Where Rich Dudes Fight All of the Time

Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I by Thomas Malory
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dude, I was trying to like this. I thought I was gonna. I mean, I did a little, enough for a 3/5 stars. But this was not a fun read.

I was hoping and expecting something like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Tasso's Jerusalem delivered, and there are similarities. But where those have a thread or two connecting everything, this retelling of King Arthur feels much more random.

The book has no direction, no real plot, no coherent storytelling. Sometimes you know what a character is feeling, if it's a strong emotion, but most of the time you just can't tell. The dialogue is wooden and trite, devoid of emotional content. Every character, in my head, sounded like Keanu as on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Here's an exchange from Marhaus and Gawain after fighting almost all day:

"Sir Knight," said Sir Marhaus, "I have well felt that ye are a passing good knight and a marvelous man of might as ever I felt any, while it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great, and therefore it were pity to do you hurt, for I feel ye are passing feeble."

"Ah," said Sir Gawain, "gentle knight, ye say the word that I should say."

Motivations are occasionally clear, but most of the time they're opaque. They go on quests with no point. They refuse to tell their real name, sometimes. They'll fight over small things and then, on a whim, forgive huge injuries. Sometimes they act predictably, according to knightly norms, and other times nope.

And the form of the stories is super repetitive. Every story in it--since it's more like a collection of incompatible legends than a single narrative--feels like it's kicked off with generic story-starts (maiden at the crossroads crying is a favorite), has the middle bit assembled from a collection of stock phrases, and gets concluded one of several stock ways, as if the author rolled his D&D dice to decide what happened this time.

Some of the characters behave in an admirable way, and you feel like maybe Mallory is piecing the old stories together to give the impression that King Arthur's impact was to teach these knights how to be better men, to make the nobility more responsive to the needs of the people around them. That was my hypothesis partway through. But then the knights show no discernible sense of morality besides being considered a worthy fighter. In fact, almost every knight in the story is at times a horrible person.

The fighting is just stupid. So many knights fight for hours, causing horrible injuries, for no good reason, and then stop and become friends. Hey, fellas, how about you make friends first and quit fighting people you have no quarrel with? Brothers kill brothers by accident. Friends injure friends. Lots of men with promise die young. All of this is because somebody says "Wanna fight?" And then they always do. Launcelot says that "when men be hot in deeds of arms oft they hurt their friends as well as their foes." Ya think? Any ideas how to fix that, Launcelot? Sheesh.

And the setting is so weird. Story after story after story has a knight setting out and encountering some horrible knight blocking a bridge or attacking travelers or holding women hostage, and the way the story is told it sounds like all of these terrible places are about an hour outside of Camelot. Did nobody have a map? How could they all travel half a day and find castles they've never heard of with customs that are crazy? I guess this is kind of a fairyland or dreamscape where everybody apparently has terrible head injuries so that they know nothing about the country they all live in.

My recommendation, Arthur, is that you put aside finding the grail and instead have some guys do a real good survey of the country, noting castles where they kill travelers and stuff like that. It'd be super useful. Sending guys off in random directions is not a productive policy. Let's get organized!

Anyway, this was worth reading. I'm glad to get an idea of the original, or nearly original, stories about King Arthur. I was never interested in them as a kid and avoided every fantasy novel that was based on them because it seemed well picked over already. But my curiosity finally got me, and I'm glad to finish this volume. I may someday pick up the second volume of the book, but for now I have had my curiosity quenched.

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