To die with honour

In 1915, in a letter to a friend, C. S. Lewis described the fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur as “the greatest thing I’ve ever read”. In the TLS some thirty years later, he was rather less complimentary about the life of its likely author, Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel. “To those who love to see old altars defaced”, he wrote, “Malory’s life offers a rich banquet.” On the surface it does seem so. Malory has what must be one of literary history’s most extensive criminal records, with convictions for “cattle-lifting, theft, extortion, sacrilegious robbery, attempted murder and rape”. (As Lewis pointed out, though, convictions in Malory’s time were often politically motivated, and it is impossible to determine the actual nature and extent of his crimes.) In A Good Deliverance Toby Clements engagingly reimagines the author’s life, from his childhood in rural Warwickshire to his final days in prison.

We first meet Malory as an old man, dragged from his estate to Newgate gaol on mule-back, “more parcel than person”. He is locked up in a solitary cell without hearing the nature of the charges against him, without being allowed to speak to the keeper and without much luck in appealing to anyone who might help him to clear his name. The only person who offers him some distraction is the twelve-year-old son of one of the wardens, who brings him his daily meals. And so, while he awaits what he fears will be the execution bell, he sets about telling the boy the story of his life.

The life Clements has divined for Malory is brilliantly entertaining, placing him on the sidelines of some of the fifteenth century’s great events. Moving from London to Calais, Konstanz and beyond, the young Thomas gets drunk at the coronation of Henry V, participates in the siege of Harfleur and the battle of Verneuil, and guards the captive Joan of Arc at Rouen. He tutors the child king Henry VI, receives a knighthood, competes in a tourney, falls in love with the wife of the brutish Duke of Gloucester and lays an ambush when the duke marches on his estate in retaliation. The stories of Arthur and his knights loom large throughout, inspiring his literary ambitions and offering a lofty moral standard. But, like Arthur in Le Morte Darthur, Malory cannot help but be framed by the spectre of his eventual downfall. “I wonder if there was hidden from me anything by way of a sign”, he reflects, “as you might hope would come in a man’s life, to warn him that his life is now at its zenith?”

The fifteenth century is familiar territory for Clements – his four-part Kingmaker series (2014–17) fictionalized the Wars of the Roses – and he carries his knowledge of the period lightly. He is a wonderful sketcher of characters and offers delightful – and often very funny – portraits of some of the era’s notable figures. The roguish antipope John XXIII is “small, strikingly dark, like a Saracen, [with] perhaps the least saintly expression I ever saw on any man, let alone a pope”; John Lydgate, busy in his “chase to become the next Chaucer”, strikes Malory as a “jolly little Benedictine, plump and mischievous”.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, being a book about a writer, A Good Deliverance is at its heart concerned with storytelling. Between the boy’s visits Malory frets about what to tell him and what to leave out. The story he settles on is striking in its contrast to his colourful criminal record. In Clements’s hands he emerges as an essentially noble figure swept up by the political turmoil of his age. But he also has a habit of aggrandizing his achievements, of talking around or dismissing his supposed crimes, and of avoiding his fall from grace.

The boy knows this too. Like a sceptical reader he scrutinizes Malory’s account, interrupting him with questions and showing his excitement, disappointment or plain boredom with the story as it is told. But in the end he, like we, cannot help but be won over by Malory’s charm.

Pablo Scheffer is an editor at the TLS

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