PearlyBooks

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Aboard the Alecto , prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous 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 KingâGé¼'the maimed and impotent ruler of a barren country of whom Perceval failed to ask the right questions. A myth with many permutationsâGé¼'and a blurred borderland between themâGé¼'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 a highly stylized narrative infused with Greek mythology, legend, and satire.