The Royal Road to Romance, by Richard Halliburton

I picked up a copy of this classic at a remainder sale, and it's been gathering dust on my shelf for years. I finally decided to record it for Malaysian Association for the Blind, figuring it would be a good vehicle for armchair travel.  After graduating from Princeton, Halliburton set out on his trip around the world, seeking what he felt were the most exotic and adventurous sites and experiences.

Halliburton's photograph of a
Balinese woman making a temple offering

As I'm sure my tones of voice will make clear to anyone who borrows this recording, I alternately adored Halliburton for his vivid accounts and wanted to throttle him for his arrogance. This is a book written by a young white man traveling the world in the 1920s, with all that implies.

The positives:  He was a young man, full of brio. Guards, fences, No Admittance signs and hours of operation meant nothing to him. If he wanted to take photographs from the tip of Gibraltar or spend the night in the Taj Mahal or atop an Egyptian pyramid, he found ways to do so. His enthusiasms were still passionate, driving him to wax poetic about the Alhambra and Bali at a time when most people's only exposure to these places were written accounts, perhaps accompanied by a photo or two. Halliburton's youthful strength permitted him to make treks that others deemed foolhardy -- up the Matterhorn and Mount Fuji with borrowed and inadequate equipment at inopportune seasons, or over a Himalayan pass to Ladakh.

The tourism industry was also in its youth in the 1920s, and it's marvellous to read today of the difficulties Halliburton overcame to reach the Angkor ruins, which he explored in perfect solitude, apart from the bats and a handful of monks living in Angkor Wat.  Today we can reach all of these sites with less difficulty, and the price we pay is seeing them alongside hordes of other travellers. The romance is rather dashed when another mob of tourists follows their guide (with his microphone) off their coach and overruns the temple or palace. Kashmir was still an earthly paradise, decades before warfare tore it apart, and Halliburton was fortunate enough to witness a raucous Balinese funeral ceremony (the more energetic aspects of which actually appalled him) that can be seen no more. He was in the Forbidden City when the last emperor was essentially held under house arrest, albeit in gorgeously appointed chambers. He arrived in Vladivostok to converse with Russian nobles who had fled from the west to escape the depredations of the Bolsheviks. Halliburton always took pains to avoid the 'beaten tourist track', even though far fewer tourists were beating tracks to anywhere then, so his account stands apart from others written at the same time.

There are also negative aspects to this travelogue by a young white man travelling the world in the 1920s. Halliburton, although he has a Princeton diploma and a well-heeled family backing him, decided that it would be so much more romantic and adventurous to do this globe-trotting on the cheap.  The scenes of him evading ticket collectors on Indian trains are nothing short of horrifying. One conductor insists that as a passenger with a 3rd class ticket, Halliburton must vacate the 1st class berth in which he's squatting. Halliburton deems the man insolent and ultimately decks him.  Later, when he has no ticket at all, he gets into a physical tussle with another conductor and pitches the much smaller man off the train, furious at the impudence of these 'natives'.  Evidently he managed to graduate Princeton unaware that taking things to which one is not entitled constitutes theft, and that theft is wrong, not even justifiable in the name of adventure or romance.

In his eagerness to avoid the typical tourist routes, he decides to ignore all local advice and undertake a journey across the Malay isthmus on foot during the monsoon season. He discovers that the only person who will agree to serve as his guide (for a fee of $6) is known as the village idiot. The two of them set out for what proves to be an arduous, soaking, and miserable several days' slog through the jungle.  He makes several derogatory remarks about 'the idiot' who is leading him, noting that the guide doesn't seem bothered by the deep waters covering the trail. Trying to find easier going, Halliburton decides to walk on the grass to the side of the submerged trail.  He almost immediately treads on a cobra's nest and finds himself face to face with a rearing and furious snake. Certain that he's about to die, he whacks at the creature with his walking stick, and it retreats without striking him.  'The idiot', he notes, was trudging on ahead of him, blissfully unaware of this whole drama.  As well he should be! The arrogance of this young foreigner, putting other people's lives at risk to gratify his own sense of sport, and then demeaning them in the process!

Halliburton had a big, rambunctious personality, so it's not surprising that he inspired admiration and irritation in equal measure. His antics came to an end in 1939 (he was then 39 years old), when he attempted to sail from Hong Kong to San Francisco in an oversized Chinese junk. The ship was not seaworthy and went down in a storm with Halliburton and the whole crew. I wonder if this was another instance of rash arrogance that endangered not only the adventurer but also those whom he hired to join him. Where was the line in this case between adventure and foolhardiness?

Through the Window, by Julian Barnes

Subtitled 'Seventeen Essays and a Short Story', Through the Window reminded me both how much I love a well-crafted essay, and how deeply I admire Julian Barnes.  In these reflections on books and authors, Barnes introduced me to writers I've not yet read and illuminated aspects of books that I have read, but regrettably with less care and thought than he gave them.

In the book's opening essay, 'The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald', Barnes lauds an author I know only by name and moves her up several notches on my to-be-read list.

"On the whole," she told her American editor in 1987, "I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken." Fitzgerald is tender towards her characters and their worlds, unpredictably funny, and at times surprisingly aphoristic; though it is characteristic of her that such moments of wisdom appear not author-generated, but arising in the text organically, like moss or coral. Her fictional personnel are rarely vicious or deliberately evil; when things go wrong for them, or when they inflict harm on others, it is usually out of misplaced understanding, a lack less of sympathy than of imagination. The main problem is that they cannot see the terms and conditions which come attached to life: moral grace and social incompetence are often in close proximity.

I adore authors who can take an ostensibly 'ordinary' character and, without crime sprees or plane crashes, expose the drama in his everyday life, whether internal or external. Great fiction needn't be thrilling. Quirky will do quite nicely, just as in life.

One of our better-known novelists once described the experience of reading a Fitzgerald novel as riding along in a top-quality car, only to find that after a mile or so, "someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window".  

Barnes penned three essays on Ford Madox Ford and his books.  Ford is another author whom I haven't yet read.  I 'met' him in the semi-autobiographical novels of Jean Rhys -- she'd carried on an alternately torrid and sordid and disastrous affair with Ford, husband of her best friend. His character in her books is, not surprisingly, a boor.  He comes across a wee bit better in Barnes' essays, which focus instead on Ford's love affair with southern France.

