A basic charm of The Once and Future King is the way the author threw himself into the story he borrowed from Malory. If you are looking for simple adventure, for knights and ladies in the slightly stiff poses of medieval tapestry or Gothic sculpture, you do not read White; you go to Le Morte d'Arthur, a more direct though still tertiary source. White's reworking is valuable for the myriad, living and deep reflections of the author's complex personality—in Merlyn the genial misanthrope, in Arthur the harrassed idealist who groans under the task of being an ordinary man with an extraordinary assignment, even in Guinevere and perhaps most of all in Lancelot, the good man who does grave wrong.

White's tendency to project his own concerns into the Arthurian matter is evident throughout The Once and Future King, but nowhere so much as in [The Book of...