A Good Deliverance

Toby Clements

Faber, £18.99 

Toby Clements could almost have written A Good Deliverance as a personal gift to me. The subject matter hits all my sweet spots: a scatological tragicomic medieval romp featuring Sir Thomas Malory, the man who wrote the Arthurian legends, as the star. What, I prithee, is not to like?

I'm in unabashed nerd territory here. When I read English literature at university, I was obsessed with the medieval period. From Beowulf and early medieval church lyrics, to Chaucer and Le Morte D’Arthur - The Death of Arthur by Malory - I hoovered up the literature of the world in which this novel is set.

So I know a fair bit about the historical Malory, whose life-story Clements fictionalises. Whether my knowledge is good or bad, in terms of appreciating this novel, remains to be seen. For, in truth, I don’t believe the life of Malory should be presented as a tragicomic romp, as I’ll explain.

But first the plot. We begin in the mid-1400s at Malory’s Warwickshire manor. Our ‘hero’, now in late life, is being unceremoniously wrestled to the ground by soldiers and carted off to prison.

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Malory claims he has no idea why he’s under arrest. Throughout the book, he continually tries to get an explanation for his imprisonment - imploring his useless lawyer to beseech the king for information.

We also learn that Malory spent many years, much earlier in his life, in jail for other crimes. However, he seems reluctant to specify what those offences were.

It’s the search for answers to these two questions which drives the novel forward: why has Malory been taken to jail now as an old man; and what did he do in his youth that deserved his previous arrest?

There’s plenty of old-fashioned jeopardy to keep readers entranced: will Malory be executed for the mysterious crime that’s brought him behind bars once more?

As he languishes in prison, Malory - the consummate unreliable narrator - tells his life-story to the son of his gaoler, a loveable medieval Artful Dodger.

As someone who has written historical fiction - my novel The Wolf Trial was set in 1500s Germany - I take my creative hat off to Clements for getting the filthy and the fury of this age just right. You can smell the stink of the streets, the blood on the battlefields, and the sweat on even the most genteel lady-in-waiting.

The book is brutal. This was a violent age and Clements doesn’t shy from that. “Nothing is so valueless,” we’re told, “that you should throw it away, save a human life.”

Clements is particularly good at mixing horror and humour. One moment we’re laughing at Malory in all his mock-heroic daftness gazing at his lady-love in “reverential, transfixed silence” as a fly buzzes into his mouth. The next we’re told that “harlots” in the military baggage-train during the Hundred Years War get their arms broken as punishment.

The myth enduresThe myth endures (Image: free)

Women are either adored or brutalised in this novel - sometimes both simultaneously. We hear of soldiers who fall in love with runaway nuns. They all go to sea, storms hit, and the once-smitten soldiers throw the nuns overboard as women are bad luck.

Malory presents himself as lily-white saying he’d “forsake any yearnings of the flesh until he loved a lady”. Yet he’s soon in a barn with a married barmaid. On the surface, he’s enjoyable company but thoroughly untrustworthy.

Malory goes to war full of chivalric notions, however any sense of honour and heroism quickly dies for readers. Knights are not Sir Lancelot, they’re like aristocratic members of Islamic State. Malory is felled by dysentery before the French can get him. His first ‘kill’ is his own best friend, who he accidentally brains.

The book has subtly seditious and wonderfully mischievous anti-monarchist themes. The great Henry V of Agincourt is a psychopathic war criminal. Malory’s Arthur is a monster who kills children.

Yet Malory cannot see any of this, so the chivalrous legends of the Round Table that he commits to paper, and his professed love for merry old England, are based on lies … somewhat, perhaps, like the legend Clements now tells of Malory.

Malory retains his youthful romanticism amid this squalid sadism - or at least pretends he does - forever wooing beautiful women, or jotting poetry in his notebook.

Beneath the surface though, Malory is basically one of those guys who prop up the golf club bar: good for a laugh at first, but there’s something not quite right about him, something fake, perhaps even sinister if only you could put your finger on it.

Stylistically, the narrative technique can jar. We shift unnecessarily from first to third-person as Clements moves between Malory recounting his youth, and the events of the here-and-now.

There’s also the odd device of Malory bullet-pointing important information which he thinks his audience - the gaoler’s son, and us maybe - will find less interesting than his shaggy-dog yarns of deering-do.

However, the stumbling-block for me was the unravelling of those big questions: why is Malory in prison now; and why was Malory imprisoned in the past?

I know why the historical Malory was jailed because I studied him 35 years ago. He was accused of rape, though some say he was framed by powerful enemies. Clements shies away from tackling this head-on.

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Why? Did he fear the subject? Certainly, his novel couldn’t have been written with such light, effervescent brio if he’d dealt directly with claims of rape. His likely-lad hero would have rather been the darkest of villains, or the victim of a dreadful miscarriage of justice.

Without studying Malory as a student, I’m not sure I’d have worked out the nature of the accusations, from the way Clements executes the book. The reader is left deliberately, infuriatingly, questioning what happened and why.

Some may close this novel without understanding that Malory was actually accused of rape. Even Malory’s fate is left hanging in a rather rushed denouement.

Clements hurries where haste is needless, and dawdles over matters which the reader could happily ignore. Confronting the real historical allegations would have made for a very different but much more morally complex, honest and satisfying work.

Maybe the Arthurian tales which Malory wrote, and the myths surrounding the historical Malory, are such that Clements himself wanted to bring a sense of the ‘fog’ inherent in legend.

If so, that’s brave, but it ultimately doesn’t serve the story. A more straight-forward approach would have made this a masterpiece. As it stands, it’s great entertainment, but flawed literature, and historically somewhat frustrating.