If King Arthur had worn tweed...

For ages now I have been reading “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. This is essentially a retelling of Arthurian legend, viewed through the prism of 1950s politics and morality. It comprises of 4 books: “The Sword in the Stone”(famously adapted by Disney), “Queen of Air and Darkness”, “The Ill-Made Knight” and ”The Candle in The Wind”. The first two books are rather good, but the second two threatened to bore the living arse off me.

“The Sword in the Stone” is clever and funny (the Disney film is actually surprisingly true to the book). Arthur is still an interesting character at this point because he's just a boy and still fallible and human. Further into the saga, Arthur is just so damn good, wise and kind that he becomes terribly dull. Merlin overseas Arthur's childhood and works to instill a sense of right and wrong into him, as opposed to the standard education for a mediaeval monarch which would have been learning endless manners and protocol and absorbing the idea that you are better than everyone else and can impose your will on the peasants through violence. In some places, the writing is actually very funny with characters such as Sir Ector and King Pellinore given dialogue that makes them sound like overbred upperclass twits. In many places though, there's just too much detail on the habits of the mediaeval aristocracy. For example, I don't need an exhaustive rundown of all the different breeds of hunting dogs and the protocol for handling each. I don't need a list of heraldic animals and I don't care what the difference between lions couchant, rampant, or passant regardant is. Despite these information dumps, this book still contained my favourite moment in the whole saga:

King Pellinore has spent his whole life hunting the Questing Beast (aka The Beast Glatisant), a weird creature which has the head of a snake, the body of a lippard (lizard?, leopard?) and the hooves of a hart. It makes a noise like a pack of hounds and only a Pellinore can catch it. The years of sleeping in forests and fields begin to take their toll on King Pellinore, and he accepts an invitation from a fellow knight to stay in his castle, sleep on a feather bed and have a bit of a holiday from the Questing Beast. On a Boxing Day boar hunt, they find the Questing Beast lying half-dead in the snow – it has been pining away without King Pellinore to chase it! He takes it home and feeds it bread and milk until it is healthy, then gives it a head start and sets off after it with renewed vigour.

The second book was also a pretty good read. In this book Arthur is trying to secure his new kingdom against rebellious Scots, and old-style robber barons reluctant to sign up to his new order of niceness. As part of this process, Arthur and Merlin invent the round table to that knights gagging to fight someone can harness their testosterone and use it for good. It is also in this book that Arthur sows the seeds of his destruction by accidentally sleeping with his half sister, Morgause. And crazy, cat boiling, brother humping Queen Morgause really does steal the show in this book. A woman so deluded she offers to be the bait in a unicorn hunt, despite having four strapping sons! She may be mad and bad, but since all the other women in the whole saga are a waste of space, I can't help feeling some grudging admiration...

Now we come to “The Ill-Made Knight” which deals mostly with the story of Lancelot and Gwenevere. I have never had any sympathy for those two and nothing Mr White had to say changed my mind. Faithless, whorish people often whine the excuse: “You can't help who you fall in love with.”. Maybe, maybe not, but you definitely CAN help who you have sex with. There is no excuse for having a personal life like something from Deidre's Casebook; it is just plain sluttish. Please remember that it is only polite to break up with one lover before you move on to the next. my contempt for the protagonists made this book pretty hard going. The structure of it seems to be that somebody accuses Gwenevere of adultery and trail by combat is used to prove her innocence or guilt. Lancelot then acts as her champion and kills the accuser. This is repeated about seventeen times.

The monotony is slightly relieved by the quest for the Holy Grail. I would have liked to have more details about this but the way that the story is told is that the reader is left hanging about Camelot with Arthur and Gwenevere, getting only sketchy impressions of what happened from returning knights. One good result is that following the Grail quest, smug, virginal, boring Galahad (Lancelot's accidental son – it's a long story) becomes so chuffing perfect that he evolves into a life-form made of pure energy and buggers off... like the tedious, pixie-eared girl from Voyager.

