Summary
In the opening pages of The Ill-Made Knight, Lancelot is in his family's armory, inspecting his visage in a kettle hat and reflecting on his own character. The young man had been impressed by King Arthur and is determined to join Arthur's new order of knights; he spends three years in rigorous training, yet never receives a summons from Arthur himself. Finally, Lancelot is prompted to set out for Arthur's court when Merlyn and Nimue (who will eventually imprison the wizard) visit Lancelot's home castle in France. Together with his devoted mentor Uncle Dap, the aspiring knight sets off from his family in secret. Uncle Dap, for his part, knows Lancelot's prowess in combat and considers it an honor to serve as Lancelot's squire.
Lancelot and Uncle Dap cross from France into England. Their journey soon brings them face to face with a silent and fearsome black knight, whom Lancelot challenges and quickly, decisively unseats during a joust. The black knight reveals himself as King Arthur. The men return to court, where Arthur knights Lancelot and where Lancelot makes the acquaintance of Queen Guenever. Lancelot, who learns of some of Arthur's difficulties in reining in his knights' aggression and moving the civilizing project of the Round Table forward, devotes himself to helping the king's endeavors along. He also begins to form a romantic attachment to Guenever. Uncle Dap warns Lancelot about such an entanglement, to little avail. Arthur, who also notices the growing bond between Guenever and Lancelot, decides to take Lancelot with him on a campaign to Rome—and himself forms a close friendship with the young and talented knight.
Almost as soon as Lancelot arrives back from Rome, he sets off on a series of quests that solidify his reputation as a knight of remarkable prowess. He defeats a destructive knight named Sir Carados, escapes from the clutches of Morgan le Fay, and later kills the brother of Sir Carados, Sir Turquine. In the process, he frees captured knights of the Round Table, including Gaheris and Lionel. Lancelot also observes acts of deception and violence; a woman and her heavily armed husband attempt (and fail) to kill him after he climbs a tree to retrieve the woman's falcon, and another armed man decapitates a woman accused of adultery. Yet when Lancelot himself returns to Arthur's court at Pentecost, he bears reports of his many deeds of nobility and bravery. He dedicates many of his accomplishments to Queen Guenever.
Both on account of tensions with the Orkney faction and on account of his complicated relationship with Guenever, Lancelot finds his time back at court to be a cause of tension. He sets off once more, and arrives at the town of Corbin. Here, Lancelot learns of an enchantment that keeps a girl trapped in a cell of boiling water. He approaches the girl, breaks her enchantment, and is greeted as a hero. However, the girl herself seduces Lancelot during a dinner; she plies him with wine and sends him false news that Guenever is at a nearby castle. Lancelot rides off and makes love to the counterfeit Guenever, only to discover the next morning that he had been intimate with Elaine herself. He expresses his wish never to see Elaine again.
The romance between Lancelot and Guenever herself blossoms after Lancelot returns to court, their intimacy sped along by a year-long absence on Arthur's part. In the meantime, the naive Elaine has devised a plan to win Lancelot back. She will confront him in Arthur's court, bringing her infant son with her. Lancelot treats Elaine's arrival as an inevitability, but is rattled by her entreaties and by the sight of his infant son, Galahad. His state only grows worse when Guenever summons Lancelot and Elaine and, in a rage, commands Lancelot to leave the castle. He rushes out, driven mad. Not long after, stories of a wild man of great physical prowess begin to circulate, though Lancelot's exact fate is unclear. (He is believed to have been killed by a boar.) Eventually, a powerful yet submissive wild man arrives at the court of King Pelles, who makes the wild man his fool and gives him a royal gown. Yet the daughter of King Pelles—Elaine herself—recognizes the wild man as Lancelot and nurses him back to health.
Lancelot resolves to stay with Elaine, and the two of them go to reside in Bliant Castle. Elaine is ecstatic over the prospect of a shared life. She also arranges a tournament, in which Lancelot proves his prowess as a fighter. His identity is finally given away when two of Arthur's knights seek him out, and he leaves Elaine behind after Uncle Dap arrives at Bliant Castle and silently beckons Lancelot to resume his life as a knight. Aware by now that Guenever has repented of her actions and has spent a fortune looking for him, Lancelot returns to Arthur's court.
Over the space of fifteen years, the civilizing project of the Round Table proceeds smoothly and triumphantly. New knights—Gareth, who adores Lancelot, and Mordred, who is Arthur's half-son—appear at court. Yet Arthur is eventually brought news of a bizarre murder: Sir Agravaine has killed his own elderly mother, Morgause, who was found in bed with a knight named Sir Lamorak. Instead of punishing the Orkney faction, Arthur decides that he must redirect his knights' energies towards a new constructive end. He will send them on holy quests, with the ultimate objective of finding the Holy Grail.
The knights of the Round Table, whose number now includes Galahad, set off to find the Grail. One by one they trickle back into England as their adventures wind down, and report their deeds to Arthur. Gawaine is among the first to return, and tells Arthur of his exasperation with the conduct of the pious and otherworldly Galahad. Sir Lionel also arrives, and makes similar (though less vehement) statements about the holy yet strict conduct of one of his companions, Sir Bors. Eventually, Lancelot appears. He reveals that Gahalad was pronounced the best knight in the world over even him, the great Lancelot, and that the Holy Grail has in fact been found. Galahad, Bors, and another knight named Percivale were allowed access to the Grail; Lancelot, however, was not.
