The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-5) in 2015 Reading Challenge [Closed]

Mar 18, 2023 Mary Anne rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, series, classic

How did the fact of war begin in general? For any one war seemed so rooted in its antecedents. Mordred went back to Morgause, Morgause to Uther Pendragon, Uther to his ancestors. It seemed as if Cain had slain Abel, seizing his country after which the men of Abel had sought to win their patrimony again for ever. Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter. Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered, yet everybody was inextricabl ...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Jukka Särkijärvi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, arthurian

Writing about classics tends to be a thankless job. Most everything there is to be said has already been said. Nevertheless, I'll give it a shot.

The Once and Future King is probably the most important retelling of the tale of Arthur from the 20th century (the next two places being in my mind occupied by Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Mists of Avalon). It inspired Disney's The Sword in the Stone and that musical with Richard Harris. Its view of Arthur's childhood has more or less become Writing about classics tends to be a thankless job. Most everything there is to be said has already been said. Nevertheless, I'll give it a shot.

The Once and Future King is probably the most important retelling of the tale of Arthur from the 20th century (the next two places being in my mind occupied by Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Mists of Avalon). It inspired Disney's The Sword in the Stone and that musical with Richard Harris. Its view of Arthur's childhood has more or less become the default in popular imagination – not that there's a lot of competition.

It is also a children's book, but it is a children's book from an era before children were carefully stored in cushioned boxes to be released upon reaching majority. It's the story of King Arthur, and if you tell the entire tale (which White more or less does), there will be some pretty sordid content. There is incest, there is adultery, and of course there is a lot of villainy, violence and all that other stuff that goes along with being a member of a professional military upper class.

White's Britain is an anachronistic place set somewhere between the 11th and 15th centuries. Where, exactly, is deliberately obfuscated and the data points given are contradictory. In the first book, Robin Hood makes an appearance! The narration talks from a present-day perspective (well, present for when the book was written), at one point using an extended cricket metaphor to describe Lancelot's prowess. The anachronisms are in fascinating contrast with the very specialized terminology regarding falconry and medieval warfare that normally I would look up in a dictionary, except the dictionary didn't have them.

What White does perhaps the best of all Arthur writers I've read is humanize the knights. In Malory, many of their actions seem irrational and self-destructive to a modern reader. In White, the same actions are explained with an eye for psychology that Malory lacks. The characters are believable and human, which makes the ultimate tragedy of it all that much more powerful.

In general, White's book stands as a complementing companion piece to Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. The reader is occasionally referred directly to Malory for more detail on events, and in general, White talks of the things that Malory did not. The first two books and a good deal of the third are about the childhoods of King Arthur, the Orkney knights, and Lancelot. The entire quest for the Grail is described from the point of view of Arthur and Guinever, who kept to Camelot. The book is conscious at all times that this is just one take of the legend, which is far too great a thing to be captured or definitively nailed down by any one single work, a thing that lives through its reinterpretations in each new age. ...more

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Oct 24, 2012 Micah rated it did not like it

I got a quarter of the way into it before I came to terms with how much I hated it. I was doing that thing when you're bored with a book, where I read a paragraph, then spaced out and thought about anything that wasn't the book. It was painful. Also, possibly the shittiest female characters I've ever read, in any book from the last three centuries. Ugh. ...more

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