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When First I Met My King
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When First I Met My King, by Harper Fox
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By Harper Fox
Published by the Author, 2017
Five stars
A new Harper Fox book is a great event in my life. So, if you’re looking for disinterested opinion, forget it. With this launch of her new trilogy, re-casting the legend of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, Fox tackles a hoary tale as deeply entrenched in English culture as the legend of Robin Hood. I mention that, because that story has been wonderfully treated by J. Tullos Hennig as an epic five-part series in which Robin and his lifelong love are both men.
How I love authors who can do this and triumph.
Fox’s series will clearly be less epic in scale, given the size of the first installment, but no less profound in its emotional punch. Imagine a teenager, surviving crushing loss and privation on the northern edge of Roman Briton, after the Roman empire has collapsed and lost its ability to protect its outer borders. Into this boy’s wilderness rides a boy his own age. This is no desperate third son of a shepherd king, but a golden princeling, supposed heir to a Roman fiefdom, named Artorius. Delivered into the hands of a Roman soldier by a raving old man who claimed to be a wizard, Arthur has grown up bemused and puzzled by the prophetic myths surrounding his birth. Only when he meets Tertius, known to his community as Lance because of his skill with a spear, does Arthur’s world begin to make sense.
Nobody in the world of gay romance writes like Harper Fox. Few people in the English literary world can top her beautiful language and unmatched elegance of prose. She brings us into the fantastical heart of ancient English myth, and renders it with a gritty realism that is both harrowing and poetic. This is the world of pagans just at the beginning of the long, harsh shadow of Christianity. This is a world of social and political turmoil in the wake of a dying empire. It is the world that spawned the legend of Arthur.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I have never actually read any full version of the tale of King Arthur. I’ve never even seen “Camelot.” All I’ve seen, 50 years ago, is the Disney animated film, “Sword in the Stone.” So, I approached this series with a vague, pop-culture awareness of the bare details. It looks as if Harper Fox’s Arthur will become the definitive one for me. There is no question that Fox has imbued this tale with her own sensibilities, her own pagan spirit, her own very modern love of justice and honor.
And that’s just fine. There are aspects to Arthur that already worry me. I suspect there will be things that make me unhappy. But that’s fine. Once more, Fox has transported her readers into a place they never expected to find themselves. It’s not always a comfortable journey. But well worth the trouble.