Lavie Tidhar

A retelling of Arthurian myth for the age of Brexit and Trump, from World Fantasy Award-winner Lavie Tidhar, By Force Alone. Everyone thinks they know the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. The fact is they don't know sh*t. Arthur? An over-promoted gangster. Merlin? An eldritch parasite. Excalibur? A shady deal with a watery arms dealer. Britain? A clogged sewer that Rome abandoned just as soon as it could. A savage and cutting epic fantasy, equally poetic and profane, By Force Alone is at once a timely political satire, a magical adventure, and a subversive masterwork.

By Force Alone

'Lavie Tidhar bears comparison with the best of Philip K. Dick' Financial Times. Britannia, AD 535. The Romans have gone. While their libraries smoulder, roads decay and cities crumble, men with swords pick over civilisation's carcass, slaughtering and being slaughtered in turn. This is the story of just such a man. Like the others, he had a sword. He slew until slain. Unlike the others, we remember him. We remember King Arthur. This is the story of a land neither green nor pleasant. An eldritch isle of deep forest and dark fell haunted by swaithes, boggarts and tod-lowries, Robin-Goodfellows and Jenny Greenteeths, and predators of rarer appetite yet. This is the story of a legend forged from a pack of self-serving, turd-gilding, weasel-worded lies told to justify foul deeds and ill-gotten gains.

Anyaconda

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This novel is extremely plot driven. It's a 9 on a scale up to 10 for being plot driven.

It lost me at the part, where the Green Knight, who's transforming from a tree into a giant man, starts wanking while thinking about snails having sex (snail antennas are also mentioned).

I am a huge fan of Arthurian myths and legends and one of my favorite books of all time is "Mists of Avalon". 
By force alone is like the opposite of The Mists of Avalon - a parody and a huge disappointment. I still don't know if some of the parts were supposed to be funny. I guess that's not my kind of humor.

The writing style takes getting used to. Sentences are short, blunt and abrupt. There are so many cuss words in this book that if I'd emptied a shot glass each time, I would have filled up a mid-sized lake. 

Women are either wenches, whores or seductresses, who are only interested in how big men's dicks are. 

Arthur is basically running his own mafia gang, stealing and selling shrooms for cash so he can upgrade his army to take over the world (which makes me wonder how many shrooms have been ingested while writing this book). 

Some ideas were great, for example the weird fairyland, Guinevere having her own band of cutthroats or Lancelot being a kung-fu master. All the little story lines felt detached from each other and it seems as if the author just wanted to include everything from Pellinor's worm, to leprechauns to aliens, to the Green Knight (which I already mentioned before) and it reads like a jumbled mess. 

The weirder the better? No.

You can still see the standard time line, but the book was way too long and ridiculous in my opinion. Reading those 512 pages was a drudgery.

What started as a promising story about violence and ambitions, taking the throne and power by force alone and not magic or prophesy as in all other Arthurian books, it fell short of what I really enjoy in a book: likeable characters (or just characters with believable motives), good dialogue, a plot that makes sense and women handled in a non degrading way.

I can't recommend this book.

By Force Alone

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