Booking it: The Tragedy of Arthur

There are four Arthurs in The Tragedy of Arthur: the author, Arthur Phillips; the narrator, also Arthur Phillips; the narrator’s father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips; and the legendary King Arthur of Britain. While this novel is fiction, many of the details of the author’s real life are the same as the narrator’s, making it difficult to determine where reality ends and fiction begins. This blurring of the line between reality and fiction preoccupies the audience and the characters alike.

The basic story of the novel is that the narrator’s father, a dying con man, gifts his son with a 1597 quarto of a previously undiscovered Shakespeare play, The Tragedy of Arthur, enjoining him to get it published. Of course, the necessary question is whether this play is real, or if it is the con man’s last and greatest scam. The novel is partially a memoir and partially an introduction to the play, which is included at the back of the book. (For simplicity’s sake, I will not be reviewing the play itself except to say that it is an enjoyable read and believably Shakespearean.) Evidence surfaces for both sides, much of it convincing, but none of it conclusive.

In order to explain the history of the play and his doubts as to its authenticity, the narrator finds himself recounting his life story. He talks about growing up with his twin sister Dana, struggling to win the approval of his recidivist father and running away from home and back again in the effort to find his place in the world. His father and Dana love Shakespeare; he hates the man and his plays. He ends up a spectator to a crucial part of the relationship between the two most important people of his life. The rift widens over time and the narrator is cut adrift from those he loves as they grow older and more problems intrude on their lives, as more differences, resentments and emotional instabilities thrust their fingers into the cracks and pull their family apart. The author masterfully escalates these issues toward the climax, bringing together the narrator’s relationship to his family members, Shakespeare, and The Tragedy of Arthur.

Does the title refer to the play, and the tragedy of King Arthur of Britain, an unwilling and fundamentally flawed king? Or is it the tragedy of Arthur Phillips, an unwilling and fundamentally flawed family member? Or perhaps it is the tragedy of Arthur Edward Harold Phillips, the narrator’s father. The lines between them blur. They bear uncanny resemblances and links to each other. Whichever one you are more interested in, you find yourself looking to the others for clues to their personality as you realize how similar they are, and how one can reveal what the other tries to hide in their hopes and fears.

This confusing stew of Arthurs is the most obvious way that the final Arthur, the author, brings up the theme of who and what influences us through our lives. All the Arthurs have an impact on each other, whether they want to or not, and they all wrestle with issues that parallel or echo each other. The narrator spends a large chunk of his story crafting “indifference” toward his father – and, by extension, to Shakespeare and The Tragedy of Arthur – but it ultimately fails. The author taps into a truth of human relationships here, which is that we cannot choose who impacts us. We only wish to build indifference towards people who have already changed us, and we often most loudly proclaim we do not care about someone’s opinion when that person’s praise would mean more than any other.

The narrator writes his memoir unwillingly, with what he calls “a gun to his head.” It is therefore littered with sarcastic, annoyed and self-aware references to the genre. He questions his own memories and how much he has written or rewritten them, and continually points out his lack of qualification to write objectively about his own life. The result is darkly amusing and sometimes pitiable, as he staggers between struggling to justify his actions and condemning them and his justification alike. He will draw attention to “memoirists’ tricks” as he tells his stories.

Much like a Shakespeare play, this novel does not contain only one theme or story, but rather the multitudes of a complicated, fractured family life. Within this one family are the joys and tragedies of relationships of all kinds, the coming of age stories, the losses, wonder at the magic of the world and disenchantment with it, the trials of learning how you are different from your loved ones and how you are the same, the struggle to be your own person and the struggle to live up to the expectations of others. Arthur’s life is, as any other, filled with ups and downs that are equally exciting and exasperating to follow, but are worth reading either way.