The Fisher King
A Novel
256 pages
|
5-1/4 x 8
|
© 1986
Aboard the Alecto, prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: a graceful, ethereal, virginal dancer named Barberina Rookwood and her lover, Saul Henchman, a crippled, emasculated war hero and photographer. Fancifully, Beals imagines Henchman to be the reembodiment of one of the most mysterious Arthurian legends, the Fisher King—the maimed and impotent ruler of a barren country of whom Perceval failed to ask the right questions. A myth with many permutations—and a blurred borderland between them—the Fisher King legend dovetails the various explanations Powell offers from his competing narrators as to why a talented young dancer would forsake her art to care for a feeble older man.
Ostensibly a novel about gossip on a cruise ship, The Fisher King is much more: a highly stylized narrative infused with Greek mythology, legend, and satire.
Ostensibly a novel about gossip on a cruise ship, The Fisher King is much more: a highly stylized narrative infused with Greek mythology, legend, and satire.
"Always a master of characterization and the comic dimension of life, Powell gives us a wonderful group of characters in The Fisher King. . . . He is at the top of his form, and we can all be grateful for it."
"A profoundly touching, comic novel . . . . The Fisher King marks a triumphant rebirth for Powell."—Chicago Tribune
"The Fisher King remains a pleasure to read--knowing, faintly malicious and finally understanding. Fifty-five years after his accomplished first novel, Afternoon Men, Powell has lost nothing of his gift for acute observation or epigrammatic pronunciamento. Admirers of A Dance to the Music of Time should love it, and anyone who has wanted to read Powell but felt daunted by that imposing edifice would be quickly rewarded by starting here."
"For anyone who has already succumbed to the spell of A Dance to the Music of Time, [The Fisher King] can hardly fail to have a considerable fascination."
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Literature and Literary Criticism: Fiction
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