"The blessing of forgetfulness: that was the first essential. If everything one did, or which one's fathers had done, was an endless sequence of Doings doomed to break forth bloodily, then the past must be obliterated and a new start made. Man must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but we can only set the misery right if we accept a status quo. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the Peace of God."
T.H. White wrote this book in 1940, though it wasn't published until 18 years later, as part of a collected edition. It's the last book in White's The Once and Future King series, following The Ill-Made Knight, The Queen of Air and Darkness and The Sword in the Stone.
In The Candle in the Wind Arthur is finally forced to do something about his wife Guenevere's long-standing love affair with Lancelot. The one doing the forcing is his illegitimate son Mordred, who wishes to usurp Arthur's kingdom out of jealousy. Arthur, long aware of Guenevere and Lancelot's liaisons, would prefer not to act on the matter, but Mordred and the powerful Gael faction use his sense of justice to force his hand.
Taken on its own terms it's a fairly lopsided novel. Most of the action occurs in the first half, with Arthur and his knights chasing Lancelot back into France, where Guenevere's lover withstands a long siege. Mordred plots behind the scenes, but he's a poorly developed character, and his machinations never feel that threatening. The story is somewhat interesting up until Guenevere is almost burned at the stake, but of course she's rescued at the last moment, and after that it's hard to stay invested in the story.
The end of this book consists of Arthur's meditations on the use of force and the ideal society. In this section T.H. White returns to some of the themes he set up in The Queen of Air and Darkness and The Ill-Made Knight, but aside from some pleasing generalizations I didn't feel like Arthur's meditations amounted to much.
And The Once and Future King taken as a whole? I found it amusing, but the overall structure could have used some work. A particularly glaring deficiency is Mordred, a character who never makes sense. Every good protagonist needs an antagonist, and the author never realizes one in Mordred.
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