For a thousand years the Arthurian legends have endured undiminished by progress or pessimism, and in this triumphant comic reaffirmation by Thomas Berger, they will continue to enthrall readers….

Of course, to portray a mortal man in a mythic situation is to invite comedy. And as John Barth did in Chimera, Berger [in Arthur Rex] exploits the humorous human potential to the fullest, but without compromising the integrity of the original legends—Gawaine and the Green Knight, or the tryst of Tristram and Isolde.

Instead, Berger enriches the texture of the tradition by speculating on the background of each knight—Percival's upbringing as a sissy in girls' clothes, Gawaine's fantastic carnal appetites, Launcelot's ascetic monasticism….

The familiar tales are told in a style as deliberately atavistic as that employed by the translators of the King James Bible in 1611, and to the same purpose: to give the whole a...