Review: The Mists of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Today we remake Spiderman every couple of years. For much of the millennium before that – extending to today – we’ve remade the legends of Arthur and the Round Table. It’s generally the same story, at least in its outlines, but the challenge is to emphasize one or another element, to take material that belongs to all of us and to reframe it with a particular perspective.

When you come to Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, it helps to know the story already. Spoiler, but Guinevere can’t deny her love for Lancelot and that means trouble all around. And the part about the quest for the Holy Grail that destroys the companionship of the knights? Yeah, there’s no avoiding it either.

Traditional authors of the story have done all sorts of things with it, of course. Malory applied it to developing and codifying a code of chivalry which, while it has its virtues, helped lay the foundation for a sexist and puritanical Britain two or three centuries later. T.H. White (with Disney following) emphasized the wonder of the story, turning it into one stream of fantasy that paved the way for the reception of (if not so much the creation of) Tolkien’s world.

Bradley turns out to be powerfully ambitious here. She inserts a clear feminist take on the legends – here, Morgaine (Morgan le Fey) is not evil, but rather the most important representative of the druidical religion that Christianity is displacing. This is not “merely” feminism, though. Instead, it’s a claim for what I’d call syncretism, for the argument that the “enemy” isn’t some form of Satan but rather intolerance of what we cannot understand in our limited human perspective. We get lots of quotes exonerating Christ from the work of extirpating the traditional religion, with the blame going instead to “His priests.” (As such, St. Patrick, here as Patricius, is much more the ‘bad guy’ than Morgaine herself.)

The idea for Bradley, that is, is that we find the best in ourselves as humans when we embrace the good wherever we find it. She’s hardly anti-Christian, yet she embraces the sense that the nature-worshipping druids had important virtues as well. The challenge is always to find a balance, to accept that catechism – the mindless listing of what we ought to believe and how we ought to conduct ourselves – is the enemy of real faith. That’s as true for seeing the power within women as it is in the context of faith.

In a way, then, she offers what may be the most important theological take on the fantastic in the interval between Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. Tolkien (and C.S. Lewis, of course) used fantasy to explore a clear vision of a benign, monotheistic space where evil nonetheless existed. At the other end, Martin has unveiled a world where there is no “true north” of faith, a world where the supernatural is present but a range of god-like figures vie with one another for amoral victory.

It’s fascinating, then, to see Bradley as a middle-ground, as someone intent on using the genre to imagine a space between catechism and amorality. At its best, that’s precisely what her exhaustive take on these legends accomplishes. The Grail of her account, for instance, may or may not be the cup of Christ, but it is clearly something long used in druidical worship that Merlin, that traitor to the druidical cause, has stolen for Christian purposes. It’s not an angel that the knights see holding it but rather Morgaine herself, channeling the powers of the goddess for a brief moment, who sets them off to discover a vision of the holy that they can imagine only within a Christian vocabulary.

As a concept, as a motive for revisiting stories most of us know in one form or another, I love all that. And parts of this, especially the opening pages, are wonderfully done. There’s a reason this was a best-seller when it came out, and there’s a reason it lingers around the edges of the genre’s canon even as Bradley has come to be held to account for a lot of disturbing things from her lifetime.

All that said, though, this can’t entirely escape what seems the original sin of the genre. This is simply too long by at least a third. What works in the first few hundred pages – the scene-setting, tension-building, character-developing work – becomes tedious by the end. We all know what’s going to happen; I’d like to see her get to the parts that matter to her sooner: the collapse of the Round Table as a sign of the failure of syncretism, the trapping of Merlin as simultaneously a feminist reclamation of the goddess and a pyrrhic victory for the druidical cult, and the final vision of Arthur as representing a “Camelot” moment that we can look to for inspiration even as we cannot recreate it.

I’m glad I read this – it came in handy as the semester wound down and I needed something thoughtful and distracting to listen to as I drove to work and walked the dogs – but I’m glad to be finished as well.


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