What Arthur saw was nothing like what Moren saw. He saw no silver trees, nor the shining suns of souls, nor the blue glow of possibility, of hope, or of longing. Arthur saw before him the legends, rising up in shapes like griffins and dragons, growing about him in the way that lilies grow up like miracles in a forest where once stood some forgotten cottage. They stole his breath, and for a time it was so quiet in his tent that even the roar of celebration outside seemed to vanish away.
B. A. Patty blogs at Grim’s Hall, one of the blogs I’ve been following for years. He’s a reader of my novels too. But he’s even less aggressive about marketing his novel, Arms and White Samite, than I am in regard to mine. In fact, I’d forgotten he had one until he offered a deal recently, and I picked it up. It’s an impressive book, one that deserves greater recognition than it’s received.
Our hero is Moren, a warrior of Arthur’s Company of the Wall (the book is set in “King” Arthur’s original historical context, with certain supernatural intrusions). One day a lady dressed in white rides into Arthur’s hall, pursued by a great, fearsome knight armored in black. In spite of Arthur’s men’s attempts to protect her, the knight carries her off. Moren takes upon himself the quest of rescuing the lady. He follows her through a forest, where he rescues another lady who becomes his companion, and later into a fortress, where he is taken prisoner. A group of his brothers follow to help – or rescue – him. Meanwhile, the Saxons are harrying the land, and Arthur faces the challenges and sacrifices of total war against an enemy led by a king who is more than human.
For me, the greatest appeal of the Arthurian stories has always been, more than the tales of chivalry and valor, the hints of mystery behind it all – ancient names of places lost to history, shadowy characters who seem not quite human in some undefined way. Arms and White Samite is rich in those elements. It’s actually as much about the realms of faery as about this world (though the battle scenes are excellent, and seem historically plausible).
Quite a lot of time is spent in discussions about the intersection of this world and the Otherworld, and the nature of life and eternity. Questions of theodicy (the problem of evil) are central. Although the matrix of the philosophy seems Christian, there are elements that seem Buddhist and syncretist. This left me puzzled, but I’m not sure I understood it well enough to judge.
There were a couple typos (at least I think they were typos; perhaps I misunderstood the antique diction), and on very rare occasions the author made the questionable artistic choice of using exclamation points in exposition.
Still, all in all, I think Arms and White Samite is the kind of book C. S. Lewis would have liked very much.