Books We Can’t Quit: The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series reviews books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.

Del Rey
912 pages, $25.84

Review by Dawn D’Aries

Once upon a summer in the mid-1980s, while perusing the shelves in a B. Dalton’s bookstore, I discovered a tome – as thick as the Bible — which granted me access to a world I had theretofore never imagined existed.

The tome’s paperback cover was intriguing: a white swan; a gold-hilted sword held aloft by an enrobed woman; a handsome white steed, its hooves obscured in mist. On the inside pages, the Prologue began:

 Morgaine speaks…

In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-woman, queen. Now in truth I have come to be wise-woman, and a time may come when these things may need to be known.

Here was a narrator who embodied all my girlhood fantasies of being queen of the woods behind my home, or a priestess who could harness the power of the wind. The novel, The Mists of Avalon, became my first purchase with the babysitting money I’d saved. Written by Marion Zimmer Bradley and first published in 1982, it is a clever interpretation of the legend of King Arthur, including the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Morgan le Fay.

I was 14 years old when I first read The Mists of Avalon and — still one year away from a sophomore-year English class reading of John Gardner’s Grendel — had never before fully understood the intriguing nature of a legend told from an entirely different point of view. In 876 pages, Bradley developed a Camelot of strong-willed, independent-minded women named Gwenhwyfar, Morgause, Igraine and Viviane. Bradley answered questions of motivation for the female characters that were not explored as deeply in more traditional myths. Her Morgaine is not only a priestess, a woman of magic, but is loyal, hungry for true love, determined to protect her family and friends. Gwenhwyfar is a survivor, a woman trying to keep her spirit alive in a world where she’s been raised to accept that she must live up to others’ expectations. The Mists of Avalon women are strong. They strive to overcome their fears and the challenges posed by men who try to dominate their lives.

And the sex. Oh, the sex that my young teenage self read about while lounging on the living room sofa in front of my parents, who had no idea, really, that I was gobbling up passages about orgies by the Beltane fires, and threesomes between Arthur, Lancelot and Gwenhwyfar.

Along that vein, there are many conservative types who frown not only on the conspicuous coupling, but also on the stance Mists takes on Christianity. Bradley clearly laments the blotting out of traditions – now referred to as Pagan or Wiccan ways — that at one time in the distant past honored the earth’s natural rhythms and revered a Goddess as a higher spiritual being rather than a male-centric God. As a reader, I could almost hear the dirge as Gwenhwyfar succumbed to Christianity, committing herself to a convent in the end.

Maybe it’s because it’s written by a known fantasy genre author, or maybe because the TV miniseries, produced too many years later (2001) was dismal, but Mists never really got the widespread attention it deserved, even though it was on The New York Times Best Sellers list for about three months. It wasn’t nominated for a Pulitzer or a National Book Award. Its length does not exactly make it ideal for discussion groups. It’s not a book that comes up in college lectures about must-read books. The people who are going to be talking about the merits of The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Infinite Jest and The Road are not going to be talking about The Mists of Avalon. Right?

Well, not quite. Over the years, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover members of The Mists of Avalon sisterhood among the academic elite as well as literary snobs. It is a secret society, united by our admiration for Bradley’s research, creativity, and ability to draw the reader into a world in such a talented way that we are convinced we can smell the smoke from the fires of the Beltane festival.  Inevitably, during a conversation about books, if a woman presses hard enough, if one of the members of the group is willing to shyly, quietly mention The Mists of Avalon as one of her all-time favorite books, at least one other woman in the group will smile with recognition and exclaim, “I loved that book too!”

For me, it is a book I revisit in snippets and sections, depending on my mood. Passages snatched here and there, like Lancelot and Gwenhywfar’s moments together. A section that begins “Summer on the hills, the orchard in the queen’s garden covered with pink and white blossoms,” is a chapter, for instance, that embodies all that makes Mists enticing: sexual tension, a sense of an ancient place and time, the constraints of Christianity trying to control the way a Goddess-loving priestess rules the Earth.

Now, if only HBO could be persuaded to do The Mists of Avalon justice in a television series, full male frontal nudity and all.

***
Dawn D’Aries is a writer and educator who did time in public relations and paid her dues as a newspaper reporter. She is managing editor of Kaylie Jones Books, an imprint of Brooklyn-based Akashic Books, and continues to hammer away at her novel, which is not fantasy.