Disclaimer: I may not be qualified to review this book because I didn’t read the whole thing.
Disclaimer to the disclaimer: If only people who enjoy a book enough to read the whole thing review it, the reviews will be skewed overly positive, so perhaps I am not only qualified but obligated to write this review.
I really wanted to love The Once and Future King. I grew up reading and loving fantasy novels (perhaps to a harmful degree; I still harbor secret hopes of discovering I can do magic), including dozens of retellings of various parts of the Arthurian story. And The Once and Future King isn’t just any fantasy novel. The front of my copy calls it “The World’s Greatest Fantasy Classic!”, a surprisingly plausible claim for gushing praise found on a book cover. It routinely appears on lists of best fantasy novels. It’s rated over 4 stars on Goodreads by thousands of readers. When I mentioned reading the book to two friends, one said it was her favorite book ever, while the other merely said it was a great book. Cornelia Funke, author of the Inkheart series and The Thief Lord, calls it her “Book of a lifetime”.
And yet looking to like doth not liking move. I am a quick reader (my husband is always flabbergasted when I read a book in a single day), but it took me months to struggle through a hundred pages of The Once and Future King. For anyone who hasn’t already read the book and decided it’s your favorite ever, here’s a recap of the parts I got through.
The story portrays Arthur as a young boy growing up in an idyllic version of medieval England and going on various adventures. Arthur harvests hay, gets lost in the forest, meets Robin Hood and his band of outlaws, and watches two gentleman knights duel (several pages of them putting their armor on, cursing each other, then whacking each other with swords, but in a quaint chivalrous way instead of a gory Game of Thrones way). There’s no obvious point to any of these anecdotes. For example, in one particularly boring episode, Merlin turns himself and Arthur into fish and they swim around the moat outside the castle. They talk to other fish and a swan. Arthur is nearly eaten by the fish who is king of the moat, but they swim away just in time. Then Merlin turns them both back into people. Was there a moral to this story? Were the characters developed in some way? Will this be relevant to the plot later? Not as far as I can see.
Then one day I set the book down and didn’t pick it back up. After over a year of the book staring at me balefully from my end table, reminding me that I had yet to finish The World’s Greatest Fantasy Classic, and how could I call myself a real reader if couldn’t finish a mere 700 page book, and what was I going to say when The Once and Future King came up at cocktail parties as it surely would, I finally came to my senses. The book did not bring me joy. And let’s be real, if a book has been sitting on your end table for over a year untouched, you’re never going to read it (the three books currently on my end table are an exception, I’m going to start reading those any day now). So, with a lingering sense of sadness and guilt for not enjoying it, I finally released my copy into the circle of life (i.e. Half Price Books).
In fairness to The Once and Future King (and in fairness to myself, for anyone judging me hard right now), I think I would have loved it if I had read it as a young adult; even Cornelia Funke said she read the book “rather late” at the age of 17. There are two problems with reading it as an adult.
First, The Once and Future King suffers from what I call “The Matrix Effect”. Anyone who was old enough to see The Matrix when it came out in 1999 or shortly after, then re-watched the movie years later, may have been surprised to find the movie much less fresh and exciting than on first watching. Every aspect of it has been done before – reality as a simulation; farming people like crops; the near-future cyberpunk aesthetic; bullet time visuals. The problem is that partly due to its originality, The Matrix was so culturally influential that many movies since then have copied pieces of it. When watching The Matrix after having seen all these derivatives, the original itself feels derivative because you’ve already seen all of its innovative components in other places. Similarly, having read many adaptations of the Arthurian story before reading The Once and Future King, nothing in the novel feels new – because all of those adaptations were based on or at least informed by The Once and Future King, the canonical modern version of the story.
(Movie purists may be mentally correcting me that The Matrix actually borrowed from many different sources, but any work is only original to a degree, so we can still call a relatively original work “original”. T.H. White based The Once and Future King on the fifteenth-century work Le Morte d’Arthur, which was itself based on older French and English Arthurian stories.)
Second, to enjoy any fantasy or science fiction novel, you must be able to suspend disbelief and accept the premises of the author’s world – in this case, an idyllic version of medieval England. Having a passing acquaintance with how terrible things were in ye olde days – constant warfare, feudalism (i.e. slavery without the racism), chauvinism, disease, religious persecution, and so on – makes that impossible for me. History aside, I’ve also seen enough dark fictional depictions of medieval Europe, or fantastical settings with an obvious resemblance, for that to be difficult.
Innocence, once lost, can never be regained – and with it goes the ability to appreciate the naïveté of a peaceful and happy Dark Ages.