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Review: A royal 'Coalition'
By Porter Anderson
"A Coalition of Lions" (CNN) -- Elizabeth E. Wein's viewpoint is unapologetically rarefied in "A Coalition of Lions." She writes of royal succession in ancient Britain and the Horn of Africa without sentiment or awe. The result is a peculiarly stark cleanliness in this tale of youthful nobility. The second in a projected trilogy that started with the 1993 "The Winter Prince," this book is a clear-eyed extrapolation of Arthurian legend freed of jousting, round tables and swords in stones. Arthur, in fact, has died at the battleground of Camlan. Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us this happened in the year 542. Wein writes that Arthur's half-son Medraut (the Welsh iteration of Mordred) has obeyed the once-and-future-king's wishes and put him out of his misery. The journey to Avalon is at hand. That half-son, however, has disappeared and is presumed dead, as is Lleu, heir to the throne. King Arthur's daughter Goewin -- Wein writes in a historical note that Goewin isn't represented in legend -- flees the British Isles for the Red Sea's sixth-century Aksumite empire, set in the region of modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. The capital, Aksum, becomes the stage for a dance of power plays that may surprise readers with its seriousness. As the sole surviving child of the high king Artos (Latin and Greek are used by these characters for international conversation), Goewin must navigate a complex intersection of two kingdoms' politics. Arthur's crown is hers to bestow on a successor. But her father's wish was that Aksum's overbearing viceroy, Constantine, be that successor if his sons died, and Goewin is to be Constantine's bride. The way out of this diplomatic and personal jungle is as fraught as the tombs-and-tunnels escape Goewin must make to reach the great mountain monastery at Debra Damo. The intricacies of courtly claims and obligations here add up to a worthy challenge for the young-adult category of readership Wein targets. It might be helpful to start with the list of characters, some of whom have multiple names, although it's situated at the end of the text. Such familiarity can help a reader stay afloat during the bolder plunges Wein makes into a plot with several crosscurrents. The other buoying factor here is the writer's gift of admirable restraint: In both characterization and description, Wein honors her reader's imagination by providing spare clues and letting us do the rest. Even her humor is measured, as when she has an otherwise pathetically confused character meet Goewin and turn away complaining, "Why was I never told that the emperor is a woman?" When Goewin escapes her war-torn land for Africa, we read this lean line: "Three months later, I sat in the New Palace in the imperial city of Aksum, at the edge of the big fountain in the Golden Court, seeking sanctuary and waiting for an audience with Constantine." Lesser writers may have gone to many pages to impose an image of that Golden Court on us. Wein knows to step back and let us do the dreaming. And Goewin proves to be a handsomely capable figure before "a coalition of lions," a metaphor for fierce male loyalty among nobles. Wein paints the princess' aristocracy with strokes of strong presence made believable by a regal, lucid vulnerability. Of her efforts to speak with the Emperor Caleb, Goewin says: "I thought, in that instant, that I was boldly presumptuous in pretending myself a queen only to trick an audience out of this imperial and holy man. God help me, what was I thinking in coming here, how would I ever come away from this beautiful and terrible place alive, with my soul and my mind and my freedom intact? I was ashamed to be sitting before Caleb wearing his borrowed head cloth, or even my brother's crown. I lay with my face in my arms." Wein puts her most instructive efforts into the book's most layered relationship. It is Priamos, an Aksumite envoy to the court of Arthur and nephew of the Emperor Caleb, who extracts the princess from the ruins of her father's kingdom and delivers her safely to this African sanctuary. Priamos' standing at home is painfully compromised by mistrust and old grudges. Goewin's evolving, nearly obsessive affections for the man ring right simply because they are so profoundly felt by the princess. Wein cites as a historical influence on her post-Arthurian romance a sixth-century Aksumite coin found near Hastings, England. In the book, she has the emperor use a coin to illustrate the dichotomy of human rule -- the crowned king's image appears on one side of a coin, the countenance of the monarch-as-just-a-man on the other. And in a similar counterpoint, readers may note The New York Times' op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writing from Asmara of the "charming nation" of Eritrea "now turning into a thuggish little dictatorship." (Full story) Roaming royalty isn't so far from our experience, either, with Great Britain's Prince William reported to be considering a move after university to the United States, something that St. James's Palace loudly pooh-poohs. (Full story) Wein's "lions," however, are most easily remembered for confronting a rich "coalition" of competing interests and procedures. The book's strength, like its heroine's, is its determination to wrestle with complications -- and win.
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