(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa.)

Making a work of Arthurian Fantasy succeed is not easy. The story has been told a thousand times, and, on occasion, well back in the canon (see T. H. White and Thomas Berger, not to mention Malory and Tennyson), quite definitively well. The authors of the 80s and 90s have thus laboured to lend any new spin to the old tale, and desperate stratagems have been adopted: Guinevere as a lesbian, perhaps, or the Knights of the Round Table as Hell’s Angels, or Mordred as John Major. Otherwise, there has been the option of a retelling that does nothing new at all. But when Jack Vance, seeking to exploit the Fantasy boom of the 1980s, conceived an Arthurian trilogy, he arrived at a strategy uniquely his own: discard entirely the familiar details of Arthur et al., substitute against a similar background a new cast of characters, and proceed with a whimsical narrative of sui generis eccentricity. The result was a masterpiece.

The ‘Lyonesse’ Trilogy – made up of Lyonesse: Suldrun’s Garden (1983), Lyonesse II: The Green Pearl (1985), and Lyonesse III: Madouc (1989) – does contain a King Arthur figure in King Aillas, and the wizard Murgen is surely akin to Merlin. There are knightly quests; the Holy Grail is invoked; Druids practice sylvan rituals. Fairies and trolls recall Celtic and Norse legend. Vance knows the protocols of Celtic Fantasy; but he does not respect them very far, ruthlessly transforming them to his own ends; and his own inventions matter far more in any case. And so a wonderland of the exotic flourishes on the exhausted soil of the Arthurian cycle. The Elder Isles, divided into a host of competing kingdoms, are a landscape replete with sorcerous wonders. Magicians cast eerie spells with the help of curious other-dimensional agencies. Arcane errands repeatedly lead the protagonists into other worlds, including one inhabited by talking custard mountains. Courtly intrigues cunningly burlesque the conventions of chivalry. As in mediaeval romances, the countryside is a shifting panorama of mystery, splendour, and threat, testing wandering paladins to the limit. And the entire text of 1200 pages is related in Vance’s characteristic mannered, erudite, ironic prose, so that description is baroquely and colourfully cadenced, and dialogue is invariably poetic, formal, witty. But the trilogy’s re-invention of the Arthurian original goes beyond matters of style and detail.

The traditional Round Table Cycle is, of course, a story of unification or integration, with Arthur’s achievement of a realm founded on the chivalric ideal amounting to a temporary fulfillment of a universal aspiration towards peace, justice, and righteous conduct. The tragedy is that mortal frailty and the corrosive passage of time must bring the kingdom low. This gloomy scenario Vance brusquely shoves aside. His King Aillas unites the kingdoms through secular shrewdness, not fragile idealism; Murgen, unlike Merlin, does not desert his post as guarantor of the good; Aillas triumphs without the help of any Excalibur that must be returned to its owner, and in his version of the world the Holy Grail is an empty joke. It is human resourcefulness, courage, and rationality that count in the Elder Isles, as Vance asserts his robust, positivistic, Libertarian sense that all will be well if we only, with cool pragmatism, make it so. But this is no mere manifesto. As indicated, the ‘Lyonesse’ Trilogy is superbly conceived and written, and its baroque brio makes its revisionist case as compelling as it is sweeping.

LYONESSE I: SULDRUN’S GARDEN. GRAFTON (UK). 1984. TRADE PAPERBACK.

LYONESSE II: THE GREEN PEARL BERKLEY (USA). 1986. TRADE PAPERBACK.

LYONESSE III: MADOUC. ACE (USA). 1990. TRADE PAPERBACK.