In the best historical novels, history goes out of the window and love remains.

So it is in Rosemary Sutcliff's new novel "Sword at Sunset"—which is only theoretically concerned with King Arthur. As history, it is unconvincing. Miss Sutcliff's king has almost nothing to do with the familiar Arthur of folklore. She has reinvented him, given him a character of her own choosing and placed him outside the accepted legends altogether—in a closed world where nothing happens except at the dictates of her imagination. In this way—though the first-person narrator she presents is more mysterious than ever—he is somehow more credible than his legends.

This is not the Arthur of the history-books—the figure that scholars have puzzled over in the sparse chronicles of his time. At another level, he is not the central figure of [Sir Thomas] Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," or the more conventional hero of [Alfred, Lord] Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." This time, he is a living presence who moves in a brilliantly lit and fantastic landscape only remotely connected with ancient England. And why not? The author, we feel sure, has studied all the sources—and then, it would seem, discarded them. What remains is an expression of the purest affection for the Arthur of her heart.

The tale she tells is an odd one indeed: as rich and sumptuous as the world described in the "Mabinogion," as gay and menacing as "The Tale of Genji."… [Arthur] is always in character. He wanders across France to buy horses in Narbonne. He is seduced by his sister. He fights battle after battle against the marauding Picts and the even more murderous Saxons (who destroy entire villages for the pleasure of destruction). Though he is depicted as a man of culture, he is most at home among the Dark People, the aboriginal inhabitants of England, who practice cannibalism and weave spells and provide a shadowy background to the brightness of Arthur, Artos the Bear.

Guinevere goes into her nunnery; Arthur is crowned in a circle of seven swords; the Saxons go down to defeat at Badon Hill, and the smoke rises over the burned-out villages—it is the smoke one remembers most vividly as it clouds the landscape and suddenly vanishes to reveal Arthur in his anguish or Guinevere at her love-making, and then there is smoke again, and the passing of armies.

Rosemary Sutcliff is a spellbinder. While we read, we believe everything she says. She has hammered out a style that rises and falls like the waves of the sea—colorful and admirably suited for the set pieces like the battles and the astonishingly successful coronation scene.