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.
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