The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is a retelling of the King Arthur legend told from the perspective of the women in the story, particularly Arthur's sister, Morgaine and his wife, Gwenhwyfar.  It's a soap opera in book form, taking us through several generations of war, love, espionage, and intrigue. One of the central tensions in the novel is about the rise of Christianity and a Christian king, Arthur, who has seemingly forgotten his past with a more pagan religion. The king's wife, Gwenhwyfar, is a pious, devout Christian woman who nonetheless sleeps with a man who is not her husband and would happily bear a child with anyone who could possibly implant his seed in her and the king's sister Morgaine is a pagan priestess who DOES NOT NEED A MAN TO LIVE HER LIFE.  The strain between these two women is real. This novel makes all religious people look like idiots.  This book frequently gets cited on lists of feminist fantasy novels and I read it more as misandry rather than feminism. Men get a bad rap in this novel.

I found all 876 pages of this to be a delightful page turner. The ruse that communication was challenging and that messengers would just come and dump exposition on the reader seemed so native to the world that I didn't realize Bradley was doing it until a couple hundred pages in.  The court gossip and the ins and outs of relationships was fun to keep track of.  The parallels to the real Arthur myth were fun to look for, although I don't actually know the myth super well and I was able to enjoy the book with what little knowledge I had. I though the writing was vivid and clear and I could really picture Camelot and Avalon and what it was looked like, sounded like, and smelled like.

But I read this book and kept thinking to myself that Bradley really hated men based on this novel and must have been very unhappy in life.  So when I finished the novel, I looked her up. Oh, dear. There are allegations of child sexual abuse made about Bradley after Bradley's death. It appears as if she knew about her husband's sexual assault of young teen boys, too.  Ugh. It sounds sordid.

So this is my typical plea for someone to just tell me what to do when artists I like do bad things. I am happy that I got this book from the library, so I didn't financially add to Bradley's estate in any meaningful way, but I would have recommended this book highly to people before I had read about Bradley's life.  Now I have to make a decision. Do I go ahead and recommend it with an asterisk or do I just pretend it's not something I really enjoyed?  I still do recommend Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card even though Card is a bigot and religious zealot. If The Cosby Show came on reruns, I would probably watch an episode or two, despite Bill Cosby's history of drugging women and raping them.

Do you debate this in your own head? Can you separate the art and the artist? Should you?  I don't know the answer, but it all makes me really, really tired and unhappy for the human race.

Good book, probably not a good person.  Make of that what you will.