Michael Cox's Reviews > The Bright Sword

The Magicians trilogy had a large impact on me when I read it some 15 years ago. Being accepted to grad school and having to start to think about the next stage of life, it really hit home. Here was a kid that achieved or got everything he wanted, and he was still miserable, listless, without purpose.

The Bright Sword tries to recapture the tone from Grossman's earlier work, but maybe because I am much older and in a different stage of life, it doesn't hit as hard. Plus the lore of King Arthur is a far more difficult setting for Grossman's tone than Brakebills. The last Harry Potter book was released 2 years before The Magicians, the Chronicles of Narnia was only 50 years old.

As Grossman details in an afterword, Arthur has been written about for more than 1,400 years. There have been countless adaptations, re-imaginings, and alternate takes throughout that time. I've experienced a jolly Merlin, a Socratic Merlin, a warlord, a PR man, a fairy godfather, a priest, and everything in between. I think Grossman had such success with the Magicians because he introduced a brutal reality to fantasy worlds that had not experienced that treatment yet, and The Bright Sword falls a little flat since we've have already had so many mystical brutal medieval tellings of King Arthur it isn't bringing much new to the table.

Focusing on the outcasts with a 21st century view and the feeling of inevitable failure while still wrapping up the book with a near "happily ever after" just didn't have the impact I was hoping for, but it was a pleasant adventure all the same.