Black Gate

The Irish writer Brian Moore, who died in 1999 (he pronounced his first name in the Irish fashion — Bree-an) was one of the most interesting novelists of his time, at least based on the four books of his that I’ve read, all of which deal with areas where the supernatural, the philosophical, and the theological intersect and blur into each other.

Catholics (1972) is set in the near future after a hypothetical Fourth Vatican Council has banned private confession, clerical garb, and the Latin mass, while the fictitious Pope of the novel is engaged in negotiating a formal merger of Roman Catholicism and Buddhism, radical changes that are resisted by a handful of monks living on a small island off the coast of Ireland. In The Great Victorian Collection (1975), a scholar dreams of a fabulous collection of Victorian artifacts, and when he wakes up, it has actually appeared in the parking lot outside his California motel room. Who will believe such a thing? Can he believe it himself? Black Robe (1985) is a painstakingly detailed — and bracingly unsentimental — historical novel about the material and spiritual struggles of a Jesuit missionary to the Hurons in seventeenth century Canada.

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The Bright Sword (Viking, July 16, 2024)

With no disrespect to J.R.R Tolkien, the King Arthur legend is arguably the  inspiration of much post World War II medieval-based fantasy. You’ve got your out-of-nowhere claimant to the throne, a magic sword, court intrigue, some side stories, romance, sorcery, betrayal but yet a kind of redemption. All the key ingredients.

Sure, Game of Thrones was based on the very real English Wars of the Roses, particularly the also very real violence and death of key personages. But let’s look at the long literary tradition of Arthurian stories: sourced from Welsh mythology and grafted into 12th century British histories more based on fancy than fact, eventually becoming the  Chrétien de Troyes romances and subsequently Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. From multiple sources and variations we wind our way through Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot which in turn inspires various associated fictions, not the least of which includes Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. 

Fast forward to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and its adaption by Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot (“If ever I would leave you, it wouldn’t be in summer…”).  With the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Camelot became a metaphor for “a shining moment” intervened by fate to extinguish, that nonetheless, like the Christ-like resurrection grafted on to the Arthurian mythos, may inspire future generations. (Only a cynic would make comparisons between Guenevere’s infidelity and Kennedy’s.)

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