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135 reviews for:
The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to the Once and Future King
T.H. White
3.56 AVERAGE
135 reviews for:
The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to the Once and Future King
T.H. White
3.56 AVERAGE
Rating: 5 stars. This book goes back to its roots (kinda literally) with Arthur harkening back to his childhood education with Merlin, and it is both delightful and heart-breaking. I wanted to hug Arthur so much (because he deserves better), and the ending with Lancelot and Guinevere made my heart hurt so much.
Note: I do prefer Candle in the Wind as the series ending, but this unpublished finale is much more definitive, and it's still a very worthy swan song for the series. Very poignant.
Note: I do prefer Candle in the Wind as the series ending, but this unpublished finale is much more definitive, and it's still a very worthy swan song for the series. Very poignant.
T.H. White’s Arthurian saga The Once And Future King has a troubled publication history. The final volume, The Book of Merlyn, was submitted to his publishers in 1941 but was rejected as part of a collected volume due to wartime paper rationing. Undeterred, White took two major sequences in it – in which Merlyn transforms Arthur into an ant and then a goose – and inserted them into the first book, The Sword in the Stone. The Book of Merlyn was thus unincluded in later collected editions of the series, until the manuscript was discovered amongst White’s papers after his death in 1964. It was included in future collected editions from 1977 onwards, but – in order to present everything as accurately as possible – retains the ant and the goose sequences in The Sword in the Stone, while also later repeating them in The Book of Merlyn. (This is particularly notable because the goose sequence is probably the most famous and well-loved thing White ever wrote.)
It’s a bit less confusing when you’ve read it all the way through, but the funny thing is that those sequences feel a lot more like they belong in the first book, when Arthur was a child being transformed into animals all the time as part of his education with Merlyn, rather than the final book, where Arthur is whisked away on the night before the great battle with Mordred to discuss human nature and warfare with Merlyn and his council of wise animals. The vast majority of The Book of Merlyn takes place in the badger’s cosy underground den, which has the air of a cluttered library or gentleman’s parlour, as White (through Merlyn) expounds his philosophy about the wretched, violent nature of man.
Understanding T.H. White goes a long way towards understanding The Once and Future King, and my edition has an afterword discussing how the book came about. White was an unhappy man for much of his life: an alcoholic, a closeted homosexual, and a pacifist in a time of just war. When World War II was looming in 1939, he relocated himself to neutral Ireland and spent the rest of the war there as a conscientious objector. At this stage The Sword in the Stone had already been published, but it’s clear that the outbreak of WWII greatly influenced the rest of the series. “I have suddenly discovered that… the central theme to Morte d’Arthur is to find an antidote to war,” White wrote to his publisher. The Book of Merlyn expresses this more clearly than any other volume in the series; along with The Sword in the Stone, it effectively bookends the series, as Merlyn compares mankind to various animals – only now, with Arthur as an adult, he is no longer teaching him but rather discussing an intractable problem with him, to the king’s increasing weariness and despair.
The Book of Merlyn ultimately presents no conclusion on the matter, no coherent moral or philosophy, because White himself didn’t have one. He was a confused man, a man full of doubt, a man aghast at the horrors of the world, a man who tried to make sense of it all as best he could. He was a writer, in other words, who moulded his love of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur into his own unique, funny, beautiful epic, a meditation on the failures and foibles of the human race.
I liked The Book of Merlyn a lot; it’s probably my favourite out of the series. Despite a current of nihilism and despair, White brought back all the elements that made The Sword in the Stone such a success, and the result is a sweet and affecting tale of a man who tried to do his best. I didn’t always enjoy The Once and Future King, but The Book of Merlyn is a strong conclusion which serves the series well. And as for the series overall? I may not have always liked it, I may have been bored and frustrated with it at times, but I can nonetheless appreciate it objectively as a powerful and important work of English fantasy.
It’s a bit less confusing when you’ve read it all the way through, but the funny thing is that those sequences feel a lot more like they belong in the first book, when Arthur was a child being transformed into animals all the time as part of his education with Merlyn, rather than the final book, where Arthur is whisked away on the night before the great battle with Mordred to discuss human nature and warfare with Merlyn and his council of wise animals. The vast majority of The Book of Merlyn takes place in the badger’s cosy underground den, which has the air of a cluttered library or gentleman’s parlour, as White (through Merlyn) expounds his philosophy about the wretched, violent nature of man.
