The Death of King Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory and Peter Ackroyd

My headline has echoes of "by William Shakespeare; additional dialog by Sam Taylor," I know. The book itself is clearer, though more wordy.

The title is The Death of King Arthur. The subtitle is Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur. And the by-line is "A retelling by Peter Ackroyd." That pretty much tells the tale - Ackroyd worked from Mallory's Middle English original, and did a modern English version of the text without exactly "translating" it or attempting to be overly faithful to the original.

And I have to confess: this is a book I got for review and neglected. For an entire decade. [1] (If I occasionally mention that I don't get books for review much anymore - and don't seem to be complaining, I hope, since I'm not - that's why. I was very bad at the actually reviewing things in a timely manner part of the gig, as well as the telling people I posted a review part, which is also pretty important.) My copy still has the cover letter, so, if Holly Watson is still out there doing publicity for book publishers, I'm very sorry.

Anyway. You know the story here: Mallory codified the various Arthurian legends up to his time - he died in 1471, this was published in 1485, and exactly when he wrote it is unclear and probably never will be clear. Mallory's version, from a bunch of French romances and Welsh legends and general English sources, has been the basis of most Arthuriana for the following five hundred years, from Steinbeck to Lerner and Loewe to Monty Python. (I was personally impressed by how many things I appreciated more in Monty Python and the Holy Grail from reading this: their randomly-murderous Lancelot is actually vastly more canonical than I knew.)

Ackroyd is a novelist and historian; I've read a few books of his over the years and still have a bookmark in his magisterial London: A Biography. He's a fine prose stylist and a deep thinker in his own works; I won't say that he's slumming here with Mallory, but the narrative is much more straightforward here than Ackroyd does on his own. (Knight goes here, fights other knight. It take two hours. One is killed, or not. Someone praises God and becomes a hermit. There's a vision of the Grail. That sort of thing.) The prose is Ackroyd: modern and clear, mostly, though with the flavor of medieval romance to suit the matter, which is entirely medieval romance, as it must be.

It follows the Mallory original, and the stories most of us know very well: first Arthur's birth and ascension to the throne, with Merlin and Uther Pendragon and so on, then some Lancelot stories, then Tristram and Isolde, the Grail quest and Galahad, then the whole Lancelot-Guinevere thing, and finally the ensuing war and death of most of the major characters (Arthur, Gwen, Gawain, and finally Lance to close it out).

Ackroyd is faithful to the religious tone of Mallory's original: they all praise God a lot and are firmly convinced that beating someone up in a joust proves that you're true and righteous, which is a comforting thing for bullies and the strong to believe in all ages. Ackroyd plays all of that straight: he's writing in modern language, but about medieval people, so they have the mindsets and obsessions of the Mallory original. This is not a recasting or modernization of the stories, just of the language - an engrossing, vastly easier to read, gripping, crisp version of Mallory that can be read and enjoyed and understood by modern audiences.

[1] Even worse than that, I think: I got the hardcover in 2011, replaced it with this paperback in 2012, and only got it down from the shelf in 2023. So it took two mailings and twelve years to get me to review it, which is not what any sensible publicist wants.