Arthur the King - Hardcover

Massie, Allan

3.22

257 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786713844 ISBN 13: 9780786713844

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2004

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At the top of his form, historical novelist Allan Massie revisits Britain in the dark years after the collapse of Rome, when the land is being ravaged by bitter struggles for power among warring kings. Or so it is until the arrival of Wart, a servant boy who has been tutored by a troupe of strolling players as well as by the politically astute magus Merlin. Reinventing old stories like that of the sword in the stone, Massie replaces the magic in Merlin’s wondrous deeds with natural philosophy. In the often-incredible stuff of Arthurian legend and sixth-century history, Massie seeks out more mythic truths as romance confronts unheroic realities in Wart’s transformation into the statesman-king Arthur. In Massie’s tale, too, Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere is a matter of political convenience. Lancelot is a sickly neurotic with little sense of honor. Mordred hides behind religious piety as he undermines Arthur’s kingdom with a military dictatorship. An increasingly troubled and isolated monarch—as unsympathetic to his thuggish knights’ lust for battle as he is to their quest for the Holy Grail—Arthur does have one long-loyal friend. His name is Cal—a common man blessed with common sense—and an invention of Massie’s brilliant own mind.

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About the Author:

Allan Massie is the author of seventeen highly praised novels, as well as non-fiction works on Muriel Spark, a study of twelve emperors of ancient Rome, a history of crime in 19th-century Edinburgh and the acclaimed GLASGOW: PORTRAITS OF A CITY. He was brought up in Aberdeenshire and educated at Glenalmond School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a judge of the Booker Prize. He is also a journalist, contributing to the Scottish and English press. He is married, has three children and lives in the Scottish Borders.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this second volume of his historical trilogy (after The Evening of the World, set in the dying days of the Roman Empire), Massie presents a cheerily erudite deconstruction and retelling of the Arthurian legend. The linear events of the narrative are familiar: as a young boy, Arthur is schooled by Merlin, then claims the throne of England by pulling the sword Excalibur from its stone. Massie's version, however, fashions alternate histories for familiar characters (chronicling, for example, Merlin's wretched childhood and describing the twisted use he makes of his powers) and takes a playful, humorous tone ("Nor was Arthur enamored of mathematics, even though Merlin took great joy in that subject and excelled (as he supposed) in expounding it"). Once crowned king, Arthur is portrayed as a strategist and statesman whose marriage to the Saxon maiden Guinevere is one of convenience; his true love is his half-sister, Morgan le Fay, and he has a fondness for pretty youths (as does Merlin). Similarly, the machinations of the Knights of the Round Table are seen as a series of political maneuvers, particularly when the knights jockey for position as the quest for the Grail begins. Readers looking for the standard heroic take may be disappointed, but those of "a speculative and skeptical turn of mind, which takes nothing on trust or unexamined" will appreciate this bracing chronicle.
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