TH White Once and Future King...should I stick with it?

[HelenaRavenclaw]

Listening to the first book (Sword in the Stone) for the first time, as an adult, and really struggling to get through it. I've heard so many good things about TH White's humorous take on King Arthur that I was sure I would love this. But so far I find it very tedious and the funny parts not very engaging or original. I realise I'm reading as an adult and maybe young children would be more amused by the silliness, but for comparison I still love reading Roald Dahl, Horrible Histories, Lewis Carroll, and children's fantasy like Harry Potter or The Dark is Rising. I love the humour/fantasy mix of Discworld, and enjoyed Mark Twain's anachronistic, satirical Arthurian novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I've read many renditions of the standard King Arthur stories before and have loved them since childhood.

Does TH White get better after the first book? Should I just skip Sword in the Stone and go on to the next books, where Arthur is older? Is there a change in the tone / pacing later, or would you say it's unlikely that I'll enjoy the later books if I didn't enjoy Sword in the Stone to begin with?

The two later books are definitely much darker and more adult in tone than TSITS. I have very mixed feelings about them . There’s undoubtedly some very powerful writing particularly around the Lancelot/ Guinevere relationship. However there’s also a disturbing streak of cruelty and there is a bit involving a cat at the beginning of the second book that I can’t bear thinking about.

Thanks, I decided to skip to the very end of TSITS and start the second book. If I don't like this one, I will drop the idea of reading the next ones altogether. Gratuitous cruelty/violence in books, especially children's ones, makes me queasy so maybe I'll skip the cat chapter when it comes up.

I loved it as a young child but haven’t read it since. I doubt it will have aged well.

@HelenaRavenclaw Judging by your username you have probably realised that Merlin in Sword in the Stone is a considerable influence on the character of Dumbledore. JKR has said as much. Not accusing her of plagiarism- he’s just an influence. More, I would say, than Gandalf or Merriman Lyon , who are more austere types of wizard.

For me, if you're reading it, no, you shouldn't skip the first book. However, the first book is sometimes treated as a stand-alone book, and although I wouldn't say that it's geared to younger readers, it's true that it becomes more serious afterwards. If you're reading it for fantasy and humor, though, you'll be disappointed. It becomes more dramatic.

Ok that was the last straw. I just listened to the part in the second book where they kill the unicorn. Totally uncalled for, gory descriptions that served no purpose. Not funny, not sad, just utterly pointless and a waste of time. @pollyhemlock was right about the cruelty. Give me all the violence in Harry Potter any day -- including the unicorn killing in the first book. All of it has a purpose and never made me feel queasy, unlike TH White's writing.
@MsAmerica I would actually prefer a more serious tone rather than humour when reading retellings of classic stories like this. I loved Mark Twain's satirical time-travel novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was deeply tragic yet funny and philosophically profound at times. TSITS book made it seem like light humour was the whole point so I tried to enjoy it as such, but I was struggling to enjoy it as it felt so ineffective and unnatural, unlike Discworld or Roald Dahl for example. I would love to read a more serious, dramatic take on the Lancelot-Guinevere story etc. but I'm not willing to risk any more animal killings along the way and stupid conversations trying too hard to be funny but failing. I think I'll try Rosemary Sutcliff's King Arthur trilogy instead. I ADORED her Arthurian novels The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset. They were such perfect, poignant, and unique retellings from a more historical rather than literary angle.

I absolutely agree about the unicorn killing. Totally pointless and gratuitous. My favourite Arthurian retelling is also the Rosemary Sutcliff sequence, particularly Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset. You could also try Kevin Crossley Holland’s Arthur trilogy starting with The Seeing Stone, if you haven’t read them. Not as good as the Sutcliff but very good.

I quite enjoyed the first book, mainly because I loved the Disney film The Sword in the Stone when I was small and had no idea that this was what it was based on. I was less enamoured with the later books (although parts y good). I knew very little about them when I started to listen, and I don’t think I will return to them.

I enjoyed the first book as a child; started the second one but was massively put off by the cat thing and didn’t open them again until a few years ago when I read the whole sequence. I’m not sure that THW intended the sequels to TSITS to be for children. They are certainly very dark in places.

