The Fisher King

ebook A Novel

By Anthony Powell

cover image of The Fisher King

Sign up to save your library

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

   Not today
Libby_app_icon.svg

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

app-store-button-en.svg play-store-badge-en.svg
LibbyDevices.png

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:

Loading...
Arthurian legend and cruise ship gossip entwine in this "profoundly touching, comic novel" by the celebrated author of A Dance to the Music of Time (Chicago Tribune).
Aboard the Alecto, prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: a graceful, ethereal, virginal dancer named Barberina Rookwood and her lover, Saul Henchman, a crippled, emasculated war hero and photographer. Fancifully, Beals imagines Henchman to be the reembodiment of one of the most mysterious Arthurian legends, the Fisher King—the maimed and impotent ruler of a barren country of whom Perceval failed to ask the right questions.
A myth with many permutations—and a blurred borderland between them—the Fisher King legend dovetails the various explanations Powell offers from his competing narrators as to why a talented young dancer would forsake her art to care for a feeble older man.
Ostensibly a novel about gossip on a cruise ship, The Fisher King is much more: a highly stylized narrative infused with Greek mythology, legend, and satire.
The Fisher King