The more I read of this book, the more its flaws became apparent. As soon as Taliesin becomes a man, however, the now Lord Elphin pretty much drops out of the narrative. Elphin, I found much more sympathetic – as an unlucky youth, his discovery of the apparently magical baby and his marriage to a similarly ill-starred woman, turns his life around, and I actually found it quite moving. Actually, I always found Charis to be quite uninteresting – she was little more than a mopey teenager. The whole book constitutes the story of Taliesin’s life.Īs I said, it started off promisingly. The other is about Elphin, a young Celtic lord who discovers the baby Taliesin wrapped n leather in a weir. One concerns Charis, an Atlantean princess and her escape from the doomed continent. The story of this volume is Y-shaped – two plot threads slowly come together about halfway through. Taliesin (pronounced tal-i- ESS-in), the historical figure, was a renowned Dark Age Welsh bard, some of whose supposed works survive in The Book of Taliesin.
Taliesin is the first book of the Pendragon Cycle, a re-telling of the Matter of Britain – although Arthur apparently doesn’t turn up until the third book. Then I kept reading, and it got worse and worse, and worse. When I first started reading this book – which I’ve had in my possession for a few years – I thought it was pretty good – not spectacularly well written, but journeyman-like.
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