This is the second book in the Camulod Chronicles, which began in The Skystone. The book deals with the legend of King Arthur, but unlike other treatments of the material I've read, it's entirely realistic, with none of the fantastical--that, in fact is it's fascination. I haven't read the series by Bernard Cornwall or Stephen Lawhead, so maybe they're in that vein, but even the novels by Mary Stewart that put the stories in the Dark Ages Romano-British context had elements of fantasy--let alone more tradition approaches such as the stories by T.H. White. But in Whyte's story, if the sword Excalibur is special, its because it was smelted from a meteorite and forged by a master smith. And the Lady of the Lake? Well, she has a purely realistic explanation too we learned in the first book.
This book starts off right from where the last one began, in the twilight of the Roman Empire. And in fact, if I rate this a bit lower, it's because it does feel so much like a continuation, and so not as novel in its impact. It shares the same virtues and drawbacks--and narrator--as the last book. This is the account of Publius Varrus, a former Roman legionnaire and the man who will forge Excalibur. Whyte in my estimation as good a writer as Mary Stewart or T.H. White who were both strong prose stylists. The information isn't always woven in that naturally, and I'm not ever struck by passages I'd love to highlight or dogear.
But I did, just as with the last book, find myself fascinated by the depiction of the Roman Empire falling apart and the beginning of a new era. If the last one was notable for it's picture of the political and military, this one is interesting for what I learned, for instance, of the challenge of Pelagius to the Christian orthodoxy established by St Augustine. Also here you see the beginnings of knights--in the development of heavy cavalry, the visor, the stirrup and the lance. And while the last book merely set the backdrop of late Roman Britain, and you had to depend on the back of the book to learn Varrus would be Arthur's great-grandfather, in this book we finally begin to see the emergence of the age of Camelot with the birth of Merlyn and Uther. I'm certainly still interested in reading more of the series.
