 | Title: Cursed Author: Thomas Wheeler & Frank Miller Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers Pages: 416 Synopsis: (courtesy of goodreads) The Lady of the Lake finds her voice in this cinematic twist on the tale of King Arthur created by Tom Wheeler and legendary artist, producer, and director Frank Miller (300, Batman: The Dark Night Returns, Sin City). Whosoever wields the Sword of Power shall be the one true King. But what if the Sword has chosen a Queen? Nimue grew up an outcast. Her connection to dark magic made her something to be feared in her Druid village, and that made her desperate to leave… That is, until her entire village is slaughtered by Red Paladins, and Nimue’s fate is forever altered. Charged by her dying mother to reunite an ancient sword with a legendary sorcerer, Nimue is now her people’s only hope. Her mission leaves little room for revenge, but the growing power within her can think of little else. Nimue teams up with a charming mercenary named Arthur and refugee Fey Folk from across England. She wields a sword meant for the one true king, battling paladins and the armies of a corrupt king. She struggles to unite her people, avenge her family, and discover the truth about her destiny. But perhaps the one thing that can change Destiny itself is found at the edge of a blade. |
Just out this month, and soon to be a Netflix TV series, I was at first excited to hear there was a new book centered on a teenage Lady of the Lake who wields Excalibur herself instead of giving it to Arthur. Does it deserve the hype?
Spoilers under the cut.
This book was advertised (as I saw it) as a graphic novel, illustrated by renowned comic book artist Frank Miller, who is best known for putting dark and gritty spins on the stories he tells. In fact, it is not a graphic novel, but a full novel with occasional illustrations. It is gory enough to take its place in Miller’s canon, so it earns its stripes on that point. It is in my opinion a little grim for YA, but that’s what it’s billed as, probably just because the protagonist is a teenager—that seems to be the only standard for determining whether or not to call a book YA these days. I wonder where marketing peoples’ heads are sometimes.
This book is already in production for a Netflix original series next year, starring Katherine Langford (of 13 Reasons Why) as Nimue, Devon Terrell (best known for playing young Barack Obama in a biopic) as Arthur, and Gustaf Skarsgard (son of Stellan and brother of Alexander) as Merlin. I am already deeply curious what they’re going to change from book to film, especially with the choice to cast a black man as Arthur when he’s described and depicted in the book as white, so when it comes out I will try to do a compare and contrast (which we haven’t done for an age on this site!) at least of the first episode.
The Twist: Excalibur (here called the Sword of Power or the Devil’s Tooth) chooses Nimue, not Arthur, as the One True Ruler. The entire Arthurian legend is re-framed not only as paganism vs. the newer religion of Christianity, which is fairly common in modern Arthurian retellings, but as Fey/supernatural creatures vs. humans. The Fey are the underdogs, having recently become the object of genocide by the Red Paladins—kind of part Crusade, part Inquisition, the worst of late medieval Christianity all rolled into one delightful package but targeted at Fey rather than Jews and Muslims. Nimue becomes one of the leaders as the Fey decide to fight back. The story takes place all over a pseudo-historical Europe rather than just in England, if the place names are to be believed—half of the locations are real names and half seem to be made up.
The Plot: The timeline jumps around a little bit at the beginning in order to dump us straight into an action scene and get all of that boring establishing stuff in later, but things settle down into linear time after that. Nimue has grown up in an isolated village of Sky People, one of the many tribes of the Fey. The Red Paladins, led by the sinister Father Carden, attack the village and slaughter everyone. Nimue escapes with a strange sword her mother had been hiding, with the injunction to bring the sword to the wizard Merlin. In the process of escaping, Nimue kills first some wolves and then Red Paladins, and acquires the name the Wolf-Blood Witch.
Nimue encounters Arthur, a human mercenary, and the two fall in together. In traveling to try to figure out how to get in contact with Merlin they discover that the Red Paladins have been systematically wiping out every known tribe of Fey. Refugees from the slaughter like Nimue and her young friend Squirrel have been gathering in a series of caves near a mountain town called Cinder. There we learn the history of the sword: it is a magical Fey-made blade, and whoever holds it can claim the title of the One True King. Therefore, a bunch of people who covet that title are now after Nimue. Nimue wavers when she sees how badly the Fey need a leader, but decides to honor her mother’s dying wish and take the sword to Merlin.
