The Witch in the Wood by T. H. White

From the very first page, I liked this book much better than The Sword in the Stone. It deals with much darker and more twisted themes in a very sensitive and creepy way, while at the same time maintaining some of the humour of the previous book, but making it less nonsensical. The action shifts back and forth between the troubled sons of the King Lot and their cruel mother Morgause (the eponymous witch), King Pellinore and his misadventures with love and the Questing Beast (this is the comical part), and King Arthur fighting to subjugate aggressive feudal lords and impose chivalry. The last is the part that I liked least, because it deals with explicitly modern (or rather explicitly late 1930s) issues of the morality of war, and I felt like White was trying to impose his ideas too aggressively. The conversations between Arthur, Merlin and Kay are basically debates between various nations about what to do with a militant Germany, with Arthur learning to move away from blind aggression to a balanced exercise of power that necessitates (for White) some measure of violence before a new world order can be imposed, and Kay as weak, gullible and easily swayed by ideas of nationalism, military glory, etc. The parts about the Orkney brothers (Gawaine, Gareth, Argavaine and Gaheris) and Morgause were by far my favourite, because of their almost Gothic atmosphere and dark, deeply unsettling themes.