I'm so intrigued now because I don't remember much about these books, but I remember loving them as a teen or young adult.

I wonder if I'd still like them.

From memory White had his own agenda writing TOAFK - heavily influenced by the politics of the day (I think he was a borderline revolutionary socialist ?). So a lot of TOAFK is allegory.

If you want beautiful Arthurian prose, this is a masterpiece

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Acts_of_King_Arthur_and_His_Noble_Knights

I love Mary Stewarts "Crystal Cave" series.

Luckily (or unluckily) I read "The Mists of Avalon" before I read about it's author. (Or, passim another thread, authoress)

White is an odd author, and a bit of an acquired taste. He’s rather like Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams, in that he’s sort of comic, but also sort of serious. Maybe ‘genre-defying’ is the phrase I’m looking for (?). George Eliot, for example, and Charlotte Bronte, are conventional novelists. You don’t need to approach them in a certain way. But White isn’t like that. I’d say D H Lawrence, weirdly, is another example.

I find the cruelty of White disturbing, I don't know if it's because he was of his time or not.

In H for Hawk Helen Macdonald often comments on his cruelty (in my eyes anyway) when he was training his own hawk.

Dickens is my favourite classic author and I enjoy Douglas Adams' whimsical writing too! (Perhaps the death of the sperm whale in Hitchiker's Guide could be called a bit violent/revolting but the whole thing was completely made up out of thin air, as it were, and nothing in that book can be taken too seriously. And of course it wasn't a prolonged episode like TH White's gory unicorn killing.)

I find the cruelty of White disturbing,

But the "Age of Chivalry" was cruel. And my recollection (been decades since I read the book) was that White was highlighting the hypocrisy of the times of noble knights riding around starving peasants. Aren't there little vignettes of random cruelty throughout the book ?

Also it's Morte D'Arthur - a clue in the title it's a tragedy.

I was talking about his cruelty to animals, his own hawk

Ah, if I ever knew that, it's lost

I’m not sure that White was that interested in the starving peasants. But of course he’s writing about violent times. What I find difficult to take is the excessive detail he goes into with, for example, the death of the cat and the death of the unicorn. It’s not necessary. And yes, it’s there too in his goshawk book, as Helen Macdonald points out.

I agree; writing about cruelty in general, especially the cruelty of nobility towards lower classes in those times, is not a problem. If done well, as in Marl Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, it can be profoundly moving, tragic, and resonate strongly with the reader. There are many scenes of death and violence in that book which shock the reader, but they do not come across as gratuitous. In contrast, White seems to enjoy writing excessively and unnecessarily cruel scenes involving animals which do not serve any purpose except to disgust the reader. Aside from cruelty, as I mentioned before, White's "original" dialogue with the goal of making the characters more "user-friendly" and his attempts at humour also came across as relatively flat and pointless to me.

Before deleting the title from my Audible library, I did skip ahead to the very end and listen to the closing of the 4th book (the audio did not include the Book of Merlyn). Seems like White tried to adopt a somewhat profound, philosophical tone with Arthur reflecting on his life at the end, which was good and certainly more mature, but did not uniquely stand out to me in terms of literary merit. Twain and Sutcliff's Arthurian writing left a much stronger impression on me.

I think I'll give the other suggestions in this thread a go. Let's hope Mary Stewart doesn't disappoint me like TH White!

Years and years since I read the Mary Stewart sequence. Must reread sometime. The Rosemary Sutcliff books I reread often, particularly Lantern Bearers. They never disappoint.

Well, @HelenaRavenclaw, at this point I would have no idea whether to recommend it or not. I can only saw that I first read it in my teens, and have come to enjoy it more as I've gotten older. But one reason I can appreciate it more is that I understand more of the references and the humor. But maybe that doesn't appeal to you?

Would I recommend it? Well yes, I think the first one is fine for children who enjoy Wart’s transformation into animals and the
slapstick humour. Also Merlin is so clearly a prototype for Dumbledore. The others in the sequence I wouldn’t choose for younger children because the way Arthur changes from bright friendly boy to sad disillusioned man is something you only appreciate as you get older. So for older children and adults-yes fine, if you’re into medieval times and don’t mind the cruelty mentioned above.