"There are in this world only two earthly Paradises ... Provence... and the Reading Room of the British Museum." Provence was not only itself, but also the absence of the North, where most human vices accumulated. The North meant aggression, the Gothic, the "sadistically mad cruelties of the Northern Middle Ages" and the "Northern tortures of ennui and indigestion". Ford was a great believer in diet and digestion as controllers of human behaviour...

...South good, North bad: Ford was convinced that no one could be "completely whole either physically or mentally" without "a reasonable amount of garlic" in their diet, and equally obsessed with the malign effect of Brussels sprouts, an item of particular northern mischief. Provence was a place of good thoughts and moral actions, "for there the apple will not flourish and the Brussels sprout will not grow at all". The North was also full of excessive meat-eating, which caused not just indigestion but lunacy: "Any alienist will tell you that the first thing he does with a homicidal maniac after he gets him into an asylum is to deliver, with immense purges, his stomach from bull-beef and Brussels sprouts."

Ford sincerely embraced this philosophy, the values embedded in Provençal life. He saw himself not as a geographical writer, but as a prophet, and Barnes shares this lofty vision.

The old advice about cultivating one's garden was always moral as well as practical; nor was it a counsel of quietism. As human beings recklessly use up the world's resources and despoil the planet, as the follies of globalisation become more apparent, as we head towards what could be the biggest smash of all, the wisdom and the way of living that Ford Madox Ford -- literature's good soldier -- found in Provence are perhaps even more worth attending to.

In the essay 'France's Kipling', Barnes points out that the British author is usually associated with India and Burma, but he also had a cordial relationship with France at a time when the two chronically antagonistic nations were in a relatively civil state. This description of one squabble between them seems quaintly polite, supremely Kiplingesque.

The Fashoda Incident had recently brought the two powers to the edge of intercolonial war. To the British, Fashoda was and remains just a strange place name at or beyond the margins of memory; to the French, an event hugely magnified by propaganda and lost pride. In July 1898, eight French and 120 Senegalese soldiers arrived at a ruined fort on the Sudanese Upper Nile, having spent two years crossing the continent to get there (Frenchly, they set off equipped with 1,300 litres of claret, 50 bottles of Pernod and a mechanical piano). They raised the tricolore and planted a garden. Their main purpose was to annoy the British, and they did, a little: Kitchener turned up with a sizeable force and advised them to leave. He also gave them copies of French newspapers, in which they read of the Dreyfus case and wept. The two sides fraternised, the matter was handed over to the politicians, and six months later a British band played the Marseillaise as the French withdrew. No one was hurt, let alone killed.

The essay 'Translating Madame Bovary' is one of the most thought-provoking pieces on the topic of literary translations that I've yet read. If you think writing a book is a monumental task, Barnes suggests, try translating one.

John Rutherford's magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta -- a kind of Spanish Bovary -- used up, according to his calculation, five times as much of his life as it had of the original author's. "Translation is a strange business," he noted in his introduction, "which sensible people no doubt avoid."

Lydia Davis, one of the Bovary translators, defended her occasionally awkward English phrasing on the grounds that it was the more precise translation. Barnes takes exception to this, seeming to suggest that some precision can be sacrificed to retain the lyrical flow of the French prose.

This is the paradox and bind of translation. If to be 'faithful' is to be 'clunky', then it is also to be unfaithful, because Flaubert was not a 'clunky' writer. He moves between registers; he cuts into the lyric with the prosaic; but this is language whose every sentence, word, syllable has been tested aloud again and again. Flaubert said that a line of prose should be as rhythmical, sonorous and unchangeable as a line of poetry. He said that he aimed only at beauty, and wrote Madame Bovary because he hated realism (an exasperated, self-deluding claim, but still). He said that prose is like hair: it shines with combing. He combed all the time.

Translators of contemporary fiction have it easier in that they can confer with the authors to clarify certain intentions and nuances, but there is still no shortage of stumbling blocks.

Nowadays, at least, books are generally translated with less of a time lag (La Regenta was first published in 1884-5, and not rendered into English until 1984). Translators can quiz writers about what they mean, by email, or even in person: Don Delillo had a London conference for his European translators of Underworld, whose problems began as the novel does: with a sixty-page baseball game.

I was thrilled to arrive at the essay, 'Wharton's The Reef'.  I wish I had written it, rather than this comparatively fatuous commentary. Barnes identifies the novels key themes and tags them with key words:  natural, veil, life, house, luck, reef and silence.  Under the heading of 'natural', Barnes discusses the qualities of nature vs. society. This is classic Edith Wharton territory.

Her initial and prime effect is to show up the world of Darrow and Anna in all its evasive formality; it makes him reflect on "the deadening process of forming a 'lady'" in good society. Travelling to Paris on the train with Sophy, Darrow indicates the term which is the novel's polar opposite to "naturalness". Had he been in the same compartment and circumstances with Anna, he decides, she would not have been so restless and talkative; she would have behaved "better" than Sophy, "but her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have been nature but 'tact'". Sophy strikes him as having the naturalness of "a dryad in a dew-drenched forest"; but -- regrettably, or fortunately -- we no longer live in forests, and "Darrow reflected that mankind would never have needed to invent tact if it had not first invented social complications".

Somehow I've managed to read quite a number of John Updike's books dodging the three Rabbit novels the whole time.  (This is by chance, not intent.)  Barnes' essay 'Remembering John Updike, Remembering Rabbit' was a prod to remedy this gap. If Updike's skill can drive Philip Roth to quit writing, he can certainly dissuade me from even trying!

Philip Roth, with memorably mock-aggrieved generosity, said of Rabbit is Rich: "Updike knows so much, about golf, about porn, about kids, about America. I don't know anything about anything. His hero is a Toyota salesman. Updike knows everything about being a Toyota salesman. Here I live in the country and I don't even know the names of the trees. I'm going to give up writing."

It takes more, though, than attention to the details of car salesmanship to build a classic novel. There has to be access to deeper truths. Updike is one of few authors who can merge the ridiculous with the sublime to powerful effect.

And after death? Harry's intimations, not of immortality, but of the numinous, show up more clearly on rereading. Updike said that he couldn't quite give up on religion, because without the possibility or dream of something beyond and above, our terrestrial life became unendurable.

The final essay in Through the Window is the most visceral, the most personal.  "Regulating Sorrow" is the prelude to Mr. Barnes' latest book, Levels of Life, his account of life following the death of his wife. A review in the Guardian suggests that Levels of Life is a book to re-read, re-read and re-read, and that is true of the essay, as well. Like Updike, Barnes veers between philosophy and the excruciatingly immediate and personal manifestations of grief. I have often thought about the distance at which many of us hold death, almost as if it might be an optional event.

