I've never seen anyone (other than Tennyson) take Elaine as the central point-of-view character, and it's (literally) a revelation. Sebastian brings a distinctly contemporary sensibility and diction to the narrative, which may put off some fans of older Arthurian legends, but in my opinion makes this all the more the right Arthurian retelling for this day and age, and Elaine, a character who sees different versions of the future, the right narrator.
We live in a world with many possibilities, and too often, we shrink from them and thereby choose the wrong path. Sebastian's flawed Elaine exposes the familiar yet often unspoken rot at the core of Camelot: its inherent misogyny. Chivalry, a word used conspicuously only once in the book and then to be dismissed (by Arthur!), is a code explicitly for the control and commodification of women--and that is Camelot's downfall. It is not an accident that the villains in the straight Arthurian legend are Morgana and Guinevere--two women who could not be controlled. It is not an accident that the woman most respected from the legends is Elaine, a woman who killed herself when she learned that her husband was unfaithful.
But that is not all. Sebastian goes further. She digs out the deeper and more complex rot at the core of the Arthurian legends: the idea that some people, that one person, is more important than others. Arthur is the king, and to become king, he relies (in this book, quite literally) on his tight-knit cadre of friends. It is quite fashionable right now to tout the value of community and how no man is an island. And we see that Arthur does not gain his crown alone. And yet, again and again, he is not the one who has to sacrifice for it. The definition of a hero is the one who sacrifices for the good of the whole, and yet Arthur is the only one of the book's central characters who makes no sacrifice for his success. Instead, Sebastian makes Elaine the de-facto hero of the book, and it is Elaine who takes control of her fate, who makes the central change in the Camelot narrative, the mindnumbing thing that nobody else has even considered, even when it is so obvious in so many narratives that Lancelot or Gawain or even Bors has more going on--she stops putting Arthur ahead of everyone else.
We live in a world today where so much feels hopeless, inevitable, out of our control. We feel like we have to protect our Arthurs at the cost of everyone else, because--what will we do without a king? We are a community, yes, but some community members are more equal than others. Sebastian's Elaine refuses to accept that inevitability even as she does not escape her own fate. Rather she shows us that we can choose to meet fate for our own reasons. This Elaine is not the lady of Shalott floating quietly into the good night, but something else, lurking beneath the surface, if we only reach our hands out and grasp.
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