After Lancelot's return, Guenever attempts to seduce him anew, but finds that the now distant Lancelot resists her efforts. However, Lancelot affirms his loyalty to her by fighting on her behalf. One instance was spurred on by a feud among the knights; an attempt to poison Gawaine goes awry and leads to the death of another knight, and in the confusion Guenever is accused of treason by Sir Mador de la Porte. Sir Lancelot is away at the time of the commotion, but is brought back to fight Sir Mador on behalf of the Queen; he does not kill Sir Mador, but does force the defeated knight not to say anything further that links Guenever to the poisoning attempt.
Once this affair is cleared up, Lancelot goes to fight in a tournament at Corbin, the residence of Elaine. This decision infuriates Guenever; Elaine's fate is itself sealed in short order. Incapable of truly possessing Lancelot, Elaine commits suicide and her body is floated down to Arthur's capital in a barge. Despite this strange occurrence, life carries on as usual at court until Guenever is abducted by a knight named Sir Meliagrance. Lancelot rushes to Guenever's aid, survives Meliagrance's archers, and arrives at Meliagrance's fortifications. Meliagrance yields, but is unwise enough to later accuse Guenever of committing adultery with Lancelot. For this offense, Lancelot faces Meliagrance in combat and—despite agreeing to fight with reduced armor and with his left hand bound behind his back—kills the queen's accuser.
England then settles into a period of peace. And with this repose, a visitor arrives at Arthur's court: Sir Urre of Hungary, a knight whose wounds will not close and whose healing will require a miracle. Arthur's knights try to heal him, and fail—all accept Lancelot, who watches from a harness room and contemplates suicide. At last, though, he approaches Sir Urre. The wounds heal at Lancelot's touch and despite the joyous tumult that erupts around him Lancelot, depleted, weeps.
Analysis
Despite its title's focus on Lancelot, The Ill-Made Knight is concerned with the maturation of the entire Round Table project. This book can thus, like the two books that precede it, be understood as something of a group portrait, and as one that exhibits contrasts and arrangements that have not yet appeared in The Once and Future King. For the first time in White's saga, Arthur must maneuver his way through the world of governance without Merlyn's aid. (As if to drive this point home, the wizard here appears only to Lancelot, not Arthur—and appears alongside Nimue, the woman who will imprison him in a tumulus.) The Ill-Made Knight also gives readers the first complete view of the adult Orkneys, men who do not seem entirely well-adapted to Arthur's version of chivalry and who (for worse in Agravaine's case, for better in Gareth's) have not outgrown their youthful traits. Yet even if this book is a group portrait, it is a portrait that centers firmly on Lancelot. Morgause haunted the edges of the book titled after her; Lancelot commands the prime position in the book titled after him.
Of White's four books, it is perhaps this third one that most deftly and effectively makes use of the techniques of a psychological novel. The focus on Lancelot becomes the occasion for some extremely precise examinations of the thoughts and feelings of the Ill-Made Knight himself, as in the following, early depiction of a small conflict between Lancelot and Guenever: "The young man knew, in this moment, that he had hurt a real person, of his own age. He saw in her eyes that she thought he was hateful, and that he had surprised her badly" (334). Lancelot's development in the book proceeds both quest by quest and emotion by emotion; he begins by trying to manage a love triangle involving Arthur and Guenever, and then continues to try to balance his love for the queen with his sense of duty to Elaine. After a time, his prowess as a knight can be taken for granted; the real drama of the book starts to reside in Lancelot's responses to the "real" people around him, people whose own psyches are as vulnerable as his own.
There are aspects of Lancelot's character that White might have given more attention: the contrast between his beautiful fighting form and his ugly visage (a potentially fraught source of insecurity, one which might reward extended rumination) is raised fairly early in The Ill-Made Knight but then, itself, comes to be taken for granted. White, however, has fine justifications for such choices. After all, too much attention on Lancelot would draw attention from the other fully articulated, psychologically vital character in this portion of The Once and Future King: Guenever. Arthur's queen is a woman of strong passions and noble bearing, but the intensity of her thoughts allows White to reflect on such issues as fine mental processes involved in self-reflection, and even in the repression of specific thoughts and feelings. As White explains Guenever's consciousness at one point, "with her prescience, she was aware of dooms and sorrows outside her lover's purview. It would not be accurate to say that she was aware of them in a logical sense, but they were present in her deeper mind" (388). Though Guenever's political power pales in comparison to Arthur's, she is a woman of more emphatic moods and forebodings than her husband is accustomed to. With her, White presents a consciousness that, for all its realism, functions with higher drama than does the consciousness of the composed Arthur or the duty-bound Lancelot.
The complexity of Guenever and Lancelot is made even more apparent by White's use of foil characters. Thanks to Lancelot's network of responsibilities, Guenever is paired off against the earnest, artless Elaine. Lancelot's most interesting foil, though, is not one of the brutal knights he vanquishes; it is his own son Galahad, who proves capable of besting his own father in combat. Galahad has none of his father's ugliness, is pure while Lancelot is caught between difficult loves, and is admitted to the Grail while Lancelot is denied entrance. He is also depicted mostly through Gawaine's and Lancelot's testimonies—the ultimate contrast, in terms of narrative technique, to the emphatically-present and precisely-described Lancelot.
Keeping Galahad out of the narrative also calls attention to one of the strengths of the story that The Ill-Made Knight tells. Consider what a book about Galahad would have been like. Would any modern reader want to spend 200 pages reading about a perfectly accomplished and perfectly chaste knight? Any interest, any wonder at the man's accomplishments, would give way to monotony. The irony is that Lancelot aspired to be such a knight—a man of perfections—and failed, and yet inspired 200 pages that draw The Once and Future King into new subtleties of thought and feeling. He achieved a greatness complemented not by divine detachment, but by a quality that can be much harder for a novelist to convincingly capture—humanity.
