“I can’t keep hoping that somebody else will come long and magically make everything better. It has to be me.”

Perilous Times is Thomas D. Lee’s hugely entertaining yet thought-provoking cli-fi novel about political corruption and greed. 

Kay was a Knight of the Round Table; King Arthur’s older brother and cup bearer. He and his fellow knights agreed to Merlin’s sorcery to resurrect them any time the realm was in peril, so that they could fight and protect it once more. A noble cause. 

Mariam is an ex-student nurse and member of FETA – the Feminist Environmentalist Transgressive Alliance, not the cheese – and is bloody angry. She’s on the frontline providing help and sanctuary for women in a retention camp.She wants to actively do something about the state of the country.

Because in Lee’s near-future Britain, those in power have led the country down a path of privatisation, division, and hatred. 

He’s never surprised anymore by the new means that men dream up for killing one another. Or the new reasons.

Lee packs a great deal into this brilliant book, whilst keeping the entertainment value high enough to never allow everything else to overwhelm. There is plenty that is thought-provoking, notions of what it means to be loyal to a cause – if a cause is “for the people”, which people? He faces something of an existential crisis when he discovers the people he has fought for over the centuries do not care for the people of the realm. What good is fighting for the realm if the realm doesn’t help the people?

Mariam, is the embodiment of that anger. She is the rage and frustration of the people who want things done. The people who look to those in power to fix the problems, and despair when meeting after meeting after meeting fails to achieve anything. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her on her journey from front-line activist working in the camps to provide care and sanctuary to women, to screaming at a boardroom of representatives too focused on their individual demands to see the bigger picture. 

Lee’s characters are so relatable and well rounded. They are utterly human in their insecurities and flaws. Are we waiting for King Arthur to come back and fix it all for us? This story explores the whole Hero concept, the problems inherent in simply sitting back and waiting for a Knight in Shining Armour to come along and make it better for you. Those Knights in Shining Armour have enough problems of their own…

I absolutely loved how Lee took this story of modern socio-political unrest and dragged Arthurian legends, and also British folklore, into it. We have a brilliant cast of figures from the legends who make appearances, and I won’t list them here because it was fun discovering them! Nimue’s appearance was somewhat upsetting, appearing as a sickly, diseased figure mirroring the polluted industrialised state of Britain’s waterways. Possibly my favourite cameo was Rhiannon! The horse queen from y mabinogi was represented as a white horse (named Rhiannon so it’s not a difficult one to spot) impossibly fast who never tired. 

There is always the briefest of moments, while his skin is still curling into parchment, when he can feel the morbid wrongness of it. Like opening a must tomb and seeing the shrivelled thing inside of it and knowing that he is trespassing somewhere haunted. Except that the shrivelled thing is him. He is a living fossil, and then he is nothing, grains of sand in the wind, a bad smell lost in the many bad smells of war.

As I said above Lee really packs a lot into this story, not just in terms of thought-provoking issues and representation (particularly loved trans woman Willow being a member of the “inner sanctum for women” and the 6th century black Kay telling the neo-nazi he has a French – not British – surname therefore Kay’s called this country home longer than him), but also high-action plot with sword fights, blowing up fracking sites, and even slaying dragons. Lee’s prose is gorgeous, which is something I wasn’t actually expecting. And the book was properly hilarious; that kind of whimsical and observational humour that Fforde and Pratchett fans are going to love:

The first sign says, SECURE FRACKING FACILITY. Some kind of fortified brothel?

One final key highlight for me was Lee’s inclusion of not only Wales, but the Welsh language. So many references to the older Welsh names for places and people; it really showed, for me, the care and love Lee has for these legends demonstrated by his understanding of their roots. In all the darkness of this near-future Britain, one ray of light for me was the independent Wales! Which unfortunately was slightly marred by their obsession with coal – the mines closing was a nation-wide heartbreak, but not because of some deep-seated love of coal, but because of what it did to our economy and communities. Despite that, I don’t know a single miner who would go back underground. Added to this, Westminster’s blocking of the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon and our move towards sustainable power is a key criticism sometimes raised when discussing Welsh independence. This is absolutely me being pernickety. I cannot stress strongly enough how much I appreciated Lee’s representation of the Welsh language, and how well he did it. 

This book really was the whole package, it ticked all of my boxes; I could relate so much to the anger and frustration of, as Lee calls them, his Brexit knights; the anger was balanced beautifully by the entertainment and humour; I was swept along by the prose and the adventure and the magic… Lee has brought Arthur’s legends into these modern, perilous, times and has gifted us a story worthy of that canon aside the likes of White, Stewart, and Cornwell. A cutting commentary on Brexit Britain cunningly disguised as an utterly entertaining adventurous romp through British mythology. I do hope Lee has more up his sleeves for us…

Perilous Times is due for release 25th May. You can pre-order your copy HERE

ARC provided by Nazia at Orbit Books in exchange for an honest review. Quotes used may be subject to change. Thank you for the copy!