Bliss & Blunder
by Victoria Gosling
After her debut novel Before the Ruins, a book I had immensely enjoyed in the otherwise drab weeks of the first Covid wave, Gosling returns with Bliss & Blunder, a contemporary retelling of Arthurian legend.
Set in the same Wiltshire setting of her
earlier work, Gosling casts Arthur as the founder and head of an international hi-tech
cyber security software company, Guinevere as Arthur’s Instagram-star wife Gwen,
who is having an affair with Arthur’s friend Lance, and Mordred as Arthur and
Gwen’s adopted son Mo. Other characters
from the medieval epic also appear in modern-day guises, with vengeful Faye
Morgan (no points to guess the character providing the inspiration) and a
stalker who calls himself the Invisible Knight, introducing a sense of menace.
I must admit that my knowledge of Malory and other sources of the tales of King Arthur and his merry knights, is pretty limited. But the plot itself, a genre-bending mix of thriller, love story and coming-of-age novel, can be appreciated (with some suspension of disbelief) without any deep knowledge of the source material, even if that would add further "strata" to the novel. If you’re looking for a brainy page-turner, look no further.
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