Blending Truth and Fiction – Review of ‘Taliesin’ and ‘Merlin’ by Stephen Lawhead
Blending fiction and truth can be fractious at times. Fiction is the story that hasn’t happened. Yet it can be true. We read stories of kings and hobbits, of ice witches and the Lion, and we feel the truth of our own world, of the great story of fall, of sin, of God’s redemption.
These famous ‘fictional’ tales are analogies on deep imagined canvases. They are other worlds designed to shine with the truth of this real one. But what of fiction which may have moments of analogy, or more subtle strands of truth, but be more completely a fiction? There the writer needs to tread with care. Any writer worth his salt will have felt the responsibility and the challenge in making their imagined world ‘true’ in the truest sense of the word.
To the review part of this article, of Stephen Lawhead’s first two books in the Pendragon Cycle (I’ve only read the first two of the six in the series), which tell the imagined back-story to the rule of King Arthur. The first thing to say is that there is a lot of Christian truth in Taliesin and Merlin. There is also a lot of blending between historical sources, Celtic myth, and the spread of Christianity in the British isles.
(Spoilers to come) Taliesin is a bard, found in the earliest surviving collections of Welsh literature, here reimagined as the adopted son of Elfin – another character from Welsh history and myth. They are skilfully sewn into an origin story that will lead eventually to Arthur, but realised vividly as protagonists in their own right. Merlin, is of course the Merlin of Arthurian stories over the centuries, more regularly known culturally in book and on screen. Lawhead combines the mythical, the literary, the historical, and the Christian into his reimagining in these novels, in quite dramatic and memorable stories. They powerfully proclaim the Gospel in many places and the characters discover ‘the true light’ of Jesu, in often beautifully written prose. It is so refreshing to read of these characters embracing the love of God and the truth of his Word in this historical setting, as Rome recedes from Britain’s shores, and the islands’ peoples chart their path toward Christendom.
Yet, there is also plenty to unsettle in how the novels blend the truth with a re-historicized version of Celtic culture, of druid religion, of faerie, and Atlantean settlers. Here is the challenge of how to write truly and where to draw your lines.
Too often, I have to say, Lawhead creates a kind of syncretism – meaning where two separate religions or beliefs are merged, and typically diluted or distorted in the process. Taliesin, in the first novel, taught by druids of ‘the old religion’, finds there was ‘truth’ in their teachings, which when interpreted correctly are shown as being in line with Biblical revelation. In his conversion to Christianity he is really discovering the full truth of which his mentor Hafgan saw only part. Hafgan, former chief druid, does also gladly become Christian, where other druids return to darker ways. These conversions to Christianity of Taliesin, Hafgan, and also Atlantean Charis, are indeed beautifully, convincingly, and powerfully told; and yet the syncretism that is carried over, leaves a troubling taste.
Like Hafgan and the druids before him, Taleisin takes drug-laced chestnuts in order to enter the ‘other-world’, a spirit-realm, in which a Christ figure appears to him. The presentation of magic-mushroom-like induced states as leading to godly visions and a genuine spiritual dimension, is a huge distortion of the true Biblical revelation of spiritual reality. In Merlin this continues, with the eponymous character seeing visions of the future by firelight and when his ‘arwen’ descends. The faerie-world is likewise written as real, peopled by ‘hill-folk’. This is not analogy, but part of the story-world’s co-existing depiction of reality. The pagan and the Christian overlap.
The stories refreshingly refer to ‘the great light’ – a welcome description, though in repetition it can tend to render God vague and impersonal. Yet Lawhead takes Biblical concepts of the coming Messiah and reuses them in the context of the coming Arthur who is destined to bring ‘the Kingdom of Summer’ to Britain. Salvation gathers and builds throughout the storytelling to become by Arthurian legend, and less by Christ and His grace. The Gospel salvation is sidelined, present in the narrative, but reduced to a supporting role, more complementary to the hope of Merlin’s God inspired kingmaking.
It is something all writers of fiction should face: how to show the truth of God in representations of this world; in representations of action and thought and plot; of fallen characters, written by fallen writers. How to express the blazing, unconquerable, utterly pre-eminent Truth, with a poetic, subtle touch that can softly communicate in moments, and flame in others; that can miss nothing and yet not clobber the non-Christian reader too starkly; that can show action and reaction, the imperatives of physical drama, and yet reveal the ever-present eternal, invisible meaning of it all. We all fail to see sometimes where our own stories and emphases get lost, within the stories as they are told, within our own desires and passions that do the telling.
The world is not syncretistic; it belongs to the Lord God. The Truth is His alone. History is His. It’s all about Him, even when we’re writing about people who don’t realise it. This is the challenge of fiction, and the joy of writing and reading, when it becomes stunningly and gloriously clear.