Perilous Times

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Thank you to Netgalley and Ballantine for providing an ARC copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I love the Arthurian Legend. I have since I was little and first watched the miniseries with Sam Neill as Merlin. I gobbled that show up, and then Camelot the musical, then Disney's Sword in the Stone, then Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and well, you see where I'm going with this. Any opportunity to dive into a different version of this tale, and I'm all in. Perilous Times seemed like it would be right up my alley, and yep. It totally was.

Perilous Times borrows familiar characters from the Arthurian legend, but definitely isn't a retelling or spinoff or anything like that. You see, a long, long time ago, the original Arthurian Legend happened. And then Merlin did some magicy-things, and made them all immortal. All the knights would never permanently die — instead, they would sleep under their trees, and awaken when the realm was in peril. This means, of course, that they've been woken up quite a lot over the course of their thousand plus years of existing. But this time, this time something is seriously different.

Our three main characters are Sir Kay, Sir Lancelot, and Mariam, an eco-terrorist. That sounds scary, but really what she's trying to do is save the environment. And if that means blowing up a few oil rigs, than dammit she's going to do it. Mariam was willing to do what needed to be done, and she was really tired of all the talking, organizing, and meetings. You will spend most of this book frustrated because it feels so real. It's not a bad frustration — it's one that will remind you of how the real world is. How irritated you get when you see your government actively working against moving forward, against changing for the better. Lee did a fantastic job weaving in the reality of our world with the fantastic of this world.

The Britain that the book is set in is dying. It's a wasteland, a polluted, horrible mess. People are dying, starving, sick, and tempers are now hair-trigger. It's not a nice place Lee has set his novel in, but wow does he put this to the best possible use. He does an absolutely excellent job describing how awful everything has become, and putting us in Kay's eyes as he sees how the world has changed is just perfect. Kay is tired. He's over a thousand years old at this point, and he's damn tired of having to wake up and kill people again. He doesn't want to. He wants to sleep his eternal rest, and see his wife again. Mariam gets frustrated with Kay, because he's so wishy washy about wanting to help. Understandable, but really what is a Knight of the Round Table supposed to do against global warming?

Lancelot was fascinating. Lee writes him as a gay man who would rather follow orders than question them. He's a bit smarmy, a bit egotistical, and a lot totally over his head. While I really disliked him almost the entire novel — I think you're supposed to — I enjoyed reading his chapters because they were always interesting. He was always doing something that you didn't want him to do. It felt like watching a car crash.

And then there's Arthur. Whatever preconceived notion you have of the King just gets thrown out the window. I wasn't the biggest fan of his characterization in Perilous Times, but it really worked for the book. I prefer my Arthurs Good with a capital G, but this one wasn't. He was a brute. A cruel, brute who thought he was better than everyone else. Not my preference, but again, it really worked here. We also see Morgana, Nimue, and Merlin, but I'm not spoiling when they show up.

I don't want to spoil the main plot, because it's more interesting to just sort of fall into it. But it's done well, and it's rather easy to follow. Perilous Times would have ranked a full 5 stars for me, but the ending felt a little rushed, and not in a good way. It just felt short — I would have liked a little more explanation of what exactly was going on, but instead it was extremely vague. Overall, though, Perilous Times was fantastic.