Book Review: The Idylls of the Queen

[osprey_archer]

troisoiseaux kindly consented to join in my Arthurian quest by reading Phyllis Ann Karr’s The Idylls of the Queen with me (companion review over here), which turns out to be an amazing book to read in conjunction with T. H. White’s Once and Future King. In some ways the two books are doing the same thing, rewriting Malory as a modern novel while keeping the action basically the same, but they’re approaching that task from totally different angles.

Karr focuses on a single incident, when a knight dies from eating a poisoned apple at Queen Guenevere’s banquet, and the queen is accused of the murder. Kay, the seneschal, sets out ostensibly in hopes of finding Lancelot to fight as the queen’s champion, but actually in hopes of finding out who really poisoned the apples and therefore saving the queen himself.

Kay, you see, is madly in love with the queen, a choice that puzzled me at first, but actually I think it works really well: this love gives him a streak of idealism which leavens the biting, sardonic sarcasm with which he approaches almost everyone else, apparently on the theory that no one can reject you if you reject them first. He is, as he informs us with a warped sort of pride, the most churlish knight of the Round Table.

Because no one else wants to ride with Kay, he rides out on this quest with Mordred, ALSO one of the least-liked knights of the Round Table. Actually, insofar as he likes anyone (aside from his beloved queen, of course), Kay seems to like Mordred, and even to be sort of happy that they’re going on this quest together, even if Mordred DOES like to rile him up by suggesting the queen might be guilty, apparently for no better reason than Kay gets mad as a hornet every single time.

Mordred, as we discover, is acting out because it is prophesied that he will destroy Camelot, and he’s kind of sort of hoping that one of the other knights will kill him before he does. This shouldn’t be too hard, because the knights are very murdery! incredibly easily riled! just killing each other all the time! and yet they just won’t kill him.

Just as in Elizabeth Wein’s The Winter Prince, Mordred is described as having light hair, but unfortunately in both cases I am incapable of envisioning him with anything but shaggy dark emo hair that falls in his eyes in a perfectly cut slanting bang. He is also supposedly almost forty(!) and has a son (!!) but troisoiseaux and I agreed that it’s impossible to see him as older than about 27; he has SUCH strong Hamlet vibes.

In between The Winter Prince and Idylls of the Queen I have now developed Mordred feelings and I’m KIND of bitter about it, but what are you going to do? Anyway, he came along on this quest because he hoped that Kay thought Mordred had killed the queen and was therefore going to murder Mordred and thus save Camelot, and he’s most put out when Kay is like “What the fuck my dude, of course you didn’t poison the apple, you are the least unbearable of all of Arthur’s unbearable murdery knights.”

I suspect Karr is drawing the murdery knights directly from Malory and also suspect that it has a very different emotional valence there. In Idylls of the Queen you get the feeling that Kay’s sarcasm is a sort of defense mechanism against the fact that he’s living in the midst of a slow-moving atrocity: his king (who is also his foster brother and former best friend) killed a whole boat full of babies, his fellow knights are just murdering people all the time, and the murders just serve to further blood feuds that go on and on and on…

This could be unbearably depressing if you just looked at it straight on, but Kay’s bitterness holds it at a kind of remove, both for himself and the readers. When he describes the incident of the May Babies he’s actually funny: “Arthur had been bestowing his kingly body as generously as he could upon the ladies of his realm, to the point where he could not be sure how many lords’ children were really bastards of the high king,” he notes sardonically, and so when it is prophesied that one of these children born in May will destroy Camelot, he has to put all to lordly babies on a boat to drown.

It’s such an interesting contrast with The Once and Future King. White’s heroes are essentially the heroic characters in Malory, Arthur and Lancelot and Merlin, although sometimes it pains him to reconcile their heroism to incidents like the May Babies. (He just sort of skips over that incident till the final book, when he can no longer avoid it, and it clearly pains him that Arthur who he has so lovingly painted could do such a thing.)

Karr in contrast offers a jaundiced view of these heroes, especially Merlin, whom Kay sees as an evil mastermind undermining Camelot: otherwise why not tell Arthur that Morgause is his half-sister till after the incest, hmmmm? He also loathes Lancelot, but that’s at least three-quarters jealousy for Lancelot’s relationship with the queen, and the other quarter arises from jealousy for the fact that everyone else loves Lancelot too, not least Arthur, who used to like Kay best, not that anyone remembers that now. Not that Kay cares.

Kay insists that he doesn’t give a damn about anything except the queen (possibly because the queen is one of the few people in Camelot who is nice to him, churl or not), while in fact giving so many damns about so many things that he might actually die if he ever once allowed himself to consider just how much he cares, and how little he is cared about in return.

Comments

[sovay]

the Gareth incident, for example, where he's absolutely determined to be annoyed at this kid who is probably genuinely pretty all right, I think really provides an important balance against any urge to have Kay as a perfect misunderstood woobie hero.

Agreed. He also misses no opportunity to rag on Pelleas and as far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with the man except that he's a bit of a himbo, but since Nimue is happy with him I don't see the problem.

(I love that Kay's defensive rant about Gareth starts more or less with "everybody gets to be wrong once in their life" and finishes up "OR I COULD NOT CARE ABOUT MY JOB AND THIS ENTIRE KINGDOM COULD LOGISTICALLY FALL APART." It's very relatable.)

He is intelligent and clearheaded and sympathetic and one of the more ethical people in Camelot, and also bitter and cranky and getting in his own way a lot of the time and kind of a pain in the ass to be around!! both are true!!

It's so important. Excellent use of icon, incidentally.

[osprey_archer]

YES, the way that his rants escalate. That one in particular is just a tour de force.