King of the Middle March

‘Away east over the thousand-tongued sea, with all its sweet promises, its stabs and sudden rushes, one silver-gold blade of light.

A sword. No! A scimitar. That’s what I saw when I lifted the salt-sticky flap of our tent.’

The final part of the trilogy opens into this vividly seen gathering of the Fourth Crusade armies in Venice where Arthur is at ‘crossing places’ in even more complex ways than before: here physically crossing between cultures, between boyhood and manhood and, as before, between the story of King Arthur and his own 14th-century replaying of its themes. There are dramatic set pieces of battle and re-imagined Arthurian legend threaded through with the continuity and parallels of the two ‘Arthur’ worlds – his and our own. Finely written, it has the same short chapters as the other books (just over a hundred here), often as spare and intense as the scenes of sometimes ordinary, sometimes awfully real medieval life and death that they depict. Arthur re-sees the tragic breaking up of the Arthurian romance in mud and blood, as his own romantic views confront the vicious brutality of warfare where he can loathe and love the ‘enemy’ and his fellow ‘Christians’. This is a trilogy to grow up with, now in this third part, like the Arthur legend, more darkly toned with death and doubt. It is Arthur’s journey, a growing up and growing into understanding. The crafted narrative is made of a montage of scenes that will finally take Arthur home for Easter, returning to the world of the earlier books. He is the same but different, wiser now, a knight-of-the-head-and-heart with questions still to be resolved (the troubling similar look of the eyes that Winnie shares with Guinevere and gritty Gatty’s unfinished story). A beautifully produced book, a treat to hold and to read: a wonderful achievement.