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sadie_slater's review
4.0
Apparently autumn is when I read Gwyneth Jones's Bold As Love series; I can't remember when I read the first one, but I vividly remember finishing the second in a holiday cottage with a stunning view over Hastings harbour very early one morning exactly ten years ago this week (I know it was then, because we'd gone there to celebrate ten years together). I read the third last year and finished it the evening of the Paris attacks, and somehow, even though I thought I wanted something cosy and calming to drive away the fears the current state of the world have provoked, when I was flipping through the books on my Kindle last week trying to decide what to read it just felt like time to read the fourth.
I really like the series; a retelling of Arthurian legend (with, I think, a particularly strong nod to the Arthur of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset) disguised as, or transfigured into, a near-future sf fable about what might happen as the world of the twentieth century disintegrates. For a series first published between 2001 and 2006 it still feels like a remarkably plausible vision of the future (unlike her 1991 White Queen, which I also read last year and which is set in a 2038 where people still use fax machines and there's no internet), and I like her rockstar-turned-politician characters, both the central trio and the supporting cast. And actually, even though the series is about civilisation falling apart as the world collapses into a new dark age, I don't find the books dark and depressing; the world in Band of Gypsys has moved a long way from the not-very-different-to-now world of the first book (in some ways it felt as though it was set much further from "now"), generally not in any good ways, and there are deaths and destruction and unhappiness, but there's also sunlight and the English countryside and love and friendships and small acts of kindness, and the overall effect is somehow uplifting and hopeful despite the horrors of the setting.
The books are out of print at the moment, but cheap Kindle editions are available, and although I have paperbacks of the first three I bought Kindle copies of the later ones, and would advise anyone tempted to do the same thing to seek out secondhand paper copies instead - I have never read such a dreadfully formatted Kindle book, not even free editions of classics (well, there was the copy of Linda Grant's When I Lived In Modern Times which kept insisting that it was entirely in italics, but apart from that).
I really like the series; a retelling of Arthurian legend (with, I think, a particularly strong nod to the Arthur of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset) disguised as, or transfigured into, a near-future sf fable about what might happen as the world of the twentieth century disintegrates. For a series first published between 2001 and 2006 it still feels like a remarkably plausible vision of the future (unlike her 1991 White Queen, which I also read last year and which is set in a 2038 where people still use fax machines and there's no internet), and I like her rockstar-turned-politician characters, both the central trio and the supporting cast. And actually, even though the series is about civilisation falling apart as the world collapses into a new dark age, I don't find the books dark and depressing; the world in Band of Gypsys has moved a long way from the not-very-different-to-now world of the first book (in some ways it felt as though it was set much further from "now"), generally not in any good ways, and there are deaths and destruction and unhappiness, but there's also sunlight and the English countryside and love and friendships and small acts of kindness, and the overall effect is somehow uplifting and hopeful despite the horrors of the setting.
The books are out of print at the moment, but cheap Kindle editions are available, and although I have paperbacks of the first three I bought Kindle copies of the later ones, and would advise anyone tempted to do the same thing to seek out secondhand paper copies instead - I have never read such a dreadfully formatted Kindle book, not even free editions of classics (well, there was the copy of Linda Grant's When I Lived In Modern Times which kept insisting that it was entirely in italics, but apart from that).
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