The Fisher King: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction) - Softcover

Powell, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226677001 ISBN 13: 9780226677002

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Anthony Powell (1905-2000) has received several literary prizes in Britain and the United States, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Annual Literary Award, and the T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing. His twelve-volume masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time is available from the University of Chicago Press.

From Library Journal:

Saul Henchman is impotent, crippled, grotesquely ugly. That he is nevertheless enormously attractive to women and a famous photographer to boot explains the interest he holds for his gossipy fellow passengers on a pleasure cruise to the north of Britain. Behind Powell's familiar world of upper-middle-class bitchery there looms, all the while, the legend of "the Fisher King," whose sexual mutilation has blasted his lands. After his widely acclaimed novel sequence, "A Dance to the Music of Time," any subsequent work by Powell is likely to appear slight. The Fisher King is deft enough, if dry by American standards; perhaps only Anglophiles will fully savor its quiet mixture of acerbity and comedy. For larger collections. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0226677001
• ISBN 13: 9780226677002
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256