Book Review: The Queen of Air and Darkness
May. 8th, 2022 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI've just finished The Queen of Air and Darkness, the second book of The Once and Future King, and can I just say: THE FERAL GREMLIN ORKNEY CHILDREN *clutches face* They are horrible and I love them with every fiber of my being. The very beginning, when they're crouching in their horrible tower room with the horrible draught that doesn't even have a bed. The general fact that Morgause appears to regard her four children as an amorphous and generally not very interesting blob, as evidenced perhaps by the similarity of their names: Gawaine, Agrivaine, Gaheris, and Gareth.
I have really struggled to keep these characters straight in other adaptations: Gawain is the Green Knight guy and also Prince Valiant's friend in the Prince Valiant comics, wherein Val and Gawain often wrestle shirtless AS ONE DOES, and the others are... the interchangeable G boys? So kudos to White that, even though the G boys generally act as a unit throughout this book, I now know who they are individually and care about them, even Gaheris, whose characterization is "he was just like his brothers." This seems like a strange description given that his brothers are so different, and yet somehow it is not inaccurate.
The part where they kill a unicorn to please Morgause and she's so annoyed about something entirely unrelated to them that she has them whipped. And then Gareth takes his mother white heather "to apologize for being whipped"... Sorry, I'm just going to claw my face some more.
Anyway, there are in fact MANY things going on in this book that are not the Orkney children (althoughskygiants remarked that the Orkney children were the only part she really remembered and that seems fair). There are, in fact, two other main plotlines.
In one, King Pellinore is on a Quest with his comrades Sir Grummore and Sir Palomides, although none of them really know what this Quest is, really, they just stepped in a boat that came ashore and then floated off with them, because it looked like a Quest and a true knight can't refuse a Quest. But King Pellinore is very sad about it, because the boat took them away from the Questing Beast and also from his love, the Flemish Princess, a stout and sturdy woman to whom he refers by the romantic nickname "Piggy." The romance is actually sort of cute.
Generally, this plotline is delightfully bananas. At one point Sirs Grummore and Palomides try to cheer King Pellinore up putting together a Questing Beast cosplay, so King Pellinore can chase the Questing Beast as he has been in in the habit of doing, and then the real Questing Beast shows up and falls in love with the cosplay.
The other plotline is Arthur and Kay and Merlin putting down a rebellion of upstart princes who don't want Arthur as their overlord (including but not limited to the King of Orkney, husband of Morgause), discussing whether Might Makes Right, at which point Arthur suggests "What if we use Right to guide Might? What if we have a brotherhood of knights that all the cool knights what to join and they have to use their power to protect the weak and stuff? And also we all sit at a Round Table and have cool sigils" and then Arthur and Kay, who are after all about eighteen, get distracted and start designing sigils while Merlin facepalms, although really he doesn't have a better answer to the Might/Right question, himself.
As part of the larger Once and Future King project I found the book satisfying, but I'm SUPER curious about how this reads as a standalone, as it was originally published. (Although for all I know White edited that standalone significantly when he put together The Once and Future King, just as he did The Sword of the Stone.) I was genuinely shocked when I realized the book was almost over: I guess technically Arthur has just won his little war, but it didn't feel at all climactic, and the feral Orkney children and King Pellinore and company have been wandering around their respective plots without building toward much of anything!
Then in the final chapter Morgause takes her children to Carleon to celebrate King Pellinore & Piggy's wedding, and while she's there she seduces Arthur, and when I say "seduces Arthur" I mean that Arthur and Morgause clap eyes on each other, and then White jumps in as narrator and is all "And then Arthur accidentally slept with his half-sister who he didn't know was his half-sister, thus precipitating the tragedy which is the reason why Malory's epic is called the Death of Arthur! Here's a family tree! Look at it a while!"
When you can just turn the page and start the next book this is all very well, but when it's just flat-out the end of the book - wow! What a note to end on!
I have really struggled to keep these characters straight in other adaptations: Gawain is the Green Knight guy and also Prince Valiant's friend in the Prince Valiant comics, wherein Val and Gawain often wrestle shirtless AS ONE DOES, and the others are... the interchangeable G boys? So kudos to White that, even though the G boys generally act as a unit throughout this book, I now know who they are individually and care about them, even Gaheris, whose characterization is "he was just like his brothers." This seems like a strange description given that his brothers are so different, and yet somehow it is not inaccurate.
The part where they kill a unicorn to please Morgause and she's so annoyed about something entirely unrelated to them that she has them whipped. And then Gareth takes his mother white heather "to apologize for being whipped"... Sorry, I'm just going to claw my face some more.