Unless we have a religious belief which envisages the total resurrection of the body, we know that we shall never see the lost loved again on terrestrial terms: never see, never talk and listen to, never touch, never hold. In the quarter of a millennium since Johnson described the unparalleled pain of grief, we -- we in the secularising West, at least -- have got less good at dealing with death, and therefore with its emotional consequences...

Of course, at one level we know that we all shall die; but death has come to be looked upon more as a medical failure than a human norm. It increasingly happens away from the home, in hospital, and is handled by a series of outside specialists -- a matter for the professionals.

Barnes, alongside Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, both fine authors who have recently published accounts of grief, remarks that it is difficult, if not impossible, to critique these books. The writing style may show flaws, but they merely reflect the nature of the subject he says.

In some ways, autobiographical accounts of grief are un-falsifiable, and therefore unreviewable by any normal criteria. The book is repetitive? So is grief. The book is obsessive? So is grief. The book is at times incoherent? So is grief.

'Regulating Sorrow' is not obsessive, repetitive nor incoherent. Like the other essays, it is astute and moving, worthy of multiple re-readings.

Through the Window added books and authors to my to-be-read list -- Penelope Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Updike's Rabbit novels -- but also fired my appetite for more of Julian Barnes' own writing, including Flaubert's Parrot, Before She Met Me, Staring at the Sun, Talking It Over and its sequel, Love, Etc., and Nothing to Be Frightened Of. This isn't his complete list, of course, just the ones I'm most keen to read. I should keep a hand-written list. It would be fill a notebook of Moby Dick proportions and would be a good reminder to me that I should not waste time when I could be reading.

Who I Am, by Peter Townshend

And so we shift from A Pair of Blue Eyes to the man Behind Blue Eyes.

Celebrity autobiographies aren't generally my thing. For one thing, living in Malaysia and having no television, I rarely have any clue who these folks are, never mind why I'd want to read their accounts of their (no doubt scintillating) lives in cinema and theatre and the bedroom.  I do remember clearly, though, the day in 1978 when I first heard a song on the radio that all but blew me off my feet. A male singer screamed/shrieked/bellowed, "WHO ARE YOU?"  My thought: Well, I'm not altogether sure yet, but meanwhile, who are you?

The band was, of course, The Who.

Pete Townshend has, I suppose, earned the title of Rock Star Emeritus, or he would, if he'd ever retire. He and Roger Daltrey (the two surviving members of the original four) are on a Who tour as I write, and he's still writing solo work, as well.  Despite the band's controversial habit of smashing instruments on stage at the end of the show and wreaking frequent mayhem in hotels, Townshend's lyrics betray a fierce, sensitive intelligence.

I admire the openness with which Townshend tells his life story. The book has a very level, factual tone, giving himself credit when its due and confessing his shortcomings in a gently self-deprecating way. He's equally gentle in his treatment of others. When talking about a life with such manic peaks and dives, this is an achievement.

In the 1950s, when the four young men got together, Pete Townshend was a  gawky, insecure teen-ager. As the band's fame and success grew, he often seemed bewildered by the fans' adulation. He married with the intention of remaining faithful to his wife, hordes of groupies notwithstanding, and often struggled with the conflicts between his career and his family. When not on the road, he was most often working long hours in the studio. Times of heavy substance abuse alternated with long periods of sobriety.

Who I Am is an autobiography of the artist, but also a biography of his music. I first heard Tommy, the first rock opera, in the late 1970s, a decade after its release. I didn't grasp then what a landmark it had been -- the first rock song cycle with a plot, a theme, a story tying the music together -- I just loved the music. In this book, Townshend gives the context -- the Who played to the generation that had reached adulthood at the end of WWII, whose parents had survived (or not) the Blitz, listening to their jazz for solace and cheer, to the Queen and Churchill for strength. There is a sense of flailing in the next generation (My Generation, as an early Who anthem puts it). Their roles were less clearly defined, their heroes few if any.

The opera about the deaf, dumb & blind boy who wows the crowds as the Pinball Wizard and becomes a prophet in his own right spoke to the younger generation's confusion.  When Ken Russell began production of the film, Townshend's reservations speak eloquently of his own vision.

I realised that Ken had missed a key point at the heart of my rock opera: that it spoke of the end of dictators and self-created messiahs. Somehow Russell, eighteen years older than we were, was operating on the far side of the generational divide. He knew the rigours of war first-hand: he had been bombed, blitzed, and had performed military service in both the Royal Air Force and the post-war merchant navy. But he had little sense of the next generation's post-war shame and anger, or the way our parents' denial of those feelings might need to be confronted by us, and cast aside.

It struck me that The Who was a partnership of four equals, each with his own musical and character strengths, and each leading the band in a different regard. Being professional performers, they also boasted four significant egos, which makes the band's longevity even more astonishing. It seems that each of them deeply appreciated what the others contributed to the whole. After Keith Moon's death, Roger Daltrey complained that the replacement drummer couldn't intuit his needs as Moon had. The "quiet" John Entwistle laid down innovative and driving bass lines that lifted Townshend's lead guitar riffs off the ground. Watching this quartet -- much like a family -- evolve over the years was fascinating.

Roger arrived in a twin-engined Jet Ranger helicopter, and announced that he owned it. Thirty minutes later he flew out again. Roger's home was in West Sussex, so the helicopter was certainly useful, but we all found it strange. With the release of the movie Roger had become ostentatiously rich, a superstar teenybopper sex object, complete with helicopter. Keith was clearly jealous -- the two of them seemed to compete over such mine-is-bigger-than-yours displays. He gazed at Roger's helicopter dwindling in the distance, and I could tell he longed for something equally impressive. Did I long for anything? I was longing for my hair to stop receding.

The amount of time Pete Townshend spent and spends at work, especially in the days before digital recording, is stunning.  His descriptions of the many studios he designed for himself and The Who drove home the point that he has always been an innovator, quick to try new technologies, fearless of investing a fortune in the process. His workaholism was central to the failure of his marriage, but it's a compulsion that he's been unable to control, sadly watching as his beloved wife and daughters receded into the distance. His energy to break new ground is awe-inspiring, and Who I Am provided a time-line of Townshend's creative life to date. His solo career has been every bit as vital as that with The Who.  

Some of us fans have welcomed his metamorphoses more than others. There are still goons who bellow demands that he smash his guitar.  Fortunately for the rest of us, he doesn't seem to oblige them much nowadays. To one critic, Townshend makes plain that although some of his fans might appreciate his stagnation, he's not about to oblige them.

