Book Review - Merlin

Those that know me well will know that I am an avid bookworm (back when I worked in child development, my nickname was, no surprise, The Bookworm). I pretty much read instead of watching any sort of television (save for some movies & things on Netflix sometimes or currently Game of Thrones...but that doesn't really count because I read the A Song of Ice & Fire Series first). Because I have been reading since I can remember (I was reading before I was walking but I'm also told I was running & climbing before I was walking...hmm) I often challenge myself by visiting a library & wandering the isles until I find something strange & appealing in a slightly esoteric way & then I attempt reading it.

This is exactly what I did down at the Santa Clara City Library the other day - & then this book found me:

My first thought was that the cover really did not remind me of Merlin but, in fact, Severus Snape. I mean, look at it: lank greasy hair, hooked nose, slouching posture, worn robes sitting amidst a myriad of woodland flora. This is obviously our favorite Potions Master in disguise. Titillated, I was immediately drawn to the book (being the big, fat, steaming Snape fantwat I am) and I decided that I would find somewhere to sit & peruse the first few sentences.

The sentences turned into paragraphs, the paragraphs to chapters, & before I rightly knew, I was halfway through the book.

Apparently I had been waiting for this book my whole life & I didn't even know it.

But that's the beauty of it, really - I believe we are meant to read the exact books we read throughout our lives, in the exact order we happen to choose because we've already decided the things we would learn in this incarnation & the knowledge from certain books from certain authors is crucial, not only because is it expanding the current trail of knowledge crucial to our development at this point, but also because the authors we gravitate towards are part of our own incarnational timeline - we are all connected.

I felt immediately connected to Robert Nye's Merlin; it was an amalgamation of many other works I had read previously, almost like I had read all those things years ago to prepare for this novel.  Merlin is a raunchy esoteric retelling of the tale of Merlin & the Knights & Ladies of the Round Table riddled with blackest of the black humour, which is only really funny if you're familiar with things like The Key of Solomon the King, The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, anything by Aleister Crowley & Freud, The Necronomicon, The Kybalion, anything at all about ritual magick, every tale about King Arthur & Merlin ever, works by H.P. Lovecraft & Drunvalo Melchizedek, creation myths, and, but not excluded to, religion & the false dichotomies propagated by religion. This book is definitely not for the faint of heart, those who can't laugh at indecent japes made at religion, those who feel uncomfortable with gratuitous sex & mentions of drug use, & those that do not understand the finer points of alchemy & transformations. It was the perfect book for me.

Nye's style is very poetic - the lines on the page look more like meter with rhyme than prose, but prose it is none-the-less; poetic prose as well as darkly snarky. He uses a lot of short sentences & sentence fragments to keep you in the now of the book, in Merlin's head but also outside of it (as Merlin himself is). The story seems to be written as the events are taking place but also after the fact - time is really an illusion for the reader just as it is for Merlin. The story weaves in and out of Merlin's life - from birth to imprisonment in his crystal cave - with a great cast of characters that most are intimately familiar with: Merlin, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Uther Pendragon, King Arthur, Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, Morgan le Fay, etc. The story is broken down into four parts or "books" - Black, White, Red, Gold - signifying the alchemical process of changing base matter into gold, which is, ultimately, what Merlin is seeking to accomplish through the exploration & manipulation of the human psyche & shadow.

Needless to say, I finished it in two days. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard during the reading of a book in a long while and I'll certainly be thinking about this for some time, such was its impact on me. I would give Robert Nye's Merlin not just a five-star-rating, but a five-pentacle-rating with the pentacles covered in glitter & arranged in a pentagram formation at the bottom of a pig-stye (the pig-stye where the spider Charlotte spins her web at least) - that's how awesome this was. A diamond in the rough. A bejeweled needle in a haystack.

K.T.Trigg 2012.