the Book of Merlyn

This book is the final instalment of T.H. White's The Once and Future King series - it was published much later than the rest, because, you know, World War Two provided a bit of an interruption to smoothness on the deadline front. As you remember we last left Arthur mulling over the failure of his life's efforts in his tent outside the siege of Mordred's castle; we re-enter the scene exactly where we left off, and *surprise* - the unknown person entering is in fact his old tutor Merlyn, back from a conspicuous long absence with Nimue, and keenly reintroducing himself to Arthur's life to prod the old King back into liveliness and hopefulness with a continuation of his adolescent education. So, on the eve of battle, Arthur follows Merlyn away to an underground room where many of the animals he met when he was turned into their kind are present to offer wisdom, fellowship, encouragement and insight. The passages from the first book in which Arthur is turned into an ant and a goose* are included in this book too, because of editorial changes made during the complicated publication timeline, but here these parts are couched in a much more philosophical and less comic context. Merlyn is very deliberately trying to educate Arthur in the nature of political power, freedom, conformity, authority and whatnot. As such, much of this book consists of rambling speculative dialogue about the nature of these concepts, how well they can be realised in human society, whether there can ever truly be a "cure" for war and violence, etc. It's a very thought-provoking sequence in which Arthur's experience and Merlyn's wise insight play into each other perfectly. (Not sure where else to mention this but it's niggling at me - in this book White fully breaks the fourth wall at a couple of points, obviously via Merlyn, which I found very entertainingly in-character.) Finally, Arthur accepts his fate and his legacy, and returns to the battlefield, where he later offers Mordred a truce in exchange for half his kingdom. The book closes with a series of loose sketches about the ultimate fates of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.

   So, that's The Once and Future King! Five books in one! Plus the five-in-one volume that I've been linking these posts to includes an afterword by Sylvia Townsend Warner about the fraught publication history of this series by way of explanation as to why this final book was so late that it was actually posthumous to the author. But anyway, here we go with some reflections.

   On the whole, I really enjoyed this series. I've never myself read Malory's Morte d'Arthur so I can't speak to how well this series expresses the style (I'd be surprised) or themes (perhaps I wouldn't) of the work which inspired it, but the general vibe of medieval romance is captured to wondrous heights in these novels while still being believable and inventive - I think anyone with any fondness for the Arthurian mythos** will find a lot to recognise as well as a lot to be pleasantly surprised by in them. While magic only really plays a substantive role in the first book when Arthur is being transformed into animals (and also a little bit in the second book, because of Morgan le Fay and the Questing Beast - as well as in this, the final book for the same reasons as the first) I have classified all five as fantasy novels because the Arthurian mythos kind of has that as part of its cultural identity - this is far from historical fiction. Which - on that note, one thing that did irk me throughout was the errant nature of the past setting; if Arthur was a real historical figure, he lived in the sixth century CE, whereas these stories are set vaguely between the twelfth and fourteenth. I can forgive that though as Arthur in the mythic form is an essentially timeless character and it was during that pre-Renaissance time period that romances of his life and knights etc were doing the round of England and France the most thoroughly. What added to this temporal irk was the numerous anachronisms of both Merlyn and the omniscient narration - I know with Merlyn this is explained by his "living through history backwards" (a quirk that I really kind of dislike, as it just doesn't make narrative sense, and only exists so that the wizard can quickly reference later historical events rather than having to concisely describe sets of circumstances) and with narration it's explained by the fact that this was, of course, written in the 20th century with access to a whole heap of knowledge and realities that were future-alien to the characters in the story, but in both cases these did take me out of the immersion somewhat. Having said that, I really like the writing style - White slips idiosyncratically between medieval knightly court-speak and dialect-heavy realistic speech in his dialogue, while the third-person narration is consistently direct, sure of itself, and largely sympathetic. If there is one final closing gripe I'd have with these books, it's that Arthur and Merlyn aren't in them enough, especially the second and third instalments. But Lancelot and the other knights (and King Pellinore - what a brilliant character) are thoroughly enjoyable in their own right, so I won't decry this too much. Overall a great series.

   I know I mentioned in my first post that I was reading this series as inspiration-fodder for a series of novels about Arthur and Merlin that I'm working on myself - and to be honest I didn't get a huge amount out of them for that end. I certainly got a few sharp realisations of things that I definitely did or didn't want to happen to Arthur, and ways of being that I definitely did or didn't want Merlin to embody, but overall I think the setting and trajectory of my own Arthurian stories is different enough to White's that I can just be grateful for having read and loved an intriguing original take on the mythos without having to kowtow to it much in my own work.

* Albeit in this re-inclusion the goose chapters go on a bit further - there's even a tragicomic subplot in which Arthur falls in love with a female goose, only to be yanked back to humanity by Merlyn just as this is realised.

** I will freely admit that before reading these my only exposure to it was through the old film Excalibur, the BBC series Merlin, the Netflix series about Nimue called Cursed, and the early 2000's cartoon King Arthur's Disasters. Not necessarily in that order either chronologically or in terms of impact.