"You've gone all whiter than white and squeaky clean," he said. "Your fans don't know who you are any more." Had they ever known? Even now I'm still trying to find out who I am.

A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

I was one of those inordinately strange children who loved reading Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Stranger in secondary school.  I timidly mentioned that to a friend whom I'd always taken to be equally eccentric and was thrown off balance when he replied, "No! Not really? You're joking, right?"

This fellow had the tact and good sense to redirect the conversation quickly, and he asked if I'd read A Pair of Blue Eyes, which was said to be Hardy's own favourite of his novels.

Evidently the critics have not been as enamoured of this novel as its author was, but I still enjoyed it tremendously.  Elfride Swancourt is a vivid, strikingly modern heroine, and her concerns and reactions ring true to me today. She is a sharp-minded, reasonably educated young woman who lives with her pastor father in a small village in the west of England. Critics have written this novel off as melodrama, but when you have a good female mind stuck in a small town, there is bound to be drama, much of it inside the unfortunate woman's own head.  Hardy captures beautifully Elfride's eagerness to connect with intelligent people -- by circumstance nearly all men -- who pass through the village and the sometimes unfortunate results when she does so.

First arrives the young Stephen Smith, an angel-faced architect's assistant come to look at the village church in preparation for repairs.  Smith is quickly enamoured of Elfride, startled by her intelligence and beauty. He begins to court her avidly. At first she holds him at arm's length but eventually gives in to his effusive wooing.  The catch? He finally reveals that he is the son of the local stonemason, gone up to London to try and make a good career for himself but still of no exalted bloodlines. He and Elfride realise that her father is unlikely to sanction their marriage. Elfride tries to reason with her father, expressing the belief that Stephen's aptitude is what counts. Her father, initially very fond of Smith, will have none of it and finds every reason -- including the young man's distaste for gravy -- to discount the suitor.

'Professional men in London,' Elfride argued, 'don't know anything about their clerks' fathers and mothers. They have assistants who come to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know where they live. What they can do -- what profits they can bring the firm -- that's all London men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.'
'Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn't sense enough to know whom to despise.'
'It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you claim succession from directed.'
'That's some more of what he's been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I was inclined to suspect him, because he didn't care about sauces of any kind. I always did doubt a man's being a gentleman if his palate had no acquired tastes. An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart...'

After a secret and failed attempt to elope, the couple returns. Elfride commits herself to wait patiently while Stephen goes off to India to build his fortune and reputation.  Meanwhile, her father marries a witty, wealthy and perceptive widow who becomes Elfride's mentor and confidante. Here too it strikes me that Hardy's women are much more realistically complex characters than his men.  Step-mum makes Elfride's father look like a rigid and self-absorbed fuddy-duddy.  She encourages Elfride to complete and publish the historical novel she's been working on for years.

Some time later, a negative review of the book comes to Elfride's attention. Her stepmother minimises the criticism and highlights the complimentary bits, ultimately encouraging the young woman to write to the reviewer, which she does. The reviewer, it turns out, is not only the stepmother's nephew, but also Stephen Smith's former tutor.  At his aunt's invitation, Henry Knight comes to the village to visit his aunt and to meet the young author. Elfride's anger and wounded pride give way to admiration for Knight's erudition and confidence, which at times comes across only as arid pomposity.  She sees in him a man who is older and more accomplished than Stephen, and harder to impress.

Their exchange about her future as an author tells worlds about both of them. It reveals him as a somewhat prudish man with very rigid ideas about a woman's place. The fact that Elfride does not dismiss him out of hand reveals her own openness of mind.

'You may do better next time,' he said placidly: 'I think you will. But I would advise you to confine yourself to domestic scenes.'
'Thank you. But never again!'
'Well, you may be right. That a young woman has taken to writing is not by any means the best thing to hear about her.'
'What is the best?'
'I prefer not to say.'
'Do you know? Then, do tell me, please.'
'Well -- (Knight was evidently changing his meaning) -- I suppose to hear that she has married.'
Elfride hesitated. 'And what when she has been married?' she said at last, partly in order to withdraw her own person from the argument.
'Then to hear no more about her. It is as Smeaton said of his lighthouse: her greatest real praise, when the novelty of her inauguration has worn off, is that nothing happens to keep the talk of her alive.'

Elfride becomes enamoured of Knight, and despite his rational thoughts on the matter, the attraction is mutual. Stephen Smith returns from India to find his love engaged to his former tutor. Eventually, however, Knight learns of Elfride's previous relationship and blanches to think she had kissed another before him, shattering his delusion that he was her first love, which was blindly based upon the fact that he had not kissed a woman before, despite being many years older. Unable to bear his disappointment that she has kissed others before him, the cowardly Knight flees the household without a word, leaving Elfride distraught.

Too late, he realises that Elfride's social 'indiscretions' were the result of her propensity to wear her heart on her sleeve. But it is too late, for both of them.

...the unreserve, which was really artlessness without ballast, meant indifference to decorum; and what so likely as that such a woman had been deceived in the past? He said to himself, in a mood of the bitterest cynicism: 'The suspicious discreet woman who imagines dark and evil things of all her fellow-creatures is far too shrewd to be deluded by man: trusting beings like Elfride are the women who fall.'

Her two suitors are such classic male stereotypes:  Stephen Smith blindly worships Elfride, placing her on an unreasonably elevated pedestal. Henry Knight persists in seeing her as the virgin in her pastoral tower, never having been courted until he arrived.  Poor Elfride! She was so exuberant and open, and they still failed to see her clearly.

Brunswick Gardens, by Anne Perry

A friend and I were sitting at an outdoor table in Kuala Lumpur, sharing a pizza and some wine, and I mentioned Peter Jackson's film, Heavenly Creatures.  It's a remarkable film, based upon a true story about two New Zealand girls who formed one of those fierce, exclusive, almost mythical friendships that seem to be part of the turbulent terrain of female adolescence.  In what was probably one of her first film roles, Kate Winslet played one of the girls. When faced with separation, they concluded that murdering the single mother who would separate them was well justified.  They invited the mother out for a picnic and beat her to death with a brick.

"Mmm, she writes mystery novels now," my friend said.
"Who does?"
"The girl who helped her friend murder her mother.  She got out of prison, moved to the UK and writes mystery novels under the pen name of Anne Perry."
"I suppose she's especially qualified, but it's still hard to believe. Are you sure?"  I tried to imagine a middle-aged ex-convict penning murder mysteries, occasionally pausing to ask herself, does that ring true? I had to find one of her books. Just had to.

