The Quest of the Fair Unknown by Gerald Morris

Rating: 4/5

I’ve been unfamiliar with the vast majority of the source material Morris has drawn from with this series (aside from well-known Arthurian characters like Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, etc.), but at last the series is getting to the portion that I know of, if only because there was a trilogy I read as a kid that dealt with the portion of Arthurian legend that Morris is now getting to.

The Quest of the Fair Unknown (sequel to The Lioness and her Knight) introduces Galahad, the holiest knight of them all, though the main character is Beaufils, taken from Lybeau Desconus. The plot mostly follows the Grail plot that I’m familiar with (and shout-out to Morris for having the characters talk about the events of Parsifal’s Page, which dealt with a Grail quest) and introduces Mordred and lots of foreshadowing for dark times coming to Arthur’s kingdom. There’s also a great deal of symbolism and authorial themes about holiness and religion, as the characters stumble across hermit after hermit after anchoress, all purporting to be holy and all with different ideas about what that means. Morris pokes fun at the “vessel of virtue, no flaws” way Galahad is portrayed in the Queste del Saint Graal by making his concerns with virtue and vice in this book obsessive, leaving the common sense characters to sadly shake their heads at him. However, Morris does trend more towards mockery here than subtle criticism as with other books, which is unfortunate.

Despite that, I enjoyed this book as I have all the others, though at last I’m starting to see the formulaic nature of these books. However, the next two books promise to do away with that as they tackle Mordred and the plot to overtake Arthur. They also return to Terence’s point of view (at least, the next one does), who seems to be Morris’s replacement of a Merlin figure (Merlin has never been mentioned in this series). It’ll be interesting to return to his eyes as the last few books have had him become increasingly more mysterious and other-worldly.

Info: Gerald Morris; published in 2006 by Houghton Mifflin

Genre: Middle Grade, Historical Fiction, Fantasy

Warnings: None.

Recommended Age Range: 10+