Merlin has been working for Uther, the current king of…England I guess, but place names are so mixed up it’s hard to tell. When Merlin discovers the Sword of Power has appeared, he determines to destroy it rather than let everyone tear Europe apart trying to claim it. At this he fails, and Nimue, with the best of intentions, decides to keep it for herself and claim the title Queen of the Fey.
A lot of ugly, bloody fighting later, Nimue and the rest of the Fey refugees take over the fortified town of Cinder but end up boxed in by the Red Paladins and Uther’s army. Nimue agrees to trade herself for the chance for the rest of the Fey to escape. This of course sets off a series of betrayals by just about everybody in power, the result of which is an unfortunate and annoying cliff hanger where the fates of most of the main characters are uncertain. Presumably there is more planned.
The Characters:
Nimue: At the beginning of the book she is hated and feared despite being the daughter of the respected village druid because she bears scars from an attack by an evil bear spirit. Her scars and their signification of her special connection to the spirit world are built up as important at the beginning of the book but then rarely come into play after her village is burned. She has powerful magic of some kind that she only barely understands, and at the moment it’s unknown how she will acquire the nickname Lady of the Lake as she doesn’t seem to have a particular affinity for water. With the Sword of Power she acquires a formidable reputation and becomes a hero to the Fey that are left, eventually briefly gaining the title Queen of the Fey. She tends to act with her heart more than her head, which makes her temperamental and impulsive. She and Arthur are attracted to each other from the first. At the end of the book she is shot a bunch of times, Boromir-style, and falls into a river, but her body is recovered by a mysterious group of beggars in the epilogue so it’s implied she might not be dead.
Arthur: A young mercenary who gives up his career and wanderlust to protect Nimue, as he comes to believe in her and her cause. Though he appears to have no connection to Uther or any other royal house, it would not surprise me to learn that he actually is the true Pendragon son who supposedly died at birth but is rumored to have survived. If that’s the direction they go in a future book, it would be an unusual take to have Uther and Arthur set up as rivals rather than father and son.
Merlin: Nimue’s birth father. Merlin is hundreds of years old, and once wielded the Sword of Power until it fused to him (which of course puts me in mind of Ruber from Quest for Camelot, though I doubt the reference is intentional). The fusion was killing him until he stumbled upon Nimue’s mother, who healed him but at the cost of his magic power. He has been treading a thin line ever since trying to keep people from finding out. Pretty much everybody hates him, but he has managed to stay alive this long because he’s good at making promises, being sneaky, and pitting people against each other to keep the heat off himself. He comes across as a drunken Littlefinger from Game of Thrones most of the time, with a few flashes of actual goodness because he’s decided now that he knows of her existence he does care about his daughter and is willing to give up his own self-interest for hers. He’s actually not all that far from a standard Arthurian Merlin, since he plays the mysterious magician, has striven to be a bridge between Fey and humanity, and always has his own agenda.
Morgan: In a certain amount of irony given that she’s usually monikered “le Fay,” she’s a plain vanilla human who has decided to side with the actual Fey and is helping to hide Fey refugees driven from their villages by the Red Paladins. She’s also Arthur’s half-sister as in legend, though on which parent’s side I’m not entirely sure.
Lancelot: For most of the book he’s known as The Weeping Monk, and about midway through we get the reveal that his real name is Lancelot. (It comes at the end of a chapter and I could almost hear the “dun dun dun!” in the soundtrack.) He is one of the top warriors of the Red Paladins, but is shown to be somewhat reluctant when it comes to massacring Fey. He seems to doubt the surety of their mission that all the others fanatically take for granted. Gawain eventually spots Lancelot as a Fey himself, explaining his supernatural talent for fighting and why he seems unbeatable. It’s actually a creative twist on Lancelot’s backstory, following the spirit of it rather than the exact history: raised by one type of people while born of another, placing him in an uncomfortable limbo where he fully belongs to neither. In the end he does switch sides because he sees a mirror of himself in Squirrel and can’t stand to see him hurt.
Gawain/The Green Knight: Gawain is the Green Knight here, which is quite an interesting take. He and Nimue are from the same village and she grew up with a certain amount of hero-worship of him—she admires him most because he had the audacity to go out into the wider world. He becomes one of the leaders of the Fey resistance. He is apparently killed by the Red Paladins’ torturer, though I’m not sure if the weirdness that happened to his body at the end where it gets covered in grass is just him being absorbed by the earth or whether the authors plan to bring him back as literally green in a later book. Which would be funnier but I’m not sure these people have that type of humor.