By the time I arrived at the final book, I have to admit I had begun to skim a bit. Modred hatches a scheme to destroy the round table by waiting til Arthur is off somewhere on business, then catching Lancelot red-handed in Gwenevere's bedroom. The lovers flee to France and the Round Table broken up as some knights are loyal to Arthur while others side with Lancelot. Arthur pursues Lancelot, mostly to appease Gawaine, who's brothers got in the way of Lancelot's escape and were cut down while unarmed. There is an extended and particularly pointless battle in which people who are friends try half-heartedly to kill each other in order that honour be satisfied. Meanwhile Mordred is left in charge of England, where he raises an army of fascist supporters in black uniforms, declares himself king and tries to marry Gwenevere. By the time Arthur realises the danger it is too late – all his knights are dead and he is a worn out old man left to fight a battle he can't possibly hope to win. His final action is to dispatch a messenger boy with orders to tell everyone he meets the story of a legendary king who tried to make things better by persuading people to be nice to one another.

To my disappointment, many of my favourite bits of Arthurian legend, such as getting Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, Gawaine & the Green Knight, going to the Vale of Avalon etc. aren't in the book at all. And in all the other versions of the legend I've read, Morgause's role is played by Morgana Le Fey. That's the thing about legends, though: they're always a bit vague.

White assumes his assumes the readers will have already read Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. Maybe this was true in the 50s (after all there was no lolcats then, noPeepshow, no Heroes so people might have been desperate enough) but it certainly isn't true in my case. I have read stories of the individual knights in books of Celtic myth which I bought in the hippy crystal shops of my wild, impetuous youth. I have read “The Mists of Avalon” by Marrion Zimmer Bradley, which is told from the perspective of Morgana Le Fey, but not Mallory. Unfortunately, White seems to have left out many bits and pieces on the grounds that he'd just be going over ground already covered by Mallory. But one of my reasons for reading him was so that I wouldn't have to read Mallory!

The Killing Joke - Anthony Horowitz

When I was about 10, Anthony Horowitz was my literary hero. He was the author of the excellent Diamond Brothers books “The Falcon’s Malteeser”, “Public Enemy Number Two” and “South by Southeast”. Not only that, but he wrote many of the scripts for my favourite TV program at the time, “Robin of Sherwood”, in which the gorgeous Michael Praed romped about the forest with his flowing, glossy mullet to a Clannad soundtrack. When my sister lent me a book Anthony had written for adults I was childishly excited...

Well, no real life book was ever going to live up to those impossibly high expectations!

The premise of the book is that a man overhears a sick joke in a pub and wonders who makes these things up. So he tries to trace the joke back to its origin. It turns out that all our nation's jokes are created by a shady government organisation which is willing to kill to protect itself.

(Let me take this opportunity to reassure any readers that not all jokes are produced by the government. Some of my friends and I make up our own. This is a lot like making your own jam/cakes/clothes in that the finished product is a bit shaky, but you get a tremendous sense of achievement. Here's an example: What's Dr Who's favourite readymeal? Gallifraybentos pies! As you can probably tell, I've yet to reach the stage when anyone else repeats one of my jokes.)

Anyway, the book putters along with the hapless hero being hunted by an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman, framed for a series of dwarf murders, falling in love and finally escaping from the villains clutches at the last minute. The book also seems to have the message that although many aspects of jokes are unpleasant or politically incorrect, a life without humour would be truly unbearable.

I am not quite sure how best to express my disappointment with this book; it's not really bad, but it occasionally feels hastily lashed together, as if the author were using one of those “Solutions for Fiction Writers” books. For example: Why would someone be that offended by a sick joke? OK, let's say it was about his Mum. But why would he be a struggling out-of-work actor if his Mum's famous enough to have jokes told about her death? Let's say she gave him up for adoption – that's good enough for Gilbert and Sulivan and it's good enough for us! Except that it isn't quite. Horowitz's adult fiction,like my jokes, needs a bit more work.