A review by ftrebelo
The Once and Future King by T.H. White

5.0

My boy, you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista, or virus, for all I care, but you will have to trust to my superior backsight. The time is not ripe for you to be a hawk, so you might as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.

This is a great book.

It has comedy and tragedy, slapstick and irony, drama and melodrama. It has good men and bad men and mediocre men and men that try really hard, men who are wrapped up in their own miseries, men who inspire others - for good and ill -, men who are caricatures, men who are real, men who are angels, men who are beasts, men who are simply getting along.

It's about love and honor and family and friendship and why people fight and how to get them to stop fighting. It's about sin - and about grace. It's about justice and mercy and how hard it is to obtain either (in this life at least).

There's hope and despair (but not in equal parts). There's good and evil, just kings and despots, nationalists and globalists, ants and geese, impossible quests, a few miracles, and a lot of the humdrum beauty of daily life.

It's a book about King Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot, of course. It has all the usual cast of characters and even the usual plot, which moves them steadily to the heartbreaking finale. It covers all the usual chivalry and jousts and the Holy Grail. But it's about much more than that. It's mostly about what it means to be human - and the answer is as messy and simple as you'd expect.