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Writer's picturemikeofthepalace

“By Force Alone” by Lavie Tidhar

This book was super disappointing to me, I’m sorry to say.


I love the Arthur story (the Matter of Britain, if I want to sound fancy). I’m always up for a new take on it. I also happen to be a big fan of creative reimaginings, so when I saw on the blurb that this Arthur was a jumped-up gangster from the streets of Londinium I was intrigued. The fact that I also love mob movies didn’t hurt either.


(aside: I didn’t like the book, but I did really appreciate when Sir Ulfius was relating part of the story of Arthur’s rise and he began with, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a knight…”)


But if you’re going to do that kind of a story - taking a known story and applying the tropes of something else - you need to know what you’re doing. A good (bad) example of what I’m talking about is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I love Jane Austen, and I love zombies, but the two together fell flat for me. Mr Collins being too stupid to realize that Charlotte is a zombie, Lady Catherine’s sneering contempt for Elizabeth being trained in the martial arts by a Chinese master instead of a respectable Japanese sensei - they were worth a chuckle, but didn’t have enough to it to make the story worth the reading. A good (good) example is Sunshine by Robin McKinley: the Beauty & the Beast fairytale retold as a vampire story. McKinley didn’t just take a known story and swap some of the tropes: she really worked to make a new spin on the tale. She didn’t just tell Beauty & the Beast and replace “the last rose petal” with “the last clove of garlic,” if you know what I’m saying.


By Force Alone has Arthur going from street urchin to local gang leader to capo di tutti i capi of the assorted Londinium gangsters knights. He controls the Londinium brothels, he’s dealing psychedelic drugs to the worshipers of Mithras, he calls for a meeting of the Five Families six kings of Britain to follow his leadership, setting off a war when they refuse. But this kind of thing can only sustain a story so far, and when the author runs out of Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola movies he kind of … reaches.


We have a Lancelot that’s a kind of kung-fu assassin/treasure hunter. We have what I can only call a tribute to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. We have aliens for some reason, even more out of place here than in the fourth Indiana Jones movie. By the time the author tries to pull it back to a solemn tone for the inevitable fall of Camelot, it’s just such an absurd tonal shift from everything else that I just didn’t buy any part of it.


I didn’t appreciate how this book handled gender. In the early stages the only mention of women at all was as serving wenches who were literally listed alongside livestock in the spoils of a captured castle. We do meet Igraine (who gets raped by Uther in disguise, of course), and Morgan and Morgause and Nimue and assorted Fae ladies (who are all seductresses, of course).

Guinevere seems like an attempt to balance things - she’s a highwaywoman leading a merry band of lady robbers. But we get one brief sequence where she’s a character, and then she mostly exists in the mind of Lancelot as a distraction when he’s treasure hunting and kung-fu fighting.


This was published by Tor (thanks to them and NetGalley for the ARC), which surprised me. Because this is really a book in need of a good editor.

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