On this day in 1997, the first Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the UK, …and the Sorcerer’s Stone when it crossed the Atlantic) came to print.
There’s not much to add about the book which upended not just the Young Adult market, but pretty much the whole damned publishing industry. Well, unless you’re interested in acquiring a complete set of 1st editions, signed by JK Rowling. And at an estimated sale price of £15,000-20,000, sorry: no cash please!
Meanwhile, perhaps another chapter in the saga of “Brit books which throw the US young-adult market for a loop” may already be brewing. (This would be on the heels not only of the Potter series, but also of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series — which, likewise, had adults prowling the YA aisles in bookstores, and pages online, and wondering why kids had all the fun.)
I direct your attention to Philip Reeves’s Here Lies Arthur. It’s not a series, as far as I can tell, just a one-off. But it’s a one-off which just happens to have won the Carnegie Medal for 2008 (a feat which not even Ms. Rowling’s steamroller accomplished, although the first title in His Dark Materials pulled it off).
I’ve been a, well, I hate to say connoisseur (a little too self-confident an assertion)… let’s just go with “fan” of Arthurian legends for about 15 years. It’s hard for me to imagine there could be a lot of new spins on the stories; I mean, after The Natural and Monty Python, doesn’t it seem to be a genre whose limits have been pretty much tested?
Not so. As Reeves has apparently cleverly understood from his research, the real King Arthur (what we can tell of him from history) wasn’t much of a hero. And that’s the starting point for this darker story.
The book’s been out for about a year in the UK. Here’s an excerpt from a review at the Guardian site:
In this brilliant version of the Camelot story, Philip Reeve scrubs off all that late-medieval gloss about gallant knights and a round table, and returns Arthur to the place where he more probably belongs – a sixth-century mud-and-blood bath of brute force and low cunning.
This Arthur, then, is not Malory’s Christian king but a bristling hog of a man who is “just a little tyrant in an age of tyrants”. He blunders about a small strip of the West Country bagging tributes from lesser bullies and rustling up boundary wars as a way of keeping his men sharp and loyal. Guinevere, meanwhile, is not a fallen angel in a wimple but Gwenhwyfar, a twice-widowed woman nudging into middle-age, and so white and stalky that Arthur’s men sniggeringly dub her “the old heron”. When she eventually succumbs to adultery, it is not with Lancelot but Bedwyr, the prototype for Sir Bedivere, a boy-man young enough to be her son.
Wow.
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