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Title: The Once and Future King by T. H. White ISBN: 0-441-62740-4 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: July, 1987 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (241 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Imaginative tale of Arthurian Legend, a real page turner!
Comment: I strongly recommend The Once and Future King by Terence Hanbury White to anyone who is interested in Arthurian Legend or just someone that is looking for a good piece of literature and a good read. The Once and Future King really is a literary masterpiece. The hostile world that King Arthur lived in is very clearly and accurately presented in White's book. From jousting knights to kings and queens, this book has it all, and more. This book truly illustrates the life of King Arthur and his many quests and adventures. It's diverse dialect, and intriguing stories, make the pages fly by. You simply can not put this book down. It is a story of love, adventure, deception, and chivalry, all the qualities of a great book. This book can also be related to today. Its main them of Right over Might, can be easily inserted in today's everyday problems. This book's moral is one of the strongest and most widely used in the world. The fight for justice that is displayed in this book should be incorporated in everyday life. Anyone who is willing to sacrifice a little time will truly benefit from reading this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent Themes Combined with Skillfull Writing
Comment: T.H. White's The Once and Future King is a modern retelling of the legend of King Arthur. It covers Arthur's boyhood to his impending death. The entire book revolves around the tragedy of Arthur and his grand ideas, and the central concept is that of "sin coming home to roost". It is divided into four books, The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind.
The Sword in the Stone is the story of Merlyn's tutorship of a young Arthur, nicknamed the Wart. White's use of animal experiences to teach the Wart is extremely creative. It is only in the first book that White shows us what Arthur is actually thinking and feeling. This too is interesting, since in the last three books we are reduced to guessing Arthur's feelings. White may have been overly descriptive in this book, but he is never really boring and nearly everything is relevant. This book was slow moving in places, but t was bearable because one easily realizes that, although slow, the book is always flowing toward the main point.
The Queen of Air and Darkness introduces us to the Orkney clan, of which Gawaine is the leader. Along the same lines as White's meandering style, is his use of different sets of characters that are slowly drawn together, and by the end of the story all sets are interacting with each other as one cast. White also continues the pattern he started when he showed us Arthur as a child, to show us the Orkneys' childhood. By watching the characters grow up, White is able to help us understand the behavior of the Orkneys as adults, which is crucial to the tragedy of Arthur. At the same time as we watch the development of the Orkneys, we see Arthur miles away in England, where he is finally learning to think for himself. If White had shown us the development of the Orkneys at the same time as we saw Arthur's childhood, he may have been able to spare many of his more impatient readers the boredom of watching characters evolve. The audience White wrote the book for, public-school educated English boys, was probably more able to appreciate the subtle refinements than most of the people who have posted online reviews of the book.
In The Ill-Made Knight, Lancelot is introduced to us as a friend of Arthur. I couldn't expect White to make such a drastic change in the story just to appease people like me, but all the same I was disgusted by Lancelot's disloyalty and wished the part of Lancelot and Guenevere could have been left out. At first it seemed that Lancelot had the right idea, when he tried to tell himself that his honor, duty, and loyalty wouldn't permit him to betray his friend. Though it was no fault of White's I was disgusted by this part of the legend. White's attempts to reconcile the two lovers in the eyes of people like me only infuriated me more, however. White shouldn't have tried to explain, let alone defend, the two traitors.
Although the last book, The Candle in the Wind, was where we saw the tragedy actually unfold, I thought that Gawaine's behavior was better than I had seen anywhere else in the book from any other character. It seemed that White tried to make Gawaine a character that gave the reader great grief, but I thought that Gawaine was a great friend to Arthur, perhaps not a great friend, since he drove Arthur to war with Lancelot, but definately the best friend Arthur had. Gawaine was fiercely loyal to anything he believed in, as we saw with his actions regarding his family and Arthur. White did a good job presenting characters at carefully chosen places on the spectrum. Gawaine is so loyal at times as to seem stupid. Lancelot had qualms, but actions speak louder than words and the point is that Lancelot did betray Arthur. We never heard Guenever express a single regret for betraying Arthur.
I thought the book was well written and had several excellent lessons. "Sin coming home to roost" was shown in almost every relationship in the book, most notably Arthur and Mordred and Lancelot and Guenevere. Loyalty and disloyalty were also predominant themes, and we saw the consequences of disloyalty in Arthur's downfall. Excellent themes like these distract the attention from the style and readability of the author, however, which were both also very good.
Rating: 4
Summary: A surprise
Comment: When I started reading this book, I was surprised: it was not what I expected. I thought that White's work would be a fantasy book, dealing with the magical aspects of King Arthur, the Round Table and the Quest for the Grail; I didn't know what to think when I found King Arthur was a confused and misled boy named "the Wart", Queen Guenever was called "Jenny", Merlyn was a crazed old fool and Lancelot was the ugliest man alive.
Then it dawned on me: there are literally hundreds of books dealing with Arthurian Legend. Thomas Malory's "Morte D'Arthur" is (maybe) the best known book on King Arthur. T H White chose not to re-write Malory's book, and he chose not to write just one more book about the Arthurian dwellings; instead, he wrote his own, personal account of the legend.
"The once and future king" is ironic, sarcastic, moralistic, pacisfist and defends globalization (yes, forty years "globalization" became a fashionable word). First of all, it's set on the XVth century, much later than the original time for Arthurian legends. The usual characters are present, but they are very different from what we're used to. White focuses on characters, sometimes to the point of forgeting to describe the settings and what is happening between conversations: it's almost like a play. White lets the reader's imagination run wild. In the end, as a final comic touch, Malory becomes a characters in White's book.
The strong point of "The once and future king" is that it's very original, creating a new atmosphere for a battered story - like Marion Zimmer Bradley's masterpiece "The mists of Avalon" did more recently. The low point of this book is that sometimes it is boring to the point of skipping pages.
Anyway, this book was a surprise - a good one - for me.
Grade 8.0/10
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Title: The Book of Merlyn : The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King by T. H. White ISBN: 029270769X Publisher: Univ of Texas Press Pub. Date: 1988 List Price(USD): $11.65 |
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Title: The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White ISBN: 0440984459 Publisher: Laure Leaf Pub. Date: 15 September, 1978 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: The Once and Future King (Cliffs Notes) by Daniel Moran ISBN: 0764585509 Publisher: Cliffs Notes Pub. Date: 05 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart ISBN: 0688003478 Publisher: Eos Pub. Date: 01 December, 1980 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Le Morte D'Arthur : Complete, Unabridged, Illustrated Edition by Sir Thomas Malory, John Matthews, A-M Ferguson ISBN: 1844030016 Publisher: Cassell Pub. Date: 28 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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