"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court" by Mark Twain

I first read this book on a road trip when I was in school. I must have been around fourteen or fifteen and I had a really old and battered copy of the book. In fact, it was so battered that the pages were falling out and eventually - it fell apart not so much as a year later. The book was an old, coverless copy and I would sit in the car reading it and laughing to myself at the very suggestion that a man could travel back in time and visit the courts of King Arthur and his knights of the round table. The book itself was a short and rather funny take on a classic tale and I definitely read it more than once. I have always enjoyed the poetic tragedy of Sir Lancelot and so, reading Twain’s comedic text was like reading someone from the Southern States of America mixing up Lancelot with Huckleberry Finn with a side of William Faulkner like satire of the changing world. It’s like the perfect book to cheer you up and the most exciting novel that Twain wrote apart from Huckleberry Finn.

Upon my second read of the book, I obviously had to get another and brand new, copy. This copy had inside it a number of essays and an introduction which taught me more about how the text was written. When I was sixteen and then eighteen, I re-read the text and took note of the various themes stated in the introduction - especially the theme of time, which seemed like the most important and also the most poignant. Since I didn’t really have any friends, I liked to read and make notes then, I would write about the books in my diary and not really share it with anyone because I didn’t have anyone to share it with. When I re-read this book, I’m often out of breath or upset, depressed etc. and this book never fails to cheer me up. It has everything: there’s a great amount of adventure, there’s comedic speech and dialogue, there’s an amazing an familiar cast of characters that many of us encountered in our childhood and there’s themes of time, love, death and even the unfamiliar. When we mix the nineteenth century average American with the court of King Arthur, there are going to be some definite thrills but seriously, it is one of the funniest books you’ll read if you like the classics.

Upon my third read of the book, I was more critical of the text because now, I was about twenty-two years’ old and yet, the comedy hadn’t worn off. I still disappeared into it when I was feeling blue and down - which is more often than I’d like to admit - and I still managed to read it on long care journeys and on the train where I’d sit at the back and go over the dialogue, analysing the characters and their individuality. It’s often difficult to make every character of the round table an individual, but Mark Twain does it as well as de Troyes or Malory and it is incredible to witness. His Lancelot is a lot more confused than we would normally encounter and Parzival is estranged from reality with Sir Gawain a more distant character. As we are in the modern day, well according to Twain we’re in his modern day - as a character only, we are only really linked to that particular person. When it comes to the Knights of the Round Table, they are made purposefully to look distant, unattainable, unrealistic and more than often, they are over-the-top in the most comedic ways. Of course, when it’s written by Mark Twain, what else would you expect than these overtly satirical caricatures of characters that we associate with the old in comparison to the newer and more identifiable and relatable characters we understand as the modern and individual. I’m not going to lie, but many people haven’t read “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” and it’s a real shame because this book has brought laughter to my life when I really thought that I actually had none whatsoever. It’s an amazing book in every sense of the word.