Uther/Vortigern: Uther kind of takes both parts, since he is alive and the ruler of some large, indeterminate swath of land that seems to encompass England and some portion of what is now France but it’s revealed he’s actually the son of a peasant and not the legitimate Pendragon king. Merlin serves him because…reasons.
Tor: Here he is Arthur’s father, the first time I’ve ever seen Arthur’s father be someone other than Uther, Ector, or completely unknown. I would have put it down to the authors just picking an obscure Arthurian name out of a hat, but he’s recognizably Tor in that he’s a commoner who decides he wants to be a knight so he puts on armor and rides around doing heroic deeds and talking himself up until everybody just believes he is a knight. There’s enough there to draw a parallel to the original Tor’s story.
Igraine: Here called Elaine, but I don’t think she’s any of the Arthurian Elaines, I think the authors just slurred the name a little into something more modern-sounding that was still an Arthurian callback. Anyway, she’s Arthur’s long-suffering mother. Both she and Arthur's father are dead before the book begins.
Percival: A Fey boy, the only survivor from their village besides Nimue and Gawain. He goes by Squirrel for most of the book and only at the end after Lancelot saves his life does he reveal that his given name is Percival.
Bors/Bedivere?: Arthur’s rough, crude mercenary captain when we first meet them. What makes me think of Bedivere even though he’s called Bors is that Nimue cuts off his hand. In some versions of the legend a missing right hand is Bedivere’s defining trait.
Ector: The Lord of Cinder, the town that first gets taken over by Red Paladins and then the Fey. He’s not very happy about either invasion but likes Nimue and the Fey more than the Red Paladins and is inclined to at least cooperate with them.
Lunette: Uther’s mother in this version. She doesn’t seem to have much connection to her original counterpart; she was the wife of the king but gave birth to a stillborn son after his death. In order to retain power she paid a peasant woman for her baby, passing off the child as her own and raising him as a Pendragon king (though it’s implied that her legitimate son somehow survived and was smuggled away; at the moment we’re supposed to think it’s the Ice King of the Vikings, but no surprise if it turns out to be Arthur because we only have Merlin’s word, and Merlin is above all a liar if it serves his purpose). Uther has her killed when she reveals the truth about his parentage.
Guinevere: She makes her appearance at the last minute to save Arthur and the Fey who are attempting to escape to a new life, just when I was thinking we might get an Arthurian story without a Gwen. In another somewhat unusual twist, she appears to be a Viking warrior. They also seem to be hinting at a future love triangle between Nimue, Arthur, and Guinevere (since Arthur is being set up to think Nimue is dead, but because I know this kind of tropey storytelling, inevitably she’ll turn out to be alive just when he’s moved on. Cue teen angst.) Ugh.
It should be noted that there are a ton of other named characters who have no connection to Arthurian legend that I have not talked about here. It’s a very long book with quite a few subplots, most of which aren’t worth mentioning because they’re just an excuse for more gore and misery.
Overall: As a story, I am quite unimpressed with this. It’s obvious it’s trying to be a Game of Thrones ripoff with the Arthurian legend pasted over it, and in some spots the paste is super thin. They really play up Frank Miller’s involvement, but there aren’t all that many illustrations, and I am not a fan of the art style, which is blocky, Picasso-like, and not very evocative.
The story is hampered by lack of any sense of physical place or distance between locations. The use of some actual place names in the real world and some made up names was really confusing and kept throwing me out of the story. Some of the places mentioned are really far apart and would take a long time to travel between, and there seems to be zero sense at all that England is an island since there's a lot of fast-travel between France and England. I wish they had just made up their minds to either set it in the real world or in a made-up fantasy land rather than trying to have it both ways.
The characters are all right, and the most interesting and unique thing about this story is the connections made to their legendary counterparts and how those expectations are played with. The authors delved deeper than most people writing mainstream contemporary Arthurian retellings usually do, which is impressive. The best parts are when the story veers away from trying to be Game of Thrones and leans into putting its own twists on Arthurian stuff, like everything they did with Lancelot’s backstory.
I have zero plans to continue with any future books. I will watch at least the first episode of the Netflix show, but if it closely follows the book I don't anticipate enjoying it much, either.
Two stars.
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