New Zealanders, psychiatrists, criminologists and the simply curious (including me) are still puzzling over this crime, and articles about it are still coming out over fifty years after the murder. This begs the question: If I had no idea of Anne Perry's history, would this book have had the same impact?

I try to step back and look at Brunswick Gardens on its own terms. It's set in Victorian London; Inspector Thomas Pitt is called to Brunswick Gardens to investigate the death of a young woman in the house of a clergyman. The household, rather than the staid establishment one might expect, is instead a roiling mess.

Reverend Ramsey Parmenter, the head of household, is losing his faith. The young woman who lies dead at the foot of his stairs is Unity Bellwood, a beautiful and intelligent scholar of ancient languages (the skill for which Ramsey had hired her) but also a proponent of that new and most vexing science, Darwinism. Rev. Parmenter's young and repressed son is hell-bent (so to speak) to get to Rome to pursue his own career in the Catholic faith. His high-strung daughter Tryphena was as enamoured of Unity Bellwood as Anne Perry once was of her youthful friend, and she wastes no time in speaking out against everyone in the household who might have taken Unity from her. The other daughter, Clarice, is steadfastly devoted to her father; although she speaks her mind (often to the horror of her mother), she is by and large very practical. Finally, there is Dominic, a young and very handsome cleric with a dodgy past but with profound and genuine gratitude to Ramsey Parmenter for redeeming him. Vita Parmenter, the Reverend's wife, is petite, refined and politic, the perfect Victorian lady of the house.

At the beginning, the clues suggest that Rev. Parmenter pushed Unity down the stairs after a heated argument in which she used Darwin's science to demean his religious faith. Their torrid arguments are not academic in nature; Parmenter agonises over the new ideas, realising that they challenge his very foundation. The younger Unity, who quite possibly never held any religious faith, assumes the intellectually caustic role and simply ridicules him, leaving him to struggle on his own. Today we take one side or the other -- religion vs. science -- and we forget the tumult of the thinking religious man of Darwin's time who tried valiantly to integrate the two.  After Unity's death, Ramsey Parmenter describes his anguish to Dominic.

"Now science seems to be everywhere, the origin and the answers to everything. There is no mystery left, only facts we don't yet know. Above all, there is no one left to hope in beyond ourselves, nothing greater, wiser, or above all kinder." He looked for an instant like a lost child who suddenly knows the full meaning of being alone. Dominic felt it like a physical pain. "I can admire the certainty all these old bishops and saints seem to have had," Ramsay went on. "I can't share it anymore, Dominic." He sat oddly still for the emotions which must have been raging inside him. "The hurricane of Mr. Darwin's sanity has blown it away like so much paper. His reasoning haunts my mind. During the day I look at all these books." He waved his arm at them. "I read Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and every theologian and apologist since. I can even go back to the original Aramaic or Greek, and for a little while I am fine. Then at night the cold voice of Charles Darwin comes back, and the darkness engulfs all the candles I've lit during the day. I swear I would give anything I possess for him not to have been born!"

Inspector Thomas Pitt is married to Charlotte, a woman who does not hesitate to contribute her own thoughts to the cases he's investigating. Pitt resists the temptation to tell his wife to stay in her place, largely because when Charlotte starts snooping, she uncovers useful bits of information. Her instincts, although different than his own, are quite keen. One day Charlotte drives off for lunch with her Aunt Vespasia, a stately matron with a sharp mind. Largely out of boredom, Vespasia asks Charlotte for the details of Pitt's latest case. It amuses her to think about motives and details in her spare time. Although she is unlikely to have any blood on her own very white, soft hands, Aunt Vespasia has some very definite ideas about what drives one to murder. Again to his credit, Pitt does not disregard her thoughts, either.

Pitt could imagine Vespasia saying that. He could see her still-beautiful face clearly in his mind. She would probably be dressed in ivory, silver-grey or lilac, and she usually wore pearls in the daytime. She was right. People killed because they cared about something so fiercely they lost all sense of reason and proportion. For a time their own need eclipsed everyone else's, even drowned out their sense of self-preservation. Sometimes it was carefully-thought-out greed. Sometimes it was a momentary fear, even a physical one. Seldom was it revenge. That could be exacted in so many other ways. On rare occasions he had come across crimes resulting from blind, insensate rage. But as Vespasia said, it was always a passion of some sort, even if only the cold hunger of greed.

Who, however, felt enough passion to kill Unity Bellwood? No one seemed to stand out as a likely suspect. Dominic's past is checkered, but it seems that he has genuinely found his vocation now. Tensions grow in the house at Brunswick Gardens as everyone within begins to question everyone else. Dominic walks in the garden with Clarice, who has adopted a remarkably clear and pragmatic view. She envies that his ministerial duties call him out into the community to visit members of the congregation while she loiters about the house. She captures perfectly the tension of the situation.

"But nice to be out," she said perceptively. "I wish I had some reason to escape. Waiting is the worst of it, isn't it?" She turned away and stared at the lawn and the fir trees. "I sometimes think hell is not actually something awful happening, it's waiting for something and never being absolutely sure if it will happen, so you soar on hope, and then plunge into despair, and then up again, and down again. You get too exhausted to care for a while, then it all starts over. Permanent despair would almost be a relief. You could get on with it. It takes so much energy to hope."

Dominic assures her that Inspector Pitt is working on the case and will surely uncover the truth of the matter. Clarice does not share his faith in a conclusive ending. She has reached her own conclusion.

"Pitt may find the truth. He may not. We might have to live like this forever. I know that." Her mouth curved very slightly, as if mocking herself. "I have already decided what to believe, I mean what I shall live with, so I don't lie awake at night torturing myself, turning it over and over in my mind. I have to have a way to function." Half a dozen starlings flew up out of the trees at the end of the lawn and spiraled upward on the wind, black against the sky.
"Even if it isn't true?" he said incredulously.
"I think it probably is," she answered, staring ahead of her. "But either way, we have to go on. We can't simply stop everything else and go round and round the same wretched puzzle. It was one of us. That is inescapable. We can't run anymore; we are better accepting it. There is no point in thinking how dreadful it is. I have been lying awake a lot, turning it over and over. Whoever did it is someone I know and love. I can't just stop loving them because of it. Anyway, you don't! If you didn't love someone anymore because they did something you found ugly, no love would last. None of us would be loved, because we all do things that are shabby, stupid, vicious from time to time. You need to love from understanding, or even without it."

