The Once and Future King

In an interview on The Miracle of Autism

The Once and Future King. 

Well, T H White wrote this in the 50s when a lot of people were writing fantasy epics, like Tolkien and C S Lewis, Mervyn Peake and all these British writers who were writing masterpieces after the war. But I think what the books all did was to take the myths of the Nordic and Celtic peoples and make them available to a traumatised post-war populus and reintroduced romanticism in a context that people who’d fought in those wars could understand. This is the King Arthur story and I guess it’s about compassion. He doesn’t want to be king, he becomes king, his best friend and his wife fall in love and he is compassionate and understanding about that and he’s always trying to put the bigger picture first. It’s that thing of no good deed goes unpunished because in the end he dies, of course, by the hand of his son and sister. But he has done his best and been a good man throughout. The writing is beautiful beyond belief and it’s incredibly funny, particularly the first book, The Sword in the Stone. Again, the theme with these books is that they show you the bigger picture of people doing their best in difficult circumstances and whether they succeed or fail isn’t really the issue. The issue is that they are authentic as people.

In terms of dealing with autism, are you talking about compassion for your son, for yourselves? How do you direct the compassion?

Well, the early years of autism are all about dealing with suffering. Your child is suffering, with neurological traumas, you are suffering with helplessness and fear and loss of dreams, helplessness. And the suffering of when he kicks off in public.

And you must be exhausted too. 

Yes. You are basically like knights on a quest as an autism parent. You are questing for solutions and for a holy grail that may or may not exist. I guess when we went to Mongolia you could say that was a classic quest. I had to ask myself: what if there’s no change in Rowan at all? But that doesn’t matter because at least the diagnosis of autism didn’t stop us having an incredible adventure like that as a family. In fact it made us do something more beautiful and extraordinary than we would have done otherwise. So, suddenly, autism becomes a great gift and that shifts your perspective. In the event there was all this extraordinary change in Rowan. But these classic quest stories are always assumed to be allegorical in the western intellectual world, when, in fact, a lot of life is composed of very real questing and you need to have a bit of that in your bloodstream if you’re going to get through difficult situations in life. These situations where logic and reason and science suddenly aren’t helping you. You need a non-rational set of ideas to draw on. 

Did you take any other children with you on the journey?

No. But Rowan made his first friend on the journey, a Mongolian boy we met outside Ulan-Bator, the son of our guide. So, in the end, there were two dads and two boys on the steppe travelling up into Siberia to the reindeer people and the shaman where the big changes happened. The changes have not only lasted but the shaman said we should do a healing journey every year until he was nine when the negative effects of autism would leave him. So we’ve been doing that. We were with the bushmen in Namibia and then last year we saw an aboriginal shaman and this year we’ve just got back from the Navajo reservation in Arizona where the most profound and immediate changes since Mongolia happened. We’re a bit freaked out actually, because Rowan is now scarily normal. We went with another autism parent and her son is much more severe, completely non-verbal and quite violent. I just got an email from her this morning saying he’s no longer biting and kicking and he’s becoming verbal. But it’s not a one-shot deal; you have to go back for top-ups. 

In an interview on Fantasy

Now I’m out of guesses.

TH White’s The Once and Future King. White is less famous than Lewis and Tolkien, but he was a better writer, at least as far as style goes, and his book is a true masterpiece in its own right – a thoroughly modern re-imagining of the great English epic, the story of King Arthur. Like Tolkien, White takes an ancient, mythic landscape and scales it down to human size (or perhaps he scales us up). But White’s world is more brightly lit than Tolkien’s – he dispenses with all those Wagnerian storm clouds. White’s England is all streaming banners and sun-splashed meadows and shining walls, and he lingers longer over his characters, making them more complex and flawed and divided against themselves. The first part alone, “The Sword in the Stone”, about Arthur’s early years and his education by Merlin, may be the best story of a childhood ever committed to paper.