 | Title: Fall of Knight Author: Peter David Publisher: Ace Pages: 347 Synopsis: (courtesy of goodreads) In Knight Life, King Arthur was elected mayor of New York City. In One Knight Only, Arthur was voted President of the United States. Now, Arthur has become head of his very own church as Arthur Penn reveals his true identity, and the existence of the Holy Grail, to the world. |
Spoilers, etc…
The Twist: King Arthur has been reawakened and now has to find his place in modern times. In book 1, he ran for mayor of New York City as step one of Merlin’s grand scheme to get him back into power. Joining him from the past are Merlin, immortal and aging backwards so he's a too-clever-for-his-own-good kid, and Percival, who drank from the Holy Grail and has thus agelessly weathered the centuries since Camelot’s fall. Guinevere/Gwendolyn Queen is a reincarnation, so Arthur had to win Gwen back all over again. All the twists carried over to the next two books. In One Knight Only, Arthur had been elected President of the United States but stepped down after making a bargain with the Devil to kill Osama bin Laden (under a different name) after the latter paid a sniper that put Gwen in a coma. They later found and used the Holy Grail to cure her. Other mythical/religious/historical figures from outside of Arthurian legend have a habit of popping up in this trilogy, like Gilgamesh.
The Plot: This book picks up a year-ish after the events of One Knight Only. Arthur and Gwen have been in hiding since her restoration thanks to the Holy Grail, since people will have some serious questions if the former First Lady who was very publically transformed into a vegetable thanks to a well-placed bullet turns up completely healthy. Unfortunately, someone takes and then leaks a picture of them on their boat in the Pacific and word gets out.
The confirmed existence of the Holy Grail causes a massive worldwide crisis, especially when Arthur dares to suggest that Jesus wasn’t the son of God; he might have been just some dude like Percival who drank from the Grail and became immortal. (Even though Arthur wasn’t really serious when he first made this suggestion, it turns out to be exactly right. At the end of the book we discover Jesus has been hiding in plain sight as a Secret Service agent this entire time. Because why the hell not.) Obviously the Catholic Church, as well as many other Christians, takes a very dim view of this attitude. Meanwhile, lots of sick people hoping for a miracle start following Arthur around begging for a drink from the Grail. Arthur, Gwen and Percival end up pinned in Arthur’s private retreat in Central Park, unable to go out because of the mobs of people asking for miracles and protesting Arthur’s suggestion that Christ wasn’t divine. Some people even start to worship Arthur as a divine figure himself, something that makes them all uncomfortable but that they don’t seem to be able to prevent.
A businessman by the name of Seltzer turns up with a plan to market water from the Holy Grail, diluted so that no one becomes immortal. Unable to see another way of using the Grail’s powers to help all the people who could use it, Arthur agrees, and this seems to settle things for a little while. Meanwhile, someone in possession of the Spear of Destiny (a counterpart of the Grail, supposedly the spear that pierced Christ on the cross) wounds Merlin and then Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, kidnaps the injured wizard and takes him out of play. Merlin is unable to warn Arthur about the Spear until almost too late, nor is he able to aid him in more than a rudimentary way.
Turns out Seltzer is really a 16th century alchemist by the name of Paracelsus, who has been striving to acquire both the Spear and the Grail so that he can use them to wipe humanity off the face of the earth because we’re dirty polluters, humans are a disease, and so on. I was kind of fuzzy on his motives. (This really has nothing to do with the real-life Paracelsus, who is credited as the father of toxicology among other things.) Either way, all of that positive energy that had been going out into the world via the Grail’s diluted healing powers has been building up negative energy in the Grail itself, and now Seltzer can unleash the chaos in a firestorm upon the world. Arthur rushes to confront him at Stonehenge and try to prevent the apocalypse.
Long story short, Arthur succeeds, though the Grail, the Spear, and Excalibur are all destroyed in the process. Arthur starts a TV show on PBS with Gwen and Merlin.
The Characters:
Arthur: This is still a pretty accurate Arthur. He does tend to get paralyzed with guilt over not being able to help everyone, is idealistic to the extreme, and is fiercely protective. Peter David goes out of his way to draw a lot of parallels between him and Jesus, and seems through Arthur to be crafting some commentary on the origin of a myth vs. the reality.
Guinevere: Gwen continues to function as Arthur’s rock and moral compass. The two of them are actually very well matched, since Arthur does listen to her advice sometimes. They also talk about how Arthur’s relationship with the original Guinevere ended (she was actually executed for her adultery with Lancelot even though the legend said Lance rescued her in the nick of time), and how much he regrets how things fell out between them. He is still amazed he got a second chance.
Merlin: We learn Merlin’s backstory over the course of this book, and it’s unlike any other backstory I’ve ever seen for him. He was the gentle son of a cruel warlord who set out to hunt the last unicorn on earth. When the unicorn is injured, it begs Merlin for a mercy kill, which Merlin reluctantly grants. That night the unicorn’s corpse is paraded around the warlord’s hall and the warlord takes credit for the kill, but the dead unicorn’s magic is so powerful that it creates the Grail and the Spear when they contact its blood, before setting the hall (the present-day site of Stonehenge) on fire. Merlin, in possession of the unicorn’s horn, is spared everyone else’s fate of being burned to death. He crafts Excalibur from the horn, and spends the next several thousand years keeping an eye on these artifacts. He loves Arthur more than anything but expresses it by bossing him around.
Percival: As the immortal Grail Knight, he seems to share a special bond with the Grail and is content to just spend hours watching it now that he has it back after all the centuries since its loss. He is eventually killed by Paracelcus with the Spear, ending his long life at last.
Nimue/Vivian: (She uses both names in this story, and is an amalgamation of the Lady of the Lake and Merlin’s lover/betrayer) Of course in any Arthurian finale story we have to have her in play to remove Merlin as a factor if nothing else. The goddess of all the earth’s waters, she seduced Merlin the first time centuries ago and then imprisoned him in a cave from which it took him a very long time to escape. She’s back again, and at first is colluding with Paracelcus to destroy humanity. As changeable and forgetful as the tides, you’re never sure which side she’s on or what she’ll do next. She’s immensely powerful, and even Merlin treads cautiously when dealing with her.
Nellie (reincarnation of Elaine of Corbenic) cameos, though she spends most of this book in a coma thanks to the machinations of the Church trying to get their hands on the Grail by using her as bait to lure in Arthur.
Overall:
3 stars.
This book gets in some witty lines, but overall was just kind of…odd, and was kind of a chore to get through. It does some interesting things with Merlin’s backstory and how that weaves into the present day, and of course there’s the twist with Jesus still being around, but I find it difficult to conjure up strong feelings one way or the other about it. One wonders if the musings behind this book’s concept were inspired by the Da Vinci Code controversy, since this was being written at about the time that book caused a mini-mass crisis of faith over Jesus’ divinity.
This trilogy was obviously a sort of thought exercise for Peter David. He's not the only author to ask "what would it look like if King Arthur appeared in modern times?" In this case he chose to set it in a very specific moment in history, and as a result even fifteen years later the books already feel dated.
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