This passage struck me as remarkable, especially in contrast to Ramsey's shattered faith. Unlike her father, Clarice is willing to consider that good people may be driven to do evil things, and we must accept all facets of those we love. Ramsey cannot integrate the faith of the saints with the science of Darwin -- for him, it's either/or. Clarice seems to be the one with the grasp of agape, the profound, selfless love at the core of Christianity.

If I knew nothing of Anne Perry's history, I would never have guessed it from reading this novel. With her own past in mind, however, I can appreciate her insights into the social roles allocated to women. Their restrictions and limitations find outlets in devious behaviours or even violence. As Aunt Vespasia noted, "People killed because they cared about something so fiercely they lost all sense of reason and proportion," and it's difficult to find a sense of proportion when one is limited to a very small and regulated social sphere. Surely Aunt Vespasia's observation would have applied to the case of the young Anne Perry, as well.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, by Hilary Mantel

This, Hilary Mantel's third novel, is not her best, but it's still vastly better than most authors can manage, and it sustains my belief that the woman is purely incapable of writing a bad book.  I reached for this as the press was bubbling with Ms. Mantel's comments about the Duchess of Cambridge, and as Prime Minister David Cameron castigated her without bothering to read her full speech to grasp the context. Well, I suppose he's a busy man. About the only thing I could think to do in a defiant gesture of moral support was read another of her books.

Jeddah Rooftops,
watercolour by Dorothy Boyer

Published in 1988, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street tells the story of British expatriate Frances Shore who comes to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when her husband takes a job there with a construction company. The Shores have lived abroad for years, living and working in Africa in challenging conditions. They are not rookie expats, but very little, Mantel suggests, can prepare one for life as a foreigner in the Kingdom.

Unlike so many of Mantel's characters and narrators, Frances Shore does not speak in a grounded, authoritative voice. Of course one expects Thomas Cromwell to be resolute, but even the suburban, middle-class Londoners who peopled Mantel's earlier two novels spoke with more force. Gradually, especially as Frances' experiences in Africa are revealed, I realised that she is not a vague or passive person -- she just can't get her bearings in Saudi Arabia. From the opening scene in which Frances is on the plane, overhearing the conversations of other Saudi expats, the hair on my arms began to stand up in that way it does when I'm in a place that is not right.  I may not be able to verbalise precisely what's not right about it, but I know I don't want to be there. The genius of this novel is in the subtle, visceral unease.

I know first-hand that as a foreigner, one can expect various degrees of welcome in different countries, ranging from open arms to loaded and cocked ones.  From my friends who have worked in Saudi and the Emirates -- in a range of capacities -- I know that all outsiders, regardless of nationality or field of work, are classed as foreign workers. There is no question of enjoying or integrating with the local culture. There is no question of permanent residency: Whether you are pouring cement or doing neurosurgery, you are there to do the work that is required of you (and for which your employers pay you handsomely), and then, when they deem it appropriate, you will leave.  You will at no time consider yourself one of their peers.

Those of us who grew up enjoying the rule of law tend not to appreciate it until it's not there. Frances learns almost immediately that the Saudis not only require a visa for entry to the Kingdom but also that one may not leave without a specific exit visa, which must be applied for and granted by the authorities. In the interim, one must adhere to the Law as established by the Q'uran and the Al Saud family. The standard advice to foreigners? Keep your head down, and be quiet. If you attract the unfortunate attention of the authorities, do not expect your employer to help you.

When the Shores arrive in Jeddah, the great boom is waning. Budgets are contracting.  They are given an apartment in a 4-storey house on Ghazzah Street, which they share with a Pakistani couple and a Saudi couple. There is a vacant flat just above the Shores', and there is some nefarious business happening there. Gossip presents a few different theories, and Frances concocts a few more in her spare time.

Frances has nothing but spare time, since she cannot get a work permit in Jeddah. Her Muslim female neighbours invite her for tea and inquire when she plans to have children and marvel at the amorality of women in the western workplace, consorting with men as they do.  She can't go out for walks without being harrassed by Arab men and choked by dust and sand, and there is not always a driver available to take her elsewhere. This is the plight of the expat wife -- especially the educated and skilled one -- who follows a husband abroad and is then relegated to life as an accoutrement while he goes off to work. In the case of the Shores, however, he is consumed by his construction project (or more accurately, the increasing obstacles to its completion) and she has the free time and intelligence to intuit that something is very, very wrong in their building.

Trying to calm herself, Frances reflects on her years of living in other countries and cultures. She sanely recognises that our most intrinsic demons stow away in our luggage, but we also accumulate skills to adapt to new environments. Once you get over the initial shock of the new place, it's much the same routine as the old.

After all, she said, comforting herself, there's only the world. Travel ends and routine begins and old habits which you thought you had left behind in one country catch up with you in the next, and old problems resurface, but if you are lucky you carry as part of your baggage the means of solving those problems and accommodating those habits, and you take with you an open mind, and discretion, and common sense; if you have those with you, you can manage anywhere.

Her experiences as she begins to settle into Jeddah life, however, suggest something quite different. She meets the neighbours, has dinners with other expat couples and wanders off on a couple of solitary ventures. None of them turns out well.

She keeps a diary and also writes letters to family members in the UK, quickly discovering that the latter is an exercise in futility. She fails to describe the vague but unsettling atmosphere, and then she realises that the recipients don't really give a damn about life in Saudi Arabia.  If anything, they just want to hear how badly things have gone awry and to gloat.  "It never would have happened if you'd just stayed home where you belong..."

By and large people at home are not interested in hearing about your experiences. They feel bound to put you in your place, as if by going away at all you were offering some sort of criticism of their own lives.

Frances' husband and his colleagues tell her to ignore her suspicions about whatever may be happening in the vacant apartment upstairs, but dark hints keep crossing her path every time she steps out of her apartment, which is already feeling claustrophobic.  (The claustrophobia peaks when the landlord materialises and tells her that they're renovating and painting, and could she please keep her shutters closed for some weeks?) Her husband mentions over dinner that an Indian psychologist has just completed a study of his country's workers in the Kingdom, and he determined that they all followed roughly the same series of phases, not unlike Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of accepting impending death, albeit in reverse:  acceptance fades to anxiety, which deteriorates into paranoia and incipient madness. This at least assures Frances that she's not alone in her feelings of acute distress.

Why do people stay?  Why not simply apply for that exit visa?  It's the economy, stupid. The Saudis pay lavishly, and once accustomed to a stream of hefty salary vouchers, it's hard for expats to imagine life without them.