Understanding T.H. White goes a long way towards understanding The Once and Future King, and my edition has an afterword discussing how the book came about. White was an unhappy man for much of his life: an alcoholic, a closeted homosexual, and a pacifist in a time of just war. When World War II was looming in 1939, he relocated himself to neutral Ireland and spent the rest of the war there as a conscientious objector. At this stage The Sword in the Stone had already been published, but it’s clear that the outbreak of WWII greatly influenced the rest of the series. “I have suddenly discovered that… the central theme to Morte d’Arthur is to find an antidote to war,” White wrote to his publisher. The Book of Merlyn expresses this more clearly than any other volume in the series; along with The Sword in the Stone, it effectively bookends the series, as Merlyn compares mankind to various animals – only now, with Arthur as an adult, he is no longer teaching him but rather discussing an intractable problem with him, to the king’s increasing weariness and despair.
The Book of Merlyn ultimately presents no conclusion on the matter, no coherent moral or philosophy, because White himself didn’t have one. He was a confused man, a man full of doubt, a man aghast at the horrors of the world, a man who tried to make sense of it all as best he could. He was a writer, in other words, who moulded his love of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur into his own unique, funny, beautiful epic, a meditation on the failures and foibles of the human race.
I liked The Book of Merlyn a lot; it’s probably my favourite out of the series. Despite a current of nihilism and despair, White brought back all the elements that made The Sword in the Stone such a success, and the result is a sweet and affecting tale of a man who tried to do his best. I didn’t always enjoy The Once and Future King, but The Book of Merlyn is a strong conclusion which serves the series well. And as for the series overall? I may not have always liked it, I may have been bored and frustrated with it at times, but I can nonetheless appreciate it objectively as a powerful and important work of English fantasy.
The final book in the Arthurian series by White. The reader must see in mind that these books were written during the second world war. White explore theses like the nature of man and war. He suggests various methods of doing away with war but can find you absolute method. It gives the reader various positions and allows him to struggle with these ideas on his own.
Truly have no idea what happened in this last book? But I think I still enjoyed it.
I knew what to expect from this (it's not so much a story as a political essay), so wasn't as thrown by it as many people are when they read this after [b:The Once and Future King|43545|The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)|T.H. White|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1338741283l/43545._SY75_.jpg|1140206].
It's an interesting read, with plenty of political musings to digest...
It's an interesting read, with plenty of political musings to digest...
The Book of Merlyn tells the story of Arthur's final night on Earth in which he meets with the philosopher and wizard Merlyn as well as a council of animals to discuss the cause & right-ness of war and what man can learn from observing animals. Some points it brought up were very interesting, but there wasn't much going on plot-wise and was mostly dialogue. (This didn't bother me at all, though it may bother some!) It also tells what happened to Guenever, Lancelot, and Arthur, instead of the "cliffhanger" that ends The Candle in the Wind!
A curious coda to The Once and Future King, mostly serving as an argument against humankind’s warlike tendencies. Not critical to finish Arthur’s story, IMHO. TOaFK ends quite well on its own, and the two sections of TBoM that have been incorporated into TOaFK mean that about a quarter of this book now feels out of place. Finally, while White’s arguments make sense for who he was and the time he was writing them, not all quite stand the test of time (and, as with some moments of TOaFK, his very British colonialist/racist mind set definitely makes itself known here and there).
Some of the same wit and elegiac beauty of The Once And Future King, but it seems to exist almost entirely for the exposition of political/ideological worldview. Some great one-liners and interesting concepts, but not really great novel material. Especially for the supposed “author’s preferred ending” of such a masterpiece as TOAFK.
The saga definitely isn't complete without this entry, though it's at least 90% philosophical propaganda and (as noted in the prologue) the ant and goose episodes were relocated to the first book. So I am glad that I read this, for the sake of completion, but I didn't gain much if anything from it.