ome books know one thing, some are harlequins. One King, One Soldier is a pushmipullyu, one thing then another, a morality spoof quest schtick haiku fleuve. It is a tragic utterance about the failure of Homo sapiens to live in peace on Earth; but it is also a shambolic farce in which altogether too many crippled twins tangle with each other over the Holy Grail, which is probably the Dick of Osiris. It is a book that does not know if we are meant to laugh when Rimbaud turns into Rambo (we will explain in a moment), a book that cannot tell us (or chooses not to tell us) if its last pages are a signal that the 50 years that have passed in the world since have been hell and that we are in it, or if those last pages mount to nothing much more than a shovel to dig a hole to stick the Penis in till Alexander C. Irvine can raise a sequel.
In the end, almost certainly to its credit, I don't think the book deposes one way or another, Arthur or Martha. The indeterminacy of its conclusion may be an artifact of the author's failure to juggle more plotlines at once than he had hands for; but that lack of a neat resolution does chime, somehow, with the actual state of the world we have inhabited ever since 1953, when One King (which I am very eager to think has something to do with the world) stops. And although there are times we may rather wish Irvine had kept some of his balls in his pocket, there are also moments when, suddenly, the density of depicted reality increases, and it seems we are reading about One Thing.
So there is more story than can easily be told, certainly more story than a review can do more than skate over, like a clown trying to bronco-bust a beast with two heads. In the prologue, we meet young Arthur Rimbaud after his father has left him (there are several fathers in One King, One Soldier, and every one of them leaves his children), returning to Africa; a strange man comes and buys his dad's manuscripts. Rimbaud's life after he has written his poetry, a period Irvine wisely does not try to describe, will be a descant on these two engendering circumstances: the abandonment and the manuscripts; for generations, the Rimbaud family has been implicated in the story of the Grail, which almost certainly originated in Africa, though it may (or may not) actually be the bit of Osiris that Isis failed to find in her attempt to patch her lover (and by analogy the world) together again. Hence his dad's return to Africa, and hence Rimbaud's own last decade or so there, which Irvine describes over the course of the book, and his own attempt to find the Grail so he can fit it back into place inside the Ark of the Covenant (I meant it when I said there was more story than could be skated over), or maybe take it for himself, all of which, especially anything about the Grail/Ark burning villains into ash, must be meant to remind us (I meant it when I said One King was a spoof) of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In any case, like the Fisher King before him and Franklin Delano Roosevelt afterward (this is what I meant), Rimbaud becomes a cripple; though he does manage, at one point, to kill an assassin sent to kill him by (but that would be telling). But Rimbaud is not Arthur.
Better read than Red
We reach Part One. It is 1963. Young Lance Porter is invalided out of the Vietnam War with a wounded right leg into mysterious California (the reader is, almost certainly, not only intended to think Fisher King, but also Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock). He gets a letter from his betrothed, Ellie (read Elaine), who needs to meet up with him and explain some stuff. She plans to join him in San Francisco; but Lance refuses to look for her, because she has given him a Berkeley address, which (because Berkeley is full of Commies) means she has turned Red.
This is damaging to the book as a whole: After the hints we have been given of what's to come, Lance's refusal here to (as it were) pick up the reins of story does diminish the reader's willingness to identify with a character who must be acted upon because he is too dumb to follow his lines; nothing Irvine does later to transform him into a maker, a warrior, a lover, a Quester and ultimately an ambitious applicant for the vacant post of King of the world, quite manages to bridge the gap between the 100 pages we spend with Lance Goofus in San Francisco and the remainder of the book, after he has magically wised up.
These pages are all the more dislocating in that they make up the best-written part of the book, highly sustained, gripping, humorous (especially in those scenes where the historical Jack Spicer spouts reams of Arthurian lore in doomed attempts to make Lance, who has just bedded a gal named Gwen, see that something is happening here) and touching. By the time Lance is ready to become a Dictate of Story, we have fired him.
Another problem afflicts the initial pages devoted to the third viewpoint character in the novel, a baseball player named George Gibson, who, lurking in the minor leagues in order to disguise his talent, becomes involved in some exceedingly unclear events on an island off Nova Scotia, where the Grail (it seems) had been concealed at one point. (The auto-intoxicating ritual purity of baseball itself, interestingly, allows various protagonists to talk to one another, within the "sacred geometry" of a game in progress, without alerting any of the forces—Templars and Africans, Zagwe and Solomonites, and, I'm afraid, Uncle Tom Cobbley—who are attempting to gain the now-footloose Grail for their own King. More might have been made of this take on baseball, in a book twice as long.) Gibson kind of dies in the ocean, but is kind of rescued (none of this is quite clear enough as an incipit for long pages of action) by a Black kind-of spiritual twin, and conveyed to Africa with the Grail in a pouch, which he must deliver to the Ark. Gibson is in the same time frame as Rimbaud, which is where I'll leave this strand of story. ...
Time to take a look at the world
Meanwhile, Lance discovers that his long-lost twin isn't dead at all, and finds out stuff about Gwen, and about his mother, and about his father, and about the twin of his father, and the novel ends back in Nova Scotia, where all the above have congregated, along with the now-aged George Gibson, who has been imprisoned there for 60 years by Templars who are awaiting the true King, but until He comes then durst not wrest the Grail from Gibson's increasingly palsied grasp. The novel closes in a sequence of events whose import, as I suggested earlier, is dark to the reader's eye, and perhaps that is good. Perhaps it is as well that Irvine allows us to draw our own conclusions about the fate of the Grail since 1953.
Because this much can be said: When it is in the proper hands the Grail, or Penis, or Stone of the One Guy/Gal, should heal the world. One is reminded of the Talisman in Clifford D. Simak's Way Station (1963), which only works in the hands of a Sensitive, and which brings instantaneous world peace; and reminded also that the Talisman in Way Station, Simak's most explicitly Wellsian novel, is an analogue of the comet in In the Days of the Comet (1906) whose passing transforms the world into Utopia, and of the magic Pestilence Which Also Heals in The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
There is, in science fiction, a deep abiding sense—one that contradicts the surface certainties that most SF exhibited until well after 1953—that the world is too f--ked up to fix itself. I think, in the end, Irvine says the same thing. Here and there he has muffed the lines of his thought, for his storylines are too full of story that must be raced through, his backstory catch-me-ups are too frequently necessary for comfort, and his attempt to conflate African and Arthurian mythos stuff does not really work. Here and there has tried to touch all too many bases through the sacred geometry of One King, One Soldier; but, in the end, he manages to touch enough of them with his frank open urgent voice to charge us.
In the end, almost slyly, he charges us to look at the world.
