Review by New York Times Review
PETER ACKROYD'S vigorous retelling of the Arthur legends, based on Thomas Malory's 15th-century classic "Le Morte d'Arthur," begins with a reptilian king, "a dragon in wrath as well as in power," lasciviously whispering in the ear of another man's wife. "This dragon will not bite," he assures her, but she's grossed out anyway - who wouldn't be? - and complains to her husband. Kings tend to get what they wish for, especially if Merlin is available to make the magic happen. The husband is killed off, and three hours later the dragon, assuming the dead man's shape, sleeps with the oblivious woman. Presto, Arthur is conceived, not quite a bastard, as Merlin explains, on a technicality clear only to him. The price for Merlins matchmaking is baby Arthur, whom Merlin entrusts to a rustic knight. Only when Arthur, in search of a sword for his foster brother, Sir Kay, conveniently finds one stuck in a stone, is his special destiny disclosed. Many of us view the exploits of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table through the distortions of the 19th century, whether Tennyson's sentimental idylls or Mark Twain's biting satire. More recently, we've had T. H. White's ingratiatingly verbose "Once and Future King," already halfway to Hogwarts, with Arthur nicknamed "the Wart." White's book was the basis for the musical "Camelot" and eventually, in some not quite traceable trajectory, for our fantasy of life among the Kennedys. Ackroyd has dug down through this cultural detritus to Malory's muscular masterpiece, which was first published by Caxton's famous press in 1485 and was itself a retelling of various "old books" as Malory frequently reminds us, most of them French. It may seem odd to translate an English original into English, but that's essentially what Ackroyd has done, though not so freely as in his version of "The Canterbury Tales." He calls his retooling of Malory "a loose, rather than punctilious, translation." He has also weeded Malory's "rambling and repetitive" original and "quietly amended Malory's inconsistencies," aiming throughout for "a more contemporary idiom." When young Arthur is informed that he is king of the land, Malory has him say, "Wherefore I . . . and for what cause?" Ackroyd better conveys the boy's tongue-tied shock: "Me? Why?" (At the other extreme, we have T.H. White: "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I wish I had never seen that filthy sword at all.") When Merlin tells Arthur he will be victorious in battle, Malory leaves it at that. Ackroyd adds a touch of pure Yoda: "The force of the world is with you." Sometimes, however, Ackroyd's phrasing seems almost to predate Malory, as in this Anglo-Saxon tongue-twister reminiscent of "Beowulf": "But after a bitter battle he got the better of them." (Malory writes simply, "but at the last he slew them.") Most important, Ackroyd preserves, and even accelerates, the headlong pace of these tales, where action is everything. "Now we must ride into the world and seek out strange adventures," Lancelot announces, as though such a compulsion were self-evident. A knight like Arthur or Lancelot is less a complex psychological character like David Copperfield or Isabel Archer than the sum of his exploits. Episodes with similar components (sorceresses, hermits and harts, along with the fairy-tale number seven) follow one another in seemingly random order, as if, in the words of the scholar Erich Auerbach, "from the end of an assembly line." Random, too, is the behavior of these highborn heroes and heroines. A knight can seem the flower of chivalry one moment, rescuing damsels in distress at the drop of a helmet, and a marauding butcher the next. Love is similarly capricious. Sir Tristram loves Isolde, of course - "as the old books tell us, Tristram and Isolde were steadfast in their love" - but he's not averse to bedding an earl's wife for relaxation after battle: "They made love so madly that he paid no heed to his wound." You might think Arthur would be a paragon of deportment. Not at all. Like his creepy father, Uther Pendragon, Arthur sleeps around, fathering a child, the dread Mordred, with his own half-sister before hooking up with fickle Guinevere. That marriage, as everyone knows, goes sour when Lancelot joins the Round Table. Why can't Lancelot just marry the Fair Maid of Astolat, who starves herself to death because he's spurned her? "Love must spring from a loving heart," Lancelot explains. "It cannot come from compulsion." Midway through the book, earthly love yields to heavenly love as the picaresque adventures of the Round Table are eclipsed by the quest for the Holy Grail, the fabled "cup that holds Christ's blood." We are meant to be impressed by the spotless doings of prissy Sir Galahad, whom Victorians like Tennyson considered a bit of a "maiden knight." In the earlier tales of Arthur and his court, the fairy-tale symbolism, reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm, seems mysterious and open-ended. The Grail stories, by contrast, are studded with explanations