Before King Arthur

Lyonesse by Jack Vance

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read Lyonesse as a teenager and immediately fell in love with it. Sure, there were some minor plot holes - especially as the story moved through the trilogy of the same name - but its overall charm won in the end. Then, a few years later in university, I tried reading it again and thought it was a terrible misogynistic creation - to the point where I took the whole trilogy to a nearby charity shop and gave it away.

Seventeen years later and I was tempted to revisit the series again and find out why I'd loved it in the first place, and if the misogyny was really so bad. What I discovered was a world firmly in the mold of Angela Carter's fairy tales - the bite and sting from fairies and trolls casually sitting beside the evil committed by kings and queens. Not only that but some of Chaucer's ribaldry too. Stories definitely not meant for children. It's been a reminder for me of how important it is to revisit loved books: the stories never remain the same - we see them through different eyes as we grow older.

G.R.R. Martin took, no doubt, a lot of inspiration from Lyonesse for his A Song of Ice and Fire series - the geography of both worlds is similar as well as its intrigues, horrors, tragic love stories and magic. Lyonesse, however, is an expansion on the Arthurian legend which gives Vance more scope to play with motifs such as early Christianity (one of the biggest horrors in the book is the building of a chapel in a beautiful and remote garden.) G.R.R. Martin must have also taken note of the major plot twist in this novel that takes all readers by surprise which raises the novel above others in the fantasy genre.

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The Passage #2

Oohhh, exciting! The sequel to The Passage comes out this October!