“We’ll stop them,” Collum said. “They’ve always invaded and we’ve always stopped them. There has to be a way.”
“Not this time,” Morgan said. “Because they’re not invading.”
“Well, what the hell do you call it?!”
“Emigrating,” Morgan said. “Fleeing. They can’t stay in Saxony. The sea there is rising and flooding their lands, and the land that isn’t getting flooded is being taken away from them by the Huns, which you’d better hope don’t make it as far as Britain, because you’ll like them even less than the Saxons. These people aren’t invaders, they’re refugees. They have nowhere else to go.”
Wind was whipping spume off the tops of the swells like smoke.
“It looks cold down there,” Collum said.
King Arthur had always stopped them, and King Uther before him, and King Constantine before him, but they’d never faced this. This wasn’t half a dozen keels of Saxons, it was thousands of them. And they weren’t warriors, or most of them weren’t, he could see that even from here. The boats were groaning with women and children, sunburned and rain-whipped and salt-sick, whole families who were only just getting the first sight of Britain after days of seasickness and freezing spray in their faces and the terror of drowning. How could you fight them? They weren’t fighters. It wasn’t an army, it was a people.
…
“You do realize that we arrived exactly like this?” Morgan said. “It was only a thousand years ago, give or take. I don’t know what we were fleeing, or what we were looking for, but it can’t have been much different. The Old Ones must’ve been absolutely appalled. … And now they’re gone and forgotten, and the Old Ones are us. Even the fairies were strangers here once. We’re all of us refugees from somewhere, we just don’t like to admit it.”
— Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword (2024, Viking)
Lev Grossman wrote a book about collapse. I don’t know if that was his intent, though it certainly reads that way to me. The Bright Sword is not only an epic story told completely without heroes — which is amazing enough — but it’s an insightful analysis of what happens after over-extension, what stories are left dangling, what characters lose their meaning and focus, what places simply evanesce. This is the story of what happens after Arthur, which is itself a story of what happens after Rome. Rome had hardly consolidated its rule over Britain — though they had managed to obliterate all the local social infrastructure — before it abandoned the island to the barbarians. Arthur tried to stem the tide, and maybe he won a few battles — but he lost the war. Because it wasn’t a war, it was, as Morgan puts above, emigration. The barbarians were escaping whatever was falling apart in their own lands, seeking somewhere to live, not to conquer. There was no beating back that tide.
The Bright Sword picks up the Matter of Britain in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Camlann, probing the uncertainty and instability that followed the death of King Arthur. The Romano-British people suddenly had no future, no identity, no reason to keep plodding on… except that plodding is what makes up a life, whether there is a destination or not. So the survivors of Camlann plodded. However, with the death of the king, there was no continuous weft to hold the tapestry together. This is the tale of how it unraveled, one thread after another.
The Bright Sword does not follow Britain beyond the deaths of the last of the Round Table, but it also does not end — because collapse is not an ending, just change. Sometimes cataclysmic, sometimes subtle. The invisible changes are the worst. The knights didn’t realize they were in a different story until it was too late for some of them. Still, Britain may have stopped making sense, may have lost all context and meaning and function, but it did not end. It crumbled. It shredded. It mutated. It fell apart and lay in a confused heap on the moors. But eventually time came along and composted the mess back into some semblance of unity and utility. Yet there were no heroes in charge of the compost pile. It just happened. As life does. Collapse is not about heroes.
I don’t know how Grossman feels about heroes. I can say I’ve read much of his work and never found an actual hero. His characters do not drive the story. The story is the story. This is why I find his writing enchanting. It is life in all its messiness, and yet a compelling story manages to emerge from the chaos — with nobody at the wheel. (Except for Lev, who stays out of sight, which is another thing I love about his writing.) Grossman populates this version of Arthurian legend with hapless souls, all accidentally absorbed into Arthur’s circle. Even Arthur is an accident. But the story of Arthur emerges from all this pixelated mess like the graceful flow of a murmuration from a thousand unruly starlings.
Heroes and leaders don’t do much in life anyway. The real story is what is all around the hero, what is happening behind the leader. Those great men in our history books didn’t make history, nor even inspire others to make history. They just had better publicity. Heroes and leaders didn’t do the work, didn’t keep things moving, didn’t contribute much at all to the living tapestry. All the work, all the living, all the change, all the history, just happened, all well beyond any control — and yet, miraculously, all became one emergent story.
This is probably a lesson for our times… We have no bright sword, though we do have central beliefs about ourselves that are frayed and unraveling. We have stopped making sense, we have lost our meaning, we are collapsing. However, heroes and leaders are not making this story, nor have they ever. It has always been us. It will always be us. It is the flow of people making their lives. Immigrants, emigrants, farmers, sisters, knights, mothers and the occasional wizard for dramatic flair. Some day someone will look back and say “that was collapse”, but we will never feel it. We would be surprised at the declaration. Because we are in this water, and we can’t sense it. But we make up this flow. We make the story. And we will not end, just change… regardless of whomever thinks himself a leader.
The barbarians came to Britain seeking a new home; and they flowed into the island, both toppling one idea of living and molding a new idea. (And like all immigrants they became staunchly convinced that nobody else should be allowed into “their” lands…) The question is: when is the collapse? When the last knight dies under the apple tree long after Camelot crumbles? When Arthur falls, trying to stave off the changes? When Rome scurries back across the Channel in embarrassment? Or long before the Matter of Britain began, when the Roman Empire began to take more than it could manage and found it could no longer feed its citizens or pay its legions without eternal expansion? Where is the collapse? It’s like looking for Waldo… Only there’s no tell-tale stripy shirt and red pom-pomed hat to mark the precise location. There is no precise location. It is not a point. It may not even be a line. Collapse is a story, an unfolding, a wave, an adaption. It is change. It is the emergent tale of all of us doing what we can to be alive, all of us trying to fit our lives into new situations, all of us flowing into new ways of being, and all of us making a new chapter to the never-ending story of us.
Stories are how we see what is happening. A good story-teller can take all these chaotic threads and weave it all into sense, entertaining sense, delightful sense. Fiction is particularly good at revealing the sensible pattern because it does not have to concern itself with either too much data or not enough. It can fudge around the facts and focus on the narrative. I like Grossman’s fudging. He makes a story of Arthur’s world that is patently impossible, but that feels authentic, the truest version of the Round Table, the real story of the times — as long as you don’t quibble too much about the anachronisms. Which, you won’t… because you will be too wrapped up in the story to question broadswords in Late Antiquity or Saracen princes before Muhammad. What I particularly like is how he is telling the story of us at the same time. Read that introductory quote again. Could there be a better sense of our times…
What you feel when you finally close this long book is the pointlessness of quests and knights and kings and, well, points… The point is that there is no point. And Grossman, being a wizard, actually makes that feel comforting. Particularly in these times. Because, he whispers, we are the story… We are collapsing… But we will not end.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