They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs. No matter how much they complain about life here, they hate the thought of leaving. They see some gigantic insecurity staring them in the face, as if their lives would fall apart when they got their final exit visa, as if it would be instant ruin -- as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department.

I happened to glance at some on-line readers' reviews of this novel, and one man remarked that he never did quite understand "what happened". By the end of the book, a man is dead (possibly the result of an accident, and possibly not), a woman has been arrested trying to leave the Kingdom without approval (of her husband, never mind the Saudi authorities), the Shores' apartment has been robbed and ransacked in a peculiar fashion, and something wicked has occurred in that darned vacant apartment involving a shipping trunk. It is not clear, any of it. It's not clear to the reader, and it's not clear to Frances. The authorities will never publicise what happened, and any sensible foreigner who happens to have information will keep his or her mouth well shut. The Saudis see no need for their foreign servants to be aware or involved. The reader will find no more sure footing than the characters.

In the end, the construction company finds the Shores an apartment in a different compound, one which is almost exclusively occupied by expat workers. Will they settle more comfortably there? Will the husband put his wrists into the "golden handcuffs"?  At least this apartment has windows which look out upon something other than a high cement wall (which had totally surrounded the house at Ghazzah Street).  As the novel ends, Frances surveys the new view.

I look out through the glass, on to the landscape, the distant prospect of traveling cars. Window one, the freeway; window two, the freeway. I turn away, cross the room to find a different view. Window three, the freeway; window four, the freeway.

The Once and Future King, by T. H. White

One of N. C. Wyeth's luminous illustrations for
The Boy's History of King Arthur, which,
despite being a girl, I adored.

I was immersed in Arthurian legend as a child, and then later, on a slightly more highbrow level in college, paddled through Malory, Chretien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Tennyson and others. I'd developed a been-there-done-that smugness that my reading on the subject was complete, or at least adequate.

Then my favourite literary list-maker, Anthony Burgess, tossed the four novels of T. H. White's tetralogy onto his Best Novels list and into my path:  The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind.  Bless 'im.  I instantly saw that this version of the legends is like no other.

For one thing, it's damned funny. White has a gentle humour -- never scathing or sardonic. His characters have foibles galore. They may be mythical, but they are far from super-human. The future King, at first a bumbling lad known only as the Wart to those in his adoptive father's household, wanders off into the forest in search of an escaped falcon and comes home with Merlyn in tow. The boy has at least enough sense to grasp that Merlyn has some exceptional qualities and would likely be a good tutor for King Ector's son Kay and himself. He presents his new friend to Ector, and what ensues is the all-time best transcript of an employment interview.

"Oh, sir," said the Wart, "I have been on that quest you said for a tutor, and I have found him. Please, he is this gentleman here, and he is called Merlyn. He has got some badgers and hedgehogs and mice and ants and things on this white donkey here, because we could not leave them behind to starve. He is a great magician, and can make things come out of the air."
"Ah, a magician," said Sir Ector, putting on his glasses and looking closely at Merlyn. "White magic, I hope?"

"Assuredly," said Merlyn, who stood patiently among the throng with his arms folded in his necromantic gown, while Archimedes [the owl] sat very stiff and elongated on the top of his head.

"Ought to have some testimonials," said Sir Ector doubtfully. "It's usual."
"Testimonials," said Merlyn, holding out his hand. Instantly there were some heavy tablets in it, signed by Aristotle, a parchment signed by Hecate, and some typewritten duplicates signed by the Master of Trinity, who could not remember having met him. All these gave Merlyn an excellent character.
"He had 'em up his sleeve," said Sir Ector wisely. "Can you do anything else?"
"Tree," said Merlyn. At once there was an enormous mulberry growing in the middle of the courtyard, with its luscious blue fruits ready to patter down. This was all the more remarkable, since mulberries only became popular in the days of Cromwell.
"They do it with mirrors," said Sir Ector.
"Snow," said Merlyn. "And an umbrella," he added hastily. Before they could turn round, the copper sky of summer had assumed a cold and lowering bronze, while the biggest white flakes that ever were seen were floating about them and settling on the battlements. An inch of snow had fallen before they could speak, and all were trembling with the wintry blast. Sir Ector's nose was blue, and had an icicle hanging from the end of it, while all except Merlyn had a ledge of snow upon their shoulders. Merlyn stood in the middle, holding his umbrella high because of the owl.
"It's done by hypnotism," said Sir Ector, with chattering teeth. "Like those wallahs from the Indies. But that'll do," he added hastily, "that'll do very well. I'm sure you'll make an excellent tutor for teachin' these boys."

Kay may be the King's son, but Merlyn expends most of his tutoring efforts on the Wart, turning him into various kinds of fish, birds and animals so the boy can learn the wisdom of other species. This is not an endlessly gratifying project, and Merlyn is often irate with his student's thick-headedness.  I don't remember any other Arthurian writer suggesting either that the young Arthur was a bit dim nor that Merlyn's exasperation with him ever produced untoward results.

Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet. "Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!" he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar. The Wart was still staring at his tutor's chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.
"Why did you do that?" asked the Wart.
"I did not do it on purpose."
"Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?"
"Let this be a lesson to you," replied Merlyn, "not to swear. I think we had better change the subject."

The second novel, The Queen of Air and Darkness, opens on a more somber note with an introduction to Queen Morgause -- a lackadaisical witch (possessing nowhere near the conjuring genius of her sister, Morgan le Fay), exquisite and unfaithful wife of King Lot of Orkney and mother to his four sons, Gawaine, Gaheris, Gareth and Agravaine. These are the Gaels, the "Old Ones" of Britain, as contrasted to the Anglo-Saxons of the south, including Arthur. The clannish Old Ones settle matters by violence and blood feud and sorcery. When Arthur establishes his court, endorsing justice and chivalry, the sons become Knights at his round table, but their loyalties are always uncertain. While he is dealing with them in his newly peaceful realm in the south, the bumbling southern King Pellinore and his companions wash ashore in Orkney, and the somewhat insatiable Morgause toys with the idea of seducing them. She comes to see that it's a lost cause.

