For me, maybe the best thing about reading T.H. White's The Once and Future King is that it holds out the promise that I can look forward to many more great books that I have "missed" along my way. (Also, I can't imagine it being more rewarding than it was by my reading it in my 58th year. We were ready for each other!)
It is wonderfully authentic and beautiful in its recreation of Arthurian settings and daily life, landscape and dress. The period vocabulary for bringing-to-life its lost arts is relentless and unapologetically sustained until we accept it and know it as our own. White's genius, though, is establishing within that distant theater, entirely human characters that we believe, care about, and learn through. That he reminds us now again through contemporary analogies and metaphors that this is storytelling becomes part of the magic that we accept, like unicorns and griffins, amid the heart-breaking collapse of hopes and lives. It is at moments silly and playful, at others, wise and profound.
I will tell you, frankly, that several times it brought me to the very edge of all that reading can be.
So read it, or read it again. Merlyn will take you there and bring you back.
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