GALAHAD
Winner of the Peninsula Prize
The novel purports to be the autobiography of Arthur's most pure and noble knight. Like Mallory's tales, it is set at an unspecific period − a conflation of the Celtic and Medieval traditions − and contains deliberate anachronisms. The novel, opening in the Glastonbury region, centres around Sir Galahad - not the perfect hero of Arthurian legend, but a tarnished, amorous and bemused knight-errant. It begins with the young Galahad who wishes to become a novice monk, but gets sent to an extremely lax monastery in Dorset. Later he joins the Knights of the Round Table where Arthur orders him to seek the Holy Grail. What follows is a series of "on the road" adventures in which Galahad partakes in a distasteful blood-broth ceremony with King Cealwin, stays at Sir Bors' castle and cuckolds the pompous knight, rescues the daughter of the aeronautic King Bladud of Bath, confronts troubled spirits who haunt a pagan burial-mound, defends the honour of a mouse, meets the melancholic stag-god Herne the Hunter, explores King Lear's palace and finally, with the help of three coarse and hearty Vikings, discovers the chalice and takes it back to the King - but is it the true Holy Grail?
This month Halsgove, the Tiverton publishers, jointly with the Western Morning News, are bringing out ‘Galahad’, winner of the Peninsula Prize for 2003, written by Paul Newman, a 58-year old author based in St Austell, Cornwall, who has previously published various literary and historical titles, including ‘Lost Gods of Albion’ and ‘A History of Terror’. Newman’s book is the story of the famous knight and his adventures.
Conventional portrayals of Galahad have shown a young gallant riding forth to seek the Grail with fanatical directness. Newman’s Galahad is more doubting and tarnished. He is a knight of only ‘fair-to-middling’ purity. He drifts, dawdles and questions the value of ‘sacred baubles’ like the Grail. On more than one occasion he gets embroiled in bizarre adventures, meeting Bladud of Bath, creator of a legendary flying machine, getting drawn into an animal trial, in which a mouse is prosecuted for nibbling an ear of corn, and becoming involved with various women who distract him from his quest.
- “I think the appeal of King Arthur and the Round Table,” said Newman, “is based upon a brilliant, selfish romanticism. Knights are never stuck in one place – they’re always galloping off to meet fabulous, attractive figures, utterly removed from ordinary concerns. Vaulting obstacles, they advance towards a single goal, while day-to-day folk, who can only read about them or pay to see their adventures on the screen, are driving to work or hauling out their weekly bin bags. Most of us don’t live on castle battlements, looking out over a beautiful, wild landscape. Most of us, in fact, are in the dungeons, chained by mortgages and responsibilities. But the knights aren’t. They bound from one glorious adventure to another. All of them are honoured and admired and called ‘Sir’. It’s much nicer having a maiden say, “Sir Galahad, kindly help me remove my robe!” than a foreman shout, “Hey you, shift that pile of bricks!”