Pendragon: Arthur and His Britain | Literary Qualities

Pendragon: Arthur and His Britain Literary Qualities

Because Pendragon explores the relationship between Arthurian history and literature, Clancy's style is at once straightforward and imaginative. He recounts his scholarly investigation of Arthur in the form of a detective story, finding and evaluating historical and literary clues and placing them in the context of other clues. Clancy avoids needless decoration in his writing, but he effectively uses analogies.

As a relief from the demands of formal logic, Clancy sometimes adopts an informal tone and directly addresses the reader: "If you have studied Latin, you share with this young man [Arthur] at least one thing, a schoolbook—Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico [Of the War in Gaul]. I remember being thoroughly bored by it, though I suppose it did help me to learn Latin." Clancy's writing has the virtues of variety and clarity, and his informal tone offsets the sheer volume of historical information that underlies the book....
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