I bought this book because I hoped, as the title implied, it would be a humourous look at the Arthurian legends.
The book itself starts off on a good footing - a knight in Warwick Castle comes across American Hank Logan, who tells of how he was inexplicably sent backwards in time after being hit on the head whilst working in a munitions factory in 19th century Connecticut. He awakes in Britain during the time of King Arthur, and is taken to Camelot by a knight.
From there, everything slips out of control. The humour is quickly lost as Twain begins a long rant about his own opinions about monarchy and the role of the church through his character of Hank Logan. King Arthur himself is pushed into the background, and nearly all of the characters bar Hank himself and a boy named Clarence are shown to be simple and, in some cases, incredibly stupid. Of course, we know differently now thanks to the efforts of archaeologists, and we can give Twain some benefit of the doubt, since he was writing in an age when texts about King Arthur were taken too literally, but that doesn't explain one important problem in the book:
Throughout the book, Hank denies the existence of magic, but if magic does not exist, just how can Hank arrive in Arthurian Britain in the first place, and how can Merlin send him back again by just muttering a few threats if magic is not supposed to exist? I know that sounds as if I'm making a mountain out of a molehill - it probably is - but the non-existence of magic is the whole point behind Hank's takeover and industrialisation of Medieval Britain. If magic still exists and he is simply in denial, the whole point of the novel simply falls apart.
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