Customer Reviews

Witch in the Wood

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Her strong enchantments fading, her towers of fear in wreck,
her limbecks dried of poisons and the knife at her neck,

The Queen of air and darkness begins to shrill and cry,
'O young man, O my slayer, To-morrow you shall die.'

O Queen of air and darkness, I think 'tis truth you say,
and I shall die to-morrow; but you will die to-day."
- A.E. Housman, LAST POEMS

"Even if you have to read it twice, like something in a history lesson, this...is a vital part of the tragedy of King Arthur. It is why Sir Thomas Malory called his very long book the *Death* of Arthur. Although nine tenths of the story seems to be about knights jousting and quests for the holy grail and things of that sort, the narrative is a whole, and it deals with the reasons why the young man came to grief at the end."
- from the conclusion of THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS

THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS is a good story if read alone, better if read after THE SWORD IN THE STONE as part of the larger work THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, and better yet on being re-read, when the reader can appreciate the groundwork laid in this book for future events. Named for and introducing the character of Queen Morgause of Lothian and Orkney, the book begins and ends with two of her spells - each involving a death, the final one ending in the conception (off-stage) of her fifth son. (Despite that, she's not a serious magician, but only plays at magic out of boredom, either directly as a pasttime or indirectly when planning a seduction.)

The book is full of beginnings that contain the seeds of endings, introducing the characters that will one day be the death of Morgause, directly or indirectly: her own four sons by King Lot and the sons of King Pellinore. However, her boys here are still children, while Pellinore (the kindly and dotty old boy from THE SWORD IN THE STONE obsessed with chasing the Questing Beast) has just fallen in love with a princess he wants to marry. Arthur and Kay, far away at Camelot, are curious about her and her husband since Lot has joined a rebelling against Arthur (who is his overlord), so even their scenes with Merlin lay groundwork about her.

Morgause herself doesn't take center stage very often; she's self-centered, and doesn't seem to consider anything or anyone except in relation to herself. Her first spell, involving the very cruel killing of a cat to help her become invisible, simply provides an excuse for constantly examining herself in a mirror. All her interactions with other people seem to follow this pattern, seeking to see herself reflected in their adoration if she looks at them at all. The characters who are active players in the story are her four older sons, King Pellinore and his companions, and Arthur with Kay and Merlin. The action takes place mainly at Morgause's castle at Orkney or at Camelot.

This book is where White begins dealing with events directly from the text of Malory's LE MORTE D'ARTHUR, though he manages to breathe life into them more than Malory has ever done for me. This book covers the earliest part of Malory's text, the wars just after Arthur's coronation, before the foundation of the Round Table, while Lancelot is still just a page at court and Guenevere is barely a name to Arthur, the unknown daughter of another king.

The story opens with Morgause's four sons telling to each other as a bedtime story their mother's version of the feud between Arthur's father and their mother's family: Uther's pursuit of the Duchess of Cornwall, their grandmother. One can see that the boys are who they are partly in reaction to their mother - and that they tend to act as a unit even as they differ from one another: Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth. On one level, they're half-wild neglected kids who'll pester a friendly local religious for stories and kidnap a young kitchenmaid as bait for unicorns (they hope to impress their mother by catching one), while on another the reader can see what kind of men they'll grow into. While there are a lot of light-hearted moments, relatively few of them involve the young sons of Lot; they've grown up with too much casual cruelty for their childhood to resemble Arthur's as depicted in THE SWORD IN THE STONE. Much of the fun comes from watching Pellinore and his friends literally drift into the Orkneys on a magic barge - they have no idea there's a war on, and they're too daft (in a nice way) to notice when Morgause attempts to seduce them. Even as Merlin explains the history of the long feuds between the Gaels and the Galls to Arthur and Kay at Camelot - the Norman overlords as represented by Arthur and (ironically) the Gaels' own kings - we see the results demonstrated by the common people of Morgause's lands and their prejudiced reaction to Pellinore and his friends. Only time eventually tells whether Pellinore, Palomides, and Grummore will be accepted, or whether Arthur can solve the greater problem of making peace after winning his war.

"Tally-ho, Sir Palomides."
"Tantivvy, tantivvy, tantivvy, a-questing we will go!"

This novels is written for adults, or at least for much older children than those who love the first book in the series, The Sword in the Stone. It includes some very grim scenes, particularly the slaughter of the unicorn. It is one of the great fantasy novels, and is roughly twice as long as the version edited to appear in The Once and Future King. It is the second of five books in T. H. White's classic Arthurian romance. My recommendation is to read at least the first two books in their original form, instead of the much altered version in TOAFK.