of "tokens" and "signs" of New Testament motives. "The hart you saw is a token of Our Savior himself," Galahad is informed, "whose white skin is a sign of regeneration." Images from the Grail legend particularly appealed to T.S. Eliot (the subject of an excellent biography by Ackroyd), who incorporated them into "The Waste Land." Most surprising in these tales is the frequent linkage of love and trickery. Sir Tristram thinks it's awfully clever to travel incognito as Sir Tramtrist. Lancelot wears a woman's red scarf as a disguise just "for the sport of it," enraging jealous Guinevere. Armor in these stories is always a potential disguise. Brothers kill brothers unknowingly, and fathers fight sons. Merlin, master trickster, teaches his girlfriend "how to talk to the animals of the forest, and how to still a tempest, . . . but she had grown tired of him." What do women want? Malory himself was apparently more than a bit of a rogue, accused, according to court records, of "rape, ambush, intent to kill, theft, extortion and gang violence." He seems to have written at least part of his book in prison, making it, according to Ackroyd, "a towering example of prison literature." Malory's vivid scenes of imprisonment may owe something to his own experience behind bars. There may be other reasons for the recurrent melancholy of these stories, evident in the fates of lovelorn Lancelot and Tristram. Malory may have discovered, like Don Quixote or Twain's Connecticut Yankee, that gallantry can be difficult to maintain in a changing world. "Some of the sadness of Malory's account," Ackroyd notes, "may spring from the fact that he is celebrating a code of chivalry and courtly love at the very time they were being diminished." Diminished then, but what about now? Merlin might appreciate the wizardry of mechanized warfare and unmanned drones, but what would Sir Lancelot say? In these tales, a knight can seem the flower of chivalry at one moment, a marauding butcher the next. Christopher Benfey is Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His new book, a family memoir, will be published in March.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2012]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Having successfully reworked Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for modern audiences, British editor, novelist, and critic Ackroyd (Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion) turns his talents to Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, transforming the 15th-century compilation of Arthurian medieval romances into an eminently readable narrative. Rather than precisely translating Malory's Middle English, Ackroyd renders the original's tone and spirit in modern prose. Readers will recognize Arthur and Galahad, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Isolde, Merlin, Mordred, and Morgan LeFay, the Sword in the Stone and the Lady of the Lake-portrayed with all their pride, self-doubt, flaws, and frustrations. We see knights caught in a medieval catch-22, trying to abide by a code of chivalry that was difficult even in that era. Their adventures produce enough dastardly villains, doomed loves, magic spells, and heroic deeds to equal the most imaginative contemporary fiction, while relations between the knights and the ladies they rescue, ravish, revere, revenge, or reject yield a surprising range of emotions and complications. Though scholars might prefer a more exact version of Malory's work, most readers will welcome Ackroyd's straightforward storytelling and this celebration of Britain's literary and cultural traditions. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Most of us know Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century Le Morte d'Arthur from T.H. White's The Once and Future King or the musical Camelot. This new version by Ackroyd (The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling) isn't intended to improve on White. It's a modern retelling of the central Arthurian story lines. Arthur becomes king by pulling a sword out of a stone, and he sets up a round table of 150 knights to keep order in the kingdom but is betrayed by his bastard son, Mordred. Sir Lancelot, meanwhile, acts the perfect knight, but his illicit love for Queen Guinevere prevents him from ever attaining the Holy Grail: that privilege is reserved for Galahad, who's still a virgin. Malory's basic story (with obscure language and additional details removed by Ackroyd) should seem old now, but it doesn't. Ackroyd's retelling retains the Christian and chivalric sensibilities of the original but updates the language and cuts out repetition. The result is sheer enjoyment, with notable characters and a narrative that pulls in the reader. And what tales these are-knights fighting for honor, magical potions and poisoned lances, unrequited love, and vile deceit! No one could have done it better than Ackroyd. VERDICT Not a scholarly retelling but a popular one, this story should attract an unexpectedly wide audience.-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
