The Eagles' Brood

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

This third volume in Whyte’s Arthurian cycle is not a complete or
satisfying novel. It takes us halfway through Merlyn’s story, leaving
him and the infant Arthur adrift on the Irish Sea, with the tale to be
continued. To this problem of a middle volume in a multivolume series,
Whyte adds others. For a heroic adventure, it contains a lot of talk,
much of it about gender and religion; Merlyn’s main expedition is a
trip he makes to Verulamium to listen to a theological dispute. The
story is also heavy with romance, rather than epic, conventions:
long-lost siblings discovering each other, lavish emotions, amnesia,
mistaken identities. Much of this is hard to swallow, though Whyte does
what he can to make it palatable.

Given the discussions of Christianity and its attitudes toward women,
it is disturbing that the world of the story is almost wholly male. Two
women, Luceiia and Cassandra, are important, but the main focus is on
fathers and sons, brothers, male cousins, nephew and uncle, friends, and
military comradeship. Battle tactics, civic and military administration,
and the like are described with close attention to detail. The
villains—Lot of Cornwall, invading Saxons, Augustinian
Christians—are presented as an evil crew. Except for a couple of sex
scenes that are crucial to Merlyn’s development, this might be an
old-fashioned boys’ novel.

Merlyn himself stands out as the book’s main point of interest. He is
intelligent and charismatic but troubled and secretive, happiest when he
is hidden away in his secret valley, Avalon, with Cassandra. His
clairvoyant dreams, visions, extravagant emotions, and years of amnesia
mark him as an odd and perhaps slightly insane man. Despite the
ambiguity of the evidence, he is strangely eager to believe that his
cousin Uther is a moral monster. His understanding of the world is often
cloudy, and this book doesn’t bring him or the reader to clarity. It
raises questions that might give some thematic backbone to the sequel,
but it doesn’t have enough of one to stand by itself.