The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King is quite an epic book; the tale of the life of Arthur and those around him. But rather than a biographical style tale, it's the tale of Arthur's moral development, and his quest for the idea of a moral form of government.

The quote from the New York Times reviewer on the back cover is very apt - "A glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but as they should have been". Mighty knights and quests and the holy grail and bravery and justice and love fill this bittersweet tragedy. In the beginning Arthur is a child, then a young man the small world of his guardian Sir Ector's castle and estate, and Merlin arrives to be Arthur's tutor. This warm and humourous start to the story becomes tinged with sadness and bitterness as the story progresses, and Arthur discovers his true purpose and tries to bring justice to the violent and thuggish world he was born into.

It's a powerful book, and a telling of the tale of Arthur that changes one's conception of the tale entirely.

There was something about the copy of the book that I read that added to the experience. It's the same edition as the one linked above, but it's very worn and beaten up; it is split in half, with several pages in the middle sitting loose, broken away from the spine. This gave the book a feeling of great antiquity; almost a sense that I was reading an artifact from the time of Arthur himself. To prevent further damage this book needed to be handled with an almost reverent care; this certainly added to the experience. As I move towards e-books and a more digital life, it makes me wonder if I'll be losing more than I thought I would by leaving paper behind. Having said that, while writing this review, I was able to pop open iBooks and download Le Mort d'Arthur by Malory, which is referenced often in The Once And Future King, occasionally quite amusingly.

In any case, this is a book certainly worth reading. If possible read it in larger doses than I did (one chapter per night - there are many chapters), so that you can a deeper sense of what is going on.