Robert Nye//Merlin (Hamish)

Merlin

 

An erotic novel about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table ?
Merlin stands the medieval world of chivalry and romance on its head, and explores in a most modern way the dark unconscious side of the Arthurian myth. Here are knights and ladies - but also incest, flagellation, transvestism, and all mannor of sexual confusion. Here are Morgan le Fay and Mordred, Sir Lancelot, Queen Guinevere, Uther Pendragon, all the familiar characters from the Morte d'Arthur - but allo devils and black magie and wild surrealistic comedy. Here is the quest for the Holy Grail - but also a cup full of the whole human consciousness as it can be quaffed in the century of Freud and Jung.
Here, above all, is Merlin. Merlin the magician. Merlin the maker and master of a world of fantasy as strange as any painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Robert Nye has gone back beyond Sir Thomas Malory in mining for the `matter of Britain'. The carliest versions, the old Frcnch romances used by Malory, place far more importante on the figure of Merlin, and Nye's Merlin is truc to that tradition. This Merlin is ais archetype, a sexually ambiguous force, neither good nor evil, but'the author of good and evil in others. He is, in fact, the son of the Devil and a virgin, begotten in a deliberate attempt to create the Antichrist ... At the hcight of his powers, Merlin is seduced and destroyed by Nimue, a young girl, who beguiles him info telling her the secrets of his art and who finally binds him in a spell of his own making.
The prose of this extraordinary novel is that spelt. We sec the story through Merlin's Byes, shut with him in his crystal Gave, his cage hung beisveen heaven and helt, his place of transformation. For Merlin is allo Merlin the alchemist, imprisoned in the retort of his own imagination, his talk being to transmute the base matter of his dreams info gold. Or is it vice versa