I’m always up for an Arthur story. I’m also - and this is probably related - always up for the kind of story where you know it’s going to end in tragedy, the narrator keeps telling you that it’s going to end in tragedy, but then you get your hopes up anyway even though you really do know better, and when it all ends in tragedy just like you knew it would it ends up hurting like 1000x times worse. So an Arthur story told from the perspective of a Cassandra-esque figure, able to foresee the way it is all going to end but unable to change it, is exactly the kind of misery I love.
The actual PoV here is Elaine, the Lady of Shallot. According to the classical legends of the Matter of Britain, she falls in love with Lancelot and eventually dies of unrequited love. She is not to be confused with the other Elaine who loved Lancelot, Galahad’s mother Elaine of Corbenic; nor should she be confused with Elayne Trakand, Daughter-Heir of Andor and Supergirl; nor should she be confused with Elaine of Benes, downfall of soup Nazis.
The story centers on Elaine, Artur, Guinevere, Morgana, and Lancelot. The five of them have been raised on Avalon, but with the death of Uther they leave the safety of Avalon for Arthur to claim his throne before his (in this telling) half-brother Mordred can. The five of them are extremely close. Guinevere and Arthur love each other, and Lancelot and Elaine love each other, but the bonds between all five are very strong. And poor Elaine, as an oracle, knows exactly how everything will (or at least might) play out: Lancelot and Guinivere betraying her and Arthur, Morgana betraying Arthur, Arthur failing in a thousand ways, and so on and so on. That tension between the love Elaine has for the other four, and the love that she knows that bear for each other, and the way fate has decreed it will end is the tension in this story.
Sebastian takes a lot of liberties here, which is fine, but there are a lot of what I would consider key parts of the story that are absent. There’s nothing about the recently departed Romans, nor about the conflict between Christians and Pagans. There’s practically nothing about Arthur’s reign at all: this story is focused on him claiming the throne and, through Elaine’s visions, him falling. The focus is on the five of them and the relationships among them. It’s a much smaller-scale than the epic thing that the Matter of Britain usually is.
I got rather turned off in the middle, when it seemed like the story had more or less gone off the rails. There were also some points in the plot that veered a little too close to high school-esque melodrama for my taste. But I’m very glad I stuck through; despite some rough spots in the middle, Sebastian sticks the landing. And it’s exactly the right kind of miserable heartbreak when she does.
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