The Queen had recognized the impossible. Even in the miasma of her Gaelic mind, she had come to see that asses do not mate with pythons. It was useless to go on dramatizing her charms and talents for the benefit of these ridiculous knights ...With a sudden turn of feeling she discovered that she hated them. They were imbeciles, as well as being the Sassenach... [Gaelic term for 'Saxon']

Arthur embraces the motto "Right, not Might", but he employs warfare as an acceptable means of getting his point across. As he prepares for a battle with the Old Ones, he realises that war is largely a sport for the nobles. The peasants (kerns, or villeins) are incited to fight and die by their overlords, who usually escape unharmed. This is but one of the seemingly (and depressingly) eternal truths that White illustrates. War is a game of rich old men sending younger, poorer men off to fight and die.

Between the armies there was a serious racial enmity. But it was an enmity controlled from above -- by nobles who were not sincerely anxious for each other's blood. The armies were packs of hounds, as it were, whose struggle with each other was to be commanded by Masters of Hounds, who took the matter as an exciting gamble. The nobles of the inner circle on both sides were in a way traditionally more friendly with each other than with their own men. For them the numbers were necessary for the sake of the bag, and for scenic purposes. For them a good war had to be full of "arms, shoulders and heads flying about the field and blows ringing by the water and the wood." But the arms, shoulders and heads would be those of villeins.

The Ill-Made Knight is hardly how most Arthurian writers would characterise Lancelot. Everyone knows that he's the golden boy -- handsome, debonair, blond. Not in T. H. White's book, he's not. He's homely bordering on ugly. He is driven by his love of Arthur (and later of Guenever) to become the best knight in the world. Finally, he is just a bundle of moral conflicts. White brilliantly remarks that it was not simply a triangle between Arthur, Guenever and Lancelot, but actually a quadrangle, with God in the fourth corner. And it was the relationship between Lancelot and God that is perhaps the most complex. Arthur is a decent man; Guenever is to be loved. Lancelot's lot is to wrestle with his moral bearings.

On top of this stain there was the torture of knowing that Arthur was kind, simple and upright -- of knowing that he was always on the edge of hurting Arthur dreadfully, although he loved him. Then there was pain about Guenever herself, the tiny plant of bitterness which they had sown, or seen sown, in each other's eyes, on the occasion of their first quarrel of suspicion. It was a pain to him to be in love with a jealous and suspicious woman. She had given him a mortal blow by not believing his explanation about Elaine instantly. Yet he was unable not to love her. Finally there were the revolted elements of his own character -- his strange desire for purity and honour and spiritual excellence.

White consistently shows Arthur as a simple man, but always in a positive light. He has his blind spots, to be sure, but he tries to think things through, as his childhood tutor had taught him. He is far from a witless cuckold. And maybe, White hints, he's the wisest one in the book.

Arthur was not one of those interesting characters whose subtle motives can be dissected. He was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlyn had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.

Arthur realises that his utopian society is still somewhat violent and contentious, and he decides that the best channel for these energies is a religious quest:  "What I mean is, that the ideal of my Round Table was a temporal ideal. If we are to save it, it must be made into a spiritual one. I forgot about God."  And so begins the quest for the Holy Grail.

On a few occasions, White tells readers that he's not going to discuss this or that in great detail, and if the reader wants detail, he can reach for Malory.  Details of great battles, he says, are like reading an account of a cricket match long past -- interesting only for the cricket fanatic. If you want details on all the travails of the Grail quest, he says, Malory is your man. White plants himself in the castle with Arthur and Guenever, waiting for the survivors to return and tell their tales. Gawaine comes home and tells that his warring ways were ineffective. Lancelot got close enough to see the Grail but was not pure enough to get nearer than that. The knights whose spiritual purity let them achieve their goal (including Gawaine's son, Galahad) were never seen again -- perfection disappears, Arthur sadly and sagely concludes. Meanwhile, Lancelot, whose spiritual purity allowed him at least a glimpse of the Grail, finds life at court a bit vacuous in comparison to the spiritual retreat of the Quest.

"Arthur, you mustn't feel that I am rude when I say this. You must remember that I have been away in strange and desert places, sometimes quite alone, sometimes in a boat with nobody but God and the whistling sea. Do you know, since I have been back with people, I have felt I was going mad? Not from the sea, but from the people. All my gains are slipping away, with the people round me. A lot of the things which you and Jenny say, even, seem to me to be needless: strange noises: empty. You know what I mean, 'How are you?' 'Do sit down.' 'What nice weather we are having!' What does it matter? People talk far too much. Where I have been, and where Galahad is, it is a waste of time to have 'manners.' Manners are only needed between people, to keep their empty affairs in working order. Manners makyth man, you know, not God. So you can understand how Galahad may have seemed inhuman, and mannerless, and so on, to the people who were buzzing and clacking about him. He was far away in his spirit, living on desert islands, in silence, with eternity." 

In stark and painful contrast to Lancelot's upright courage is Mordred, King Arthur's hate-filled bastard son with Morgause. Arthur forces himself to respond to Mordred's venom and scheming with justice and forbearance, but it's clear to all that the monster will not stop until he's destroyed everything the King achieved. And here it is again, that sense that might may, after all, prove right in the end.  The older, cruder and more primal tribes will always likely prevail over the more advanced and cerebral ones, and they'll be relentless gadflies in the meantime.

Small flecks in the iris of Mordred's eyes burned with a turquoise light, as bright as the owl's. Instead of being a foppish man with a crooked shoulder, dressed in extravagant clothes, he became a Cause. He became, on this matter, everything which Arthur was not -- the irreconcilable opposite of the Englishman. He became the invincible Gael, the scion of desperate races more ancient than Arthur's, and more subtle. Now, when he was on fire with his Cause, Arthur's justice seemed bourgeois and obtuse beside him. It seemed merely to be dull complacency, beside the savagery and feral wit of the Pict. His maternal ancestors crowded into his face when he was spurning at Arthur's ancestors whose civilization, like Mordred's, had been matriarchal: who had ridden bare-back, charged in chariots, fought by stratagem, and ornamented their grisly strongholds with the heads of enemies.

At the end of the fourth and final book, A Candle in the Wind, as he's preparing for the final battle with Mordred, a weary and old King Arthur sinks into a  reverie so poignant that my heart aches to think of White as he wrote it.  

...long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred. He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might -- to have ended it -- to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent.

Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeur. 

So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better.

Ultimately, in the light of one last moment of universal truth, Arthur considers the twin responsibilities of leaders, whether good or evil, and of the people who put them into power.

Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts?

And on this bleak, haunting note, Arthur concludes his reflection. 

What was Right, what was Wrong? What distinguished Doing from Not Doing? If I were to have my time again, the old King thought, I would bury myself in a monastery, for fear of a Doing which might lead to woe.