A dark knight

I cannot tolerate this age. And I will not.

Walker Percy, Lancelot

People who do terrible things always blame somebody else, usually their victims. Just read the accounts of recent atrocities, or much older ones. So it is with Lancelot Lamar, a prisoner in a mental facility in Walker Percy's 1977 novel Lancelot. He has done something terrible, though we do not find out what it is until late in the story.

The novel is a stream-of-consciousness monologue that, as Lancelot is talking to an old friend who has become a priest, is part reminiscence and part confession. Like a typical mental patient, he can't stay on  subject, so his narrative twists and turns over a broad area, making the novel a difficult read that readers may or may not find worth the effort.

Lancelot tells how he discovered that his wife has been unfaithful. His daughter has a blood type she couldn't possibly have if he were her father. Margot, a woman whom he once could not breathe without (as he says repeatedly), is now an actress in a film being shot partly on the Lamar estate in New Orleans. The film features a hurricane, and coincidentally a real hurricane is now bearing down  on the city. He sets up cameras in various bedrooms to determine exactly who is sleeping with whom. Then he takes action.

The name Lancelot is not the only allusion to King Arthur, Camelot and all that. "Guinevere didn't think twice about adultery," he says at one point. He makes frequent mention of the Holy Grail and his own quest for an “unholy grail.”

The story has an upbeat ending, or at least Lancelot thinks that it does. But isn’t he crazy?