Book Review: "The Death of King Arthur" by Peter Ackroyd

When it comes to Peter Ackroyd, I have read my fair share. I practically devoured his book Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem in about two hours a few years' ago. It was one of my favourite books of that year. I then went on to read his book The English Ghost and even after that, his biography of William Shakespeare. But there was also another side to me during this entire time: I was (and still am) a huge fan of Arthurian Legends.

Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory and others have constantly been part of my reading culture, especially during my degree years. The fact that I only recently discovered the Peter Ackroyd version entitled The Death of King Arthur is weird to me but I was glad to do so. And so, I read it. And so, I was...disappointed. Yes, disappointed. The version written by Peter Ackroyd is a watered-down version of Thomas Mallory's epic. It is bland and feels empty. It doesn't live up to any of the older versions and left me, a keen reader, feeling underwhelmed.

Starting in pretty much the same position that the previous epics have started with, Merlin is a wizard and at the moment Uthar Pendragon is the king. Now, this introductory section is written fairly well, it makes for good and easy reading. Not a lot is physically happening until the king starts to get sick and well, it's okay to have written this with a bland-ish style. However, as the story continues, the plot may stay interesting but the written style definitely makes it a slog where Ackroyd's writing is concerned. If he had written this book like he had written Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, I would have eaten the whole thing up in seconds.

Now, I understand wanting to retain the sonorous style of Sir Thomas Mallory's original, but the modern retelling by Ackroyd feels like its been dumbed down. It does not feel sonorous at all, but instead feels like your trundling through it rather aimlessly and clumsily because the prose just doesn't fit together well. Ackroyd may have done some people a favour, of course there are those who struggle to read Medieval prose, but honestly when it comes to the overall impact of Arthurian Legend I remain confused about how he could have made it so boring and dull. It is a special skill to make one of the greatest stories of revenge, heroism and war as dull as dishwater. But alas, Peter Ackroyd achieves just that by removing all the depth from the story.

I have read a number of reviews of this book after reading the book itself and it seems that the general consensus agrees with my own: the book, though it portrayed the correct and expected stories, were lacking some serious soul and depth. When it came to the story of Lancelot for example, not only was Peter Ackroyd attempting to retain the medieval spelling of Lancelot (which was simply pointless), but he also made all the magic disappear from the affair he has with Guinevere. There is something dark and magical about the affair in Thomas Mallory's version, but in Ackroyd's, it is really just planted in there with no impact.

I think that Peter Ackroyd may have had good intentions but possibly got the execution of the novel wrong in this respect. He was doing a modern retelling of the Arthurian Tales whilst trying to retain the style that was characteristic to Thomas Mallory's time and place. It works in a medieval context because it feels magical and ahead of its time. Writing in that style whilst using more modern words and phrases characteristic of the 19th and 20th centuries of English does not work because the language no longer feels as magical. Ackroyd's novel therefore feels disconnected with none of the subsections of the bigger parts coming together quite right and, as I have already said, this exasperating reading of The Death of King Arthur becomes nothing more than a tired and soulless endeavour.

What he should have done however was retold the Arthurian legends in his own style of writing, because I think we all agree that this would be much better than anything he could achieve copying a medieval writer in the present day. His own writing would have brought more of a darkness to the story, instead of leading with a very jittery prose style. All in all, I think the execution was poor because he basically chose to do the wrong thing.