Review: Kingfisher

Kingfisher by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Unusual, in that it gives us a setting that combines contemporary life as it's lived on one of the more northerly coasts of the US (I couldn't decide which one) with Arthurian fantasy, and makes it feel like it just belongs. The legend of the Fisher King and the quest for the Holy Grail are strong influences, and a lot of the names more or less subtly reflect that (notably Pierce = Perceval, Merle = Merlin and Ginevra = Guinevere, though the Lancelot character's name is Leith; we also have a Vivien and a Morrig and a few others), but it isn't just a straight retelling by any means.

In fact, it's a twisty, complicated retelling, with perhaps just a few too many characters with their own arcs. In particular, there are three characters who seem like protagonists: Pierce (son of Leith and the sorceress Heloise), Daimon (son of the king and the mysterious Ana), and Carrie (daughter of Merle), and their arcs don't mesh completely. There are also an abundance of antagonists, major and minor: the Knights of the Rising God, who take the rivalry between the devotees of the kingdom's leading god and the leading goddess too far; the maiden/mother/crone trio trying to restore an ancient semi-fae kingdom; whatever the ultramodern chef/molecular gastronomist Stillwater is; a random sorceress at one point. There are multiple factions, all of whom want the Grail and believe it rightfully belongs to them, and who are more or less politely opposed to the others. This makes for something that isn't so much a plot as a swampy river delta of crisscrossing streams, in which the Fisher King myth is strongly alluded to but ends up not being that central, partly because nothing can truly be said to be central in such a diffuse book.

The otherwise impeccable editing is marred by only three things: an occasional missing closing quotation mark; a lot of commas between adjectives that shouldn't have them; and a couple of unexpected homonym errors ("dowsing" for "dousing" and, at one point, "gaff" misspelled as "gaffe").

Did it succeed? For me, each of the individual lines of narrative worked in its own right, but the intersections and interactions between them didn't necessarily connect up as well as I would have liked, so that it ended up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. The characters were, at least, distinct, and making an Arthurian kingdom which at the same time had cellphones and motorbikes seem natural was a feat in itself. I wasn't ever clear, though, on the function of the knights in the society; I thought at first they might be law enforcement, but they weren't, and by the end I had the impression that there were knights largely because, traditionally, there had always been knights. They didn't seem to have much of a raison d'etre or a source of support. My overall feeling was that this was an overly ambitious novel that just barely worked because the author was so skilled.

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