What inspired you to write an Arthurian novel? Why did you choose this title?
LG: In terms of the canon, I was thinking of all the authors you mentioned, especially Malory, T.H. White, and Bradley, but also the earlier Arthurian works, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gowain and the Green Knight, Cruch and Olwen, the Mabinogion, etc. The funny thing is, even after all of this, there’s still so much story left untold.
As for titles… I try not to think too much about titles. MagiciansThe label is on the can.
JC: The history notebook states: “Arthur was not born fully formed, but was slowly deposited in layers over centuries…” Shining SwordYou write, “It’s a kind of medieval English dream, where disparate elements from different eras mix and blend in a way that never happens in the real world, but which makes some kind of sense on the level of our shared cultural unconscious.” What was your world-building strategy, given the complexity of the Arthurian legend?
LG: I tried to be guided by two things. One was romance. There’s been a lot of down-to-earth, hard-boiled Arthurian stories lately. I wanted to go the other way and lean into magic, spectacle and romance — shining armor, towering castles, courtly love, jousting, magic, angels and fairies. Aaron Sorkin took all the magic out of it when he brought it back. Camelot. I wanted to put it back.
But at the same time, I didn’t want it to lose its relevance to what’s going on now. Arthur’s world had to have the same conflicts as ours – for example, the fact that his England was a post-colonial country, trying to decolonize after centuries of Roman rule and dealing with that legacy of darkness and violence. And Arthur, as a Romanized Englishman, is caught in the middle of all of this.
JC: I’m curious about the progress of your work. Shining SwordHow did you start? At what point did you decide to start the quest at the end of the Round Table, where Arthur and most of the Round Table members have been defeated by Mordred at the Battle of Camlann? How did you create your own innovations in the storyline? Was the mystery of who would take Arthur’s place on the throne answered from the beginning?
LG: I was thinking about Arthur’s afterlife pretty early in the process. I was looking for blank spots on the map, and it was clear to me that if Arthur died with no surviving children, then the next big succession crisis would be. The idea that the Golden Knighthood world loses its center and falls into darkness and chaos… I wanted to read that story. I wanted to read a post-apocalyptic story in a way. I wanted to know what happens to the people who have to continue living after the end of the world.
And the answer to that last question is no. I didn’t find out the answer until I read to the end.
JC: How did the character of Corum of Out Isles evolve? Corum is “orphaned and bastard, poor as a church mouse and far from home,” the young knight we meet in the opening scene. Corum had long dreamed of joining King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, but now he is bound for Camelot, too late. Is this character based on a historical figure?
LG: In some ways, Colum is a typical character: a mysterious young man who comes to Camelot in search of fortune, both a surrogate for the reader and an outsider finding his way at court.
But as he grew up, I realised that Colum was actually a shadow of Arthur himself. Like Colum, Arthur was an orphan, bastard, and grew up in obscurity. He was abused. They faced many of the same hardships, but their fates were very different.
JC: How did you choose and develop the other characters, the four surviving Knights of the Round Table? Bedivere, the one-handed knight who also appears in earlier Arthurian works, is of course also in Monty Python’s Holy Grail and is secretly in love with Arthur in your story. Palomides the Saracen is a Muslim knight who is depicted as the prince of Baghdad. Sir Dagonet, the court jester; Sir Constantine, Arthur’s potential successor; and Nimue, Merlin’s student who defeats him before the story begins. Your backstory, the story of Sir Palomides, the story of Sir Dagonet and Sir Constantine, or the quest for the Holy Grail, or the story of Nimue, the final adventure, are all interesting. Did you write them in any particular order?
With all the heroes gone, we were able to focus on people who wouldn’t normally be the main characters.
LG: And let’s not forget the brave Sir Dinadan! At first, when I looked up who actually survived after King Arthur’s death at Camlann, I panicked because there was hardly anyone left. But then I realized this was an opportunity: with all the heroes gone, I could look to the periphery and put people who normally wouldn’t be the protagonists at the center.
Some of them were old favorites, like Sir Dagonet, the jester knight. I always wondered what it would be like to be a court jester who had risen to the ranks of the Round Table. But I think I wrote the story of Sir Palomides first. He was a mystery to everybody. Nobody talks about a Muslim knight chasing a beast in England that he’s destined to never catch. I made Palomides come from Baghdad in the Golden Age, which means he comes from a civilization far more advanced than King Arthur’s time. All the knights of the Round Table look like barbarians to Palomides.
JC: What kind of research went into the fight scenes (interesting details on armour, weapons and style)? Also, what can you tell us about the creatures?
LG: There are tons of gaps to be explored. How knights actually fought, even the actual martial arts they practiced, has only been rediscovered in the last few decades by scholars and enthusiasts who have studied the original swordsmanship manuals and deciphered the movements. There is a lot to learn. I took a few longsword classes myself, although I didn’t show much knightly aptitude.
As for the big battle scenes… I read a lot of military history, especially first-person accounts, trying to make sense of how horrific and messy they were, and I also read great works of literary battle scenes, like deconstructed versions of the Napoleonic Wars. War and PeaceCarl Marlantes’ Vietnam novel Matterhorn. And of course, there are modern masters of fantasy battles like George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie.
Speaking of creatures, I don’t think any amount of research can prepare you for the strangest creature in the world of Arthurian legend, the Questing Beast. I hope I’ve done her justice.
JC: What are you working on now/next? Shining Sword The start of a new trilogy?
LG: Right now I’m collaborating with Lila Sturges on a graphic novel, which I’m having a lot of fun with. Heaven. It’s a space opera! Shining sword, As far as I know, this is a standalone novel. However, I Magicians Too much.
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The Shining Sword: A Novel of King Arthur Viking Books by Lev Grossman is available from Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.