Reviews for The purple sea

The average rating for The purple sea based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-31 00:00:00 Michael Lyons This is not a book for the timid. As an anthology, one can't judge any part of it based on any other part of it, but it proves a legitimately difficult read, and speaking as someone who has made it through more than his fair share of Arthurian romance, that's saying a bit. Many of the writers therein felt that the best way to get their story across in contemporary fiction was to ape as closely as possible the clipped style of Malory himself, resulting in pompous, arrhythmic fiction. The tragedy of this approach is that it doesn't really stack. There's no sense of these stories enriching what we already have. On some pages, this is justified: Steinbeck's "The Knight with Two Swords" is his translation of the original, and the tale of Jaufrey the Knight is a long-missing epic brought to light in 1853. On some pages, it reads like fan-fiction: "The King's Damosel" goes on for days with "Morte d'Arthur" cadence. The stories make very little attempt to build a connection with the reader. They come across as indulgences. This book is one of my longer-lasting Unread - having finally gotten to it, I can see why; if I managed to open this book any time in the last twenty years, I can see myself not wholly interested. There are better stories in the Canon, modern without being modernized, which might have more than academic interest to their readers.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-20 00:00:00 Stephen Spence This is a great collection of short stories from King Arthur lore. It also has a glossary of the characters and the different names they go by, and the places mentioned in the stories.