Customer Reviews

One King, One Soldier

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After his knee shattered in the Korean War, Lance Porter goes to San Francisco to recover from his wounds. While in the hospital, he receives a letter from his girlfriend Ellie who tells him to wait for her to come to him because she has something important to tell him. Thinking that she is coming west because she has become a communist, he explores the Bay Area looking to see if there really are communists in Berkley where Ellie will be staying.

He meets Jack a gay poet who seems to believe that Lance is the Fisher King, the man destined to find the Holy Grail, the missing piece of the Ark of the Covenant. He learns from Jack that his twin brother Dewy, who disappeared when he was twelve years old, resides in a small Canadian town. He travels to see Dewy, who tells him that he was chosen by their father to carry out the family heritage but is abdicating in favor of Lance since death surround those who have the Holy Grail. Lance and Elle search for the Holy Grail and evade the people who are searching for it, intent on having it or kill his enemies in a holy war.

Readers who want something different in their fantasy reading will enjoy ONE KING, ONE SOLDIER. It is cutting edge urban fantasy and the protagonist must discover the truth about himself and his family if he is to fulfill his quest. This is a different archetype on the Arthurian legend, one that is keeping with modern day society. Alexander C. Irvine has written a fantastic work of speculative fiction that will change the way readers think of urban fantasy.

Harriet Klausner

I might have liked this book a LOT more if I hadn't stumbled over one, maybe two factual errors in the beginning-- that set the stage for me to wonder how accurate the rest of the book's 'facts' were:

The author refers to an "MRE box" in the Korean War, 1953 to be exact. According to my sources, MREs weren't even in development until 1966, and not deployed until the 70's at the earliest. Korean soldiers still used C-rations. Definite big-time miss.

Secondly, and not so surely, he refers to a baseball game between the S.F. Seals and the Seattle Pilots. Now, I know the Pilots had a couple of instantiations, but I BELIEVE (but am not sure) that in 1953 the Seattle minor-league club was the "Rainiers".

If you're going to do the Tim Powers "Conflate modern history with ancient myth" schtick, you have to be rigorous in your research.

Other than that, the plot seemed jumbled, the motivations poorly delineated, and the characters' actions random. Too bad, I enjoy this type of thing, but "Last Call" did it far better.

This book is really very strange, with combinaions of history, fantasy, Arthurian legends, and the myth of the Holy Grail. It goes from Korea to the United States, to Canada, Europe and Africa. There are historical characters mixed in with the fictional ones, and it's very difficult to tell when the historical folks are acting as they would have in reality. The story is quite convoluted, and keeps skipping back and forth in time, and also in place, so that your head begins to spin at times. I can't fault the writing, because it is good, but there's just too much oddity going on to rate it any higher than I have.