num_pages: 256
description: 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 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 a highly stylized narrative infused with Greek mythology, legend, and satire.
language: English
title: The Fisher King: A Novel
titlecomplete: The Fisher King: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)
genres: 20th Century, English Literature, Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 100
publisher: University of Chicago Press