The King’s Name
Jo Walton
320 pages
published in 2001
“The first I knew about the civil war was when my sister Aurien poisoned me.”
As opening sentences go, the one that opens The King’s Name is great, starting off the sequel to Jo Walton’s The King’s Peace with a bang. It’s been five years after the end of the previous book, the peace that Sulien and her lord king Urdo had fought for so hard has held all these years, but there have been some rumblings amongst the kings and rulers of the countries of Tir Tanagiri about the high king’s rule. But for Sulien there was no real indication for danger until her sister poisoned her. Luckily one of her companions was quick enough to recognise it as poison and not a sudden drunkness and manages to get her back to her own lands, which is the only reason she survived. And then she comes home and her own steward tries it too. Something more is going on than just a grudge her sister may have held against her. Clearly she needs to warn Urdo and rejoin him to fight for the peace again…
With The King’s Name Jo Walton’s histoire à clef becomes more explicitely Arthurian, with Urdo as king Arthur, his wife Elenn as Guinever and Sulien as a distaff Lancelot, with the traditional love affair not between the queen and Sulien/Lancelot, but implied between Urdo/Arthur and Sulien. It’s long been supposed that the night Sulien spent with Urdo in his command tent early in her career was one of passion rather than exhaustion, with Sulien’s son Darien as the result. The civil war, started through the manipulations of the Modred equivalent Morthu, is of course also an Arthurian theme, the war that ends the Golden Age, kills the hero-king and restarts history. Not quite what happens here and don’t think that if you know the Arthurian template you know what Jo Walton is doing here.
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