the Island of the Immortals

This short story (available from that link online) by Ursula K. Le Guin goes hard. In it, a traveller visits an island where, it is claimed, there are immortal people living after thousands of years of uninterrupted life. Only immortality might not be all it's cracked up to be - simply not dying doesn't guarantee anything about bodily integrity or quality of life. I won't spoil it - just go and read the thing, it's pretty short, and is a startling and disturbing angle on the theme.

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.

the Candle in the Wind

This book is the fourth in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. And boy, here is where the drama really kicks off. Knights of the Round Table Agravaine and Mordred are stewing in their bitter grudges against Lancelot and Arthur respectively, and hatch a plot to bring down the reputations of these two most chivalrous of men by exposing Lancelot's love affair with Guinevere - they kind of vaguely succeed, and the kingdom is thrown into civil war as knights of the realm as well as other regional rulers from around the country piecemeal take sides. Arthur is utterly dismayed as his ideals of righteousness and chivalry are trampled upon and shown to be worthless in the face of genuine unrest, and the Round Table falls apart. The novel ends with the King alone in his tent outside the siege of Mordred's fort, wallowing in regretful what-iffery, until right at the end he is stirred by an unknown figure entering his tent - he assumes, Mordred, come to kill him. But we have to wait for the next book to find out.

the Ill-Made Knight

This book is the third in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. Again, Arthur and Merlyn are hardly featured - instead we follow perhaps the third-most famous character from the mythos - that being the inimitable Sir Lancelot, as he attains knighthood, gains renown, wins a ton of tournaments and jousts, partakes in the Round Table (which is by now well-established) and its quixotic quest to find the Holy Grail, and falls, ill-fatedly, in love with Queen Guinevere. Despite being the longest instalment in the series perhaps the least of overall plot import happens in this one - it's a lot of fun nonethless.

the Witch in the Wood

This book is the second of T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. Arthur and Merlyn are barely in this one - instead, we largely follow two ongoing largely comic threads: in one, the errant King Pellinore continues to search for the Questing Beast; in the other, Arthur's nephews (Agravaine, Gawaine, Gaheris and Gareth) jostle for status as they await adulthood. Meanwhile, in the background, the King is working on plans to establish some means of promoting chivalry and righteousness throughout the land, by way of an egalitarian ideal embodied in the Round Table. to which he starts calling chivalrous and righteous knights to promote his ethic. The eponymous "witch in the wood" is Morgan le Fay, who shows up briefly - also, right at the end, Arthur's half-sister Morgause seduces him by way of nefarious magics to conceive with him an incest-baby who will grow up to the be prophetically-ominous/tragic Mordred.

the Sword in the Stone

This book is the first in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series - a modern retelling of the Arthurian mythos loosely based on Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. I'm planning to blitz through all five books in the next week or so because I'm actually working on a series of novels involving King Arthur and this looks like great inspiration-fodder. As usual for a series, I will be restricting these posts to brief outlines of story for each post up until the final book where I will then finally offer some deeper reflections on the series as a whole.

   Anyway - in this book we are introduced to a kid nicknamed "the Wart", who is growing up in a medieval castle, undergoing rigorous diverse education in matters intellectual and military, and is bottom of his social pecking order. Then the Wart meets a mad-seeming old man called Merlyn, who rips himself away from his hermit-life to become Wart's tutor - only these new kinds of lessons are education of a completely different style to what might have been expected. Merlyn's lessons comprise partly of lectures in the need for and difficulties of getting people to live morally, and partly of turning Wart into various animals* to see how they experience life. After a few years of this, we learn that the realm is in political turmoil due to the lack of a clear successor for king, but there is a rumour abroad that whoever can pull a mysterious sword out of a stone will be divinely bestowed with such rights. Anyone who knows the story can guess who manages to pull it out - and thus, Wart's derogatory nickname is left in the dust, and a young King Arthur starts to assume his life's work.

* Including a fish, a hawk, an owl, an ant, a goose, and a beaver - the implication is that there were probably many more such lessons that didn't get covered in the book itself. The ant and goose chapters are particularly genius feats of natural imagination.