The Saxon Shore

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This fourth instalment of Whyte’s Arthurian cycle is, like the earlier
ones, a detailed rendering of a sweeping epic theme. The main character
is Caius Merlyn Britannicus, an inspired leader and troubled human
being. The narrative follows his efforts to shape the domestic and
foreign politics of Camulod so that his nephew Arthur can become High
King of the Britons. Merlyn, his half-brother Ambrose, and others seem
to be constantly traveling to Ireland, the Welsh mountains, and the
eastern coast of Britain, where Germanic tribes are settling. At the end
of this book, Arthur is eight years old, and his uncle has acquired the
wisdom to be a good teacher and guardian.

Merlyn’s charisma, uncanny intuition, feats of strength and daring,
prophetic dreams, and other attributes make him a hero of appropriate
stature. The political realm in which he acts—neutralizing factions in
Camulod, and negotiating with Athol in Ireland, Dergyll in Wales, and
Vortigern in Northumbria—gives his deeds adequate scope. Whyte
presents all this with enough high seriousness to make it work, though
his style sometimes falls short of the ideal combination of elevation
and eloquence. The storytelling, as opposed to the style, is fluent and
satisfying.

The style does get in the way, however. Would a character from a
society with no geared machinery allude to gears in speech, as Ambrose
does? The characters often talk in an idiom that conflicts with the epic
tone. More substantially, the book’s epic theme saddles it with a
monarchist political theory that lost its credibility in the 17th
century and now looks too much like fascist hero-worship. At one point
Ambrose tells Merlyn that he has acted like an autocrat, and Merlyn
responds that he is a soldier, the commander of the military forces of
Camulod, and is responsible for its safety. Military dictators today
sometimes take the same line, and it is not clear whether Whyte is
clarifying Merlyn’s character, recommending an ideology, or what. He
is working with powerful materials, and his handling of them sometimes
leaves unanswered questions.