Sword at Sunset - by Rosemary Sutcliffe

This book was selected by my book club and I was interested to read it, as the King Arthur stories and anything about the dark ages attract me. Here is the blurb:

For fourteen centuries the story of Arthur was a legend, misted over by the tradition of romantic hero-tales. But Arthur was real - a man of towering strength, a dreamer and a warrior who actually lived, fought and died for his impossible dream.
In Sutcliffe's now legendary retelling, King Arthur is brought passionately to life.
This brilliant reconception of the Arthurian epic cuts through the familiar myths and tells the story of the real King Arthur: Artos the Bear, the mighty warrior-king who saved the last lights of Western civilization when the barbarian darkness descended in the fifth century. Artos here comes alive: bold and forceful in battle, warm and generous in friendship, tough in politics, shrewd in the strategy of war - and tender and tragically tormented in love. Out of the braiding of ancient legend, fresh research, soaring imagination and hypnotic narrative skill comes a novel that has richly earned its reputation as a classic.

This is quite a large book, which I found daunting, but, in the end, I got through it with little problem.

Overall, the story is not what I expected. I thought that it would be a rehash of the usual tales, with the nice veneer of authenticity that we expect from modern authors. Instead, what we get is a story set in a vividly described post-Roman Britain, where life is balanced between something like the order of the Roman times and the chaos that would have preceded them.

We meet Arthur - or rather Artos - but almost all the other well-known characters and motifs are missing. We encounter Guenhumara - Guinevere - and Bedwyr, who must be the substitute for Lancelot, simply because he is Artos’ close friend and his cuckold. However, Lancelot is normally depicted as a dashing knight, not a rather ugly harper. There’s no mention of Camelot, the Round Table, the Holy Grail or Merlin. I have always felt that the world of Arthur that I have read about always seems a bit too “clean”. They are living in what amounts to a post-apocolyptic world and this book portrays that much more believably. I had visualized Author’s world as being a couple of centuries after the Roman departure, but this book takes place only decades or 100 years after they left. Artos and his people were true Romano-British and he had a clear Roman blood line, which gave him some claim to be King/Emperor.

It took me a little while to get going with the book. Perhaps the first 100 pages got me inside Artos’ head, which is essential, as that is where the story really takes place. From then onwards, it was steady going with enough pace to keep turning the pages and I was engaged to enough to care what would happen next. I have a great ambivalence to size of the book and level of detail in the writing. The author uses words to paint very vivid images of, what to me is, a fascinating world. On the other hand, although it would change the dynamic, I have a feeling that there a very nice 300 page book in there trying to get out.