And what if it’s not – just this once – about the boy?” This question comes early in Victoria Gosling’s second novel Bliss & Blunder, a modern reworking of Arthurian legend that upends Britain’s most enduring myth of noble patriarchy. Arthur is now a tech billionaire. His wife, Gwen, is a reluctant influencer, subject to online adoration and abuse. The knights of the Round Table are tech bros. Lancelot is an Afghanistan vet suffering from PTSD, best friend to Arthur and lover to Gwen. Gwen married Arthur young and now lives adrift and lonely after multiple miscarriages, neglected by her distant husband and haunted by cyber-stalker The Invisible Knight. As the novel opens, Morgan, Gwen’s former best friend, is coming home after two decades away, grief-stricken and bent on revenge.
In their small Wiltshire town, these fortysomethings have been drinking at the Green Knight since they were teenagers. The “knights” jockey for Arthur’s favour, desperate to maintain status and the status quo. Women have a choice: compliance, which either looks like flirting or mothering; or, as in Morgan’s case, exile. Her return threatens to uncover bullying, harassment and even murder buried in toxic banter. The question “You losing your sense of humour in your old age?” is enough to wither any dissent. Gosling’s prose is ironic, honest and humorous in a postmodern collage of myth and modernity, discourses colliding so that Arthur and Gwen’s adopted son Mo can comment: “Time cannot be redeemed … It is not Tesco Clubcard points.”
The breadth and depth of this canvas could bewilder, but Gosling manages her themes with a deft touch across a timeline that encompasses the 90s, the 00s and the “Right Here, Right Now”. The novel makes vivid our fast-moving and discordant world, from chemical attacks in Syria to partying billionaires demanding Jeff Bezos demonstrate how to unsubscribe from Prime. In flashbacks to the group’s schooldays, the Spice Girls sing about “girl power”, while teenage girls are primed to “mollify and appease him, think of inventive ways to distract him, to flatter him subtly if he’s minded to allow it”.
It’s this misogyny underpinning the myth of Britain, in which women are either quest objects or evil witches, that Gosling illuminates. Moving away from the male lens, the focus isn’t so much on the patriarchal backlash against feminism, which has gathered steam online in homes and in terror groups, though all are in the spotlight. Rather, the novel examines all the ways women prop up the patriarchy in order to survive, as “rivalrous and cruel … competitors for the prince. He’s got all the wealth and power, you see.”
Without characters who take up space in your mind between sittings, this could all become a series of talking points. But the entanglement of Arthur, Gwen and Lancelot is rendered with agonising empathy. Even more palpable is the estrangement between Gwen and Morgan, mismatched best friends at school, one popular and pretty, the other tormented and talented. The implosion of their relationship, representing the strain on female camaraderie, is the beating heart of the book.
Morgan realises “she knows of no epic poems, no legends, no bardic songs” of female friendship: “The record is nigh empty, as though women never adored each other, never went into battle, never fought the monster, never wept and bled, killed and died for each other, who, separated, didn’t feel the other’s absence like a missing limb.” Bliss & Blunder fills this gap, an ode to the power of women united in an incisive state of the nation novel.
• Bliss & Blunder by Victoria Gosling is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