Anyway, there are in fact MANY things going on in this book that are not the Orkney children (although
skygiants remarked that the Orkney children were the only part she really remembered and that seems fair). There are, in fact, two other main plotlines.In one, King Pellinore is on a Quest with his comrades Sir Grummore and Sir Palomides, although none of them really know what this Quest is, really, they just stepped in a boat that came ashore and then floated off with them, because it looked like a Quest and a true knight can't refuse a Quest. But King Pellinore is very sad about it, because the boat took them away from the Questing Beast and also from his love, the Flemish Princess, a stout and sturdy woman to whom he refers by the romantic nickname "Piggy." The romance is actually sort of cute.
Generally, this plotline is delightfully bananas. At one point Sirs Grummore and Palomides try to cheer King Pellinore up putting together a Questing Beast cosplay, so King Pellinore can chase the Questing Beast as he has been in in the habit of doing, and then the real Questing Beast shows up and falls in love with the cosplay.
The other plotline is Arthur and Kay and Merlin putting down a rebellion of upstart princes who don't want Arthur as their overlord (including but not limited to the King of Orkney, husband of Morgause), discussing whether Might Makes Right, at which point Arthur suggests "What if we use Right to guide Might? What if we have a brotherhood of knights that all the cool knights what to join and they have to use their power to protect the weak and stuff? And also we all sit at a Round Table and have cool sigils" and then Arthur and Kay, who are after all about eighteen, get distracted and start designing sigils while Merlin facepalms, although really he doesn't have a better answer to the Might/Right question, himself.
As part of the larger Once and Future King project I found the book satisfying, but I'm SUPER curious about how this reads as a standalone, as it was originally published. (Although for all I know White edited that standalone significantly when he put together The Once and Future King, just as he did The Sword of the Stone.) I was genuinely shocked when I realized the book was almost over: I guess technically Arthur has just won his little war, but it didn't feel at all climactic, and the feral Orkney children and King Pellinore and company have been wandering around their respective plots without building toward much of anything!
Then in the final chapter Morgause takes her children to Carleon to celebrate King Pellinore & Piggy's wedding, and while she's there she seduces Arthur, and when I say "seduces Arthur" I mean that Arthur and Morgause clap eyes on each other, and then White jumps in as narrator and is all "And then Arthur accidentally slept with his half-sister who he didn't know was his half-sister, thus precipitating the tragedy which is the reason why Malory's epic is called the Death of Arthur! Here's a family tree! Look at it a while!"
When you can just turn the page and start the next book this is all very well, but when it's just flat-out the end of the book - wow! What a note to end on!
no subject
Date: 2022-05-08 07:36 pm (UTC)I like their representations in Wein's The Winter Prince (1993) and Karr's The Idylls of the Queen (1982).
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Date: 2022-05-08 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-08 08:37 pm (UTC)I can think of worse plans!
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Date: 2022-05-08 07:47 pm (UTC)Arthur and Kay, who are after all about eighteen, get distracted and start designing sigils --I think this would be a good tactic for international negotiators to use, viz: you say to the warring factions, "I know, I know, I see what you're saying, but before we go any further, I think you all need to design your sigils; here, I've brought some paper and Sharpies."
Here's a family tree! Look at it a while!" Everybody: 😱
no subject
Date: 2022-05-08 08:02 pm (UTC)Who does not want to get to design a sigil and be part of the cool Round Table club? Arthur is really onto something here! What better way to get otherwise uninterested knights interested in doing good deeds than by making good deeds the entryway into the coolest club in Logres?
It's actually quite a small family tree, but nonetheless, WHO ends a book with a family tree? T. H. White, that's who. "This whole book is just prelude!" says White. "Enjoy the tragedy to come!"
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Date: 2022-05-08 08:04 pm (UTC)I'm imagining his publicist, quailing.
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Date: 2022-05-09 01:48 am (UTC)SAAAAAAAME. I confess that I also forgot the other two plotlines (or at least, in the case of the might/right conversation, that it was from this section of TOaFK).
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Date: 2022-05-09 02:09 am (UTC)I actually did quite enjoy King Pellinore's plotline, but it does seem like the sort of thing that would fade from one's mind over time, while the Orkney children would stay strong.
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Date: 2022-05-09 12:20 pm (UTC)This has haunted me my ENTIRE LIFE since I first read it as a child. They killed it to please her and it was for nothing. On the other hand almost zero memory of the questing beast lol.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-11 03:19 pm (UTC)There's probably an allegory here but it's too depressing to dig it out.