"'Uther,' he said at length, 'your lamented father, was an aggressor. So were his predecessors the Saxons, who drove the Old Ones away. But if we go on living backward like that, we shall never come to the end of it. The Old Ones themselves were aggressors, against the earlier race of the copper hatchets, and even the hatchet fellows were aggressors, against some earlier crew of esquimaux who lived on shells. You simply go on and on, until you get to Cain and Abel."
The Queen of Air and Darkness is the second book in T.H. White's The Once and Future King series. It follows The Sword in the Stone and precedes The Ill-Made Knight. It was originally titled The Witch in the Wood, and though the general story remains the same the author made heavy revisions to the text after its initial publication.
This book is not, by the way, to be confused with Queen of Air and Darkness, a 2018 novel by Cassandra Clare. Both the title of that book and this one come from a poem by A.E. Houseman.
Several years have passed since The Sword in the Stone, and an adult Arthur seeks to consolidate his kingdom and suppress the rebellious Gaels. Against this backdrop three of his knights mistakenly arrive in the Orkney Isles, where the Gaels are planning their offensive.
Overall it's a well written book that never strikes the right tone. The chapters focusing on Arthur, Kay and Merlyn's ongoing conversation are far and away the best part of it, highlighting as they do issues pertinent to both their time and our own. Their discussion of ethnic nationalism is particularly prescient, and mirrors some of the difficulties present in the world today.
The humorous chapters featuring King Pellinore and his two companions don't work as well, and detract from what T.H. White attempts to do in the other half of the book. These chapters reminded me of various Monty Python sketches, and might have been more amusing on their own, in the absence of Arthur's more "political" chapters. There's also the strange killing of a unicorn halfway through the book, which does nothing to advance the plot. It seems to belong to another story that the author failed to tell.
On the whole I liked this book much better than The Sword in the Stone, but the jarringly episodic nature of that book is only magnified in this one. It has a lot more depth however, and I'm willing to overlook its narrative shortcomings in favor of the lively political debate which frames its weaker half.
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