Aboard the Alecto, prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates
on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: 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 more: a highly stylized narrative infused with Greek mythology,
legend, and satire.