for writing the best King Arthur book I have read in a long time, Finding Camlann. And I have read MANY King Arthur books. My two favorites are T.H. White's The Once and Future King
and Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (but not its many sequels which are pale imitations of the original.) Finding Camlann is not an Arthur novel in the same vein as my favorites since Arthur is not a character. The story takes place in modern times featuring scholars who are interested in the historical Arthur, mainly the question of whether or not there is a historical
Arthur or if he is in fact the product of bards who created him from various bardic traditional stories with a smattering of historical warriors. This story centers on the search in Wales for various Arthurian battlegrounds and burial places.
Of course while these scholars are searching for a lost hero, they are dealing with their own failures and triumphs as human beings. Some of the story deals with Welsh nationalism and English rule. I learned some very interesting things. I already know some about English and Irish clashes, but was not aware of similar problems in Wales.
The search in the novel for original sources of information about a possible historical Arthur are intertwined with the story about Siôn Cent a poet who recorded stories of Owain Glyn Dŵr a historical Welsh warrior. Modern Welsh warriors who fought to keep England from flooding Welsh towns to provide a reservoir of water for England brings in Hugh Mortimer, Julia Llewellyn Mortimer, and her father Dai Llewellyn. Donald Gladstone is an archaeologist interested in Wales in general with an interest in Arthur that seems to intrigue all Romantics who cling to the ideas of nationalism and chivalry and a golden age of knights and ladies battling evil. What I enjoyed most is that Pidgeon has refrained from turing the modern characters into metaphors for the Arthurian stories. This is a novel for anyone who is fascinated by the way storytelling has always held power and how legend and history are deeply intertwined in ways that make the past both more realistic and more nebulous than we will ever be able to know.
