Summary: A retelling of part of the Arthurian legends in verse.
I have known of Malcolm Guite for quite a while, but I do not tend to read a lot of poetry and have not previously read any of his books. I have listened to a number of interviews on various podcasts. Guite is a priest, poet, and public intellectual. Galahad and the Grail pulls together all three.
I thought I had read TH White’s Once and Future King when I was a teen, but after reading Galahad and the Grail, I think I have only seen the Sorcerer and the Stone and other movie and TV adaptations. So while I had a rough idea of the characters, most of the story that Guite is adapting and putting to verse was new to me. I did not know anything about who Galahad was or how he was conceived.
It is obvious that Guite is using his skill as a poet to put this story to verse. But he is also thinking theologically about how imagination shapes our formation as humans. I am a bit resistant to the role of Christendom in this story. Arthur and others are clearly Christians working to culturally shape England into a Christ-following country. But the point here isn’t that this is history, or an example of England being particularly chosen by God for a particular purpose of colonialism or power, but that this is a story about how myth and imagination shape shared identity.
I picked up Galahad and the Grail not long after I finished Wilson’s version of the Odyssey. Both were written in verse and I read each of them a bit in verse to understand the structure, but then I mostly listened to them as audiobooks. My perception is that narrative verse was meant to be heard. And while I want to read enough to become familiar with the structure, I want to hear it because narrative verse is an aural medium.
Because it is verse, it is shorter than you might assume. It is nearly 400 pages on the page, but less than 8 hours of audio. As I understand it, this is the first of a trilogy with the second book coming out in November. The second book is about Merlin calling Arthur, which is significantly different from this book that is nearly at the end of the Arthurian era.
I think this is a book, and series, that I probably will need to read again (at least once) to fully understand. There is more here, both in the poetry and in the story, than what I am going to catch on the first run.
Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook