Book Review: The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman

Second person present tense is the sexiest way to tell a story.

If you've not come across it before, Bisclavret is a 12th century poem, one of the Lais of Marie de France, which tells the story of a knight who suffers from frequent transformation into a wolf, a secret which is later discovered and exploited against him. Indeed, the word "bisclavret" is a middle Breton term equivalent to the Norman French "garwolf"... whose English equivalent I think we might be able to guess. It draws on the pool of shared early medieval mythology, with similar reflexes found in the Lay of Melion and in the story of Sir Marrok in Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman is a retelling of this werewolf story, playing on its status as a romance in the historic and the modern senses, to explore courtly love, kingship, fealty and living with a secret dangerous to oneself and others.

But before we get into the story, I actually want to start by discussing the historical note provided at the front of the book, which is one of the best I have ever encountered at setting out the stall for exactly what the author wants the story to be:

That last sentence is key to how Longman handles the historicity of their story - they promise not strict accuracy, but an authenticity of approach that aims to situate the story in the thematic space of its inspirations, if not the details and facts. And that intention absolutely is borne out in the story itself; there is an internal consistency that holds the whole thing together, but which also strikingly evokes medieval works in feel, in way often distinctly absent from modern retellings, even of Arthuriana. And I love this. Honestly, I feel like this approach is probably more difficult to pull off than literal accuracy, but all the better for the effort. What I want out of historical stories isn't the replication of minutiae - if that style of hood only came into fashion ten years later, who really cares - but in the evocation of atmosphere, used to a purpose. If a story is situating itself in a medieval mythical world, what matters far more in my view is how it turns its tools to supporting the feeling it engenders in the reader. Longman's decision to mess with the details how the medievals would have done is exactly the sort of choice that I think works for this.

And there are other tools they turn to this end with precision and skill - prose for one. The story is set in 12th century France, so obviously there's not going to be any kind of realistic language usage (I don't know about you but my middle Breton is pretty poor). But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to feed into the atmosphere with the linguistic choices they deploy. There's a consistent formality to the word choices - even the interior ones - that helps establish the court setting and the courtly manners of the people involved, even in moments of stress. They speak in the pattern of a knight from a story, even if their behaviour is more naturalistically drawn. Sentences are long and carefully structured, even speech full of delicately threaded subclauses and patterned back and forth. And the narration echoes this, seeming to speak itself in the voice of the storyteller, consistently determined to inspire wonder and magic, even at mundane details like travel-stained clothes. At no point does Longman let up: this is a myth, and so it must sound like one, in order that the spell never be broken.

It helps that Longman's prose is also just rather lovely:

The hunt is continuity: youth, exile, kingship, all of them joined by this bright thread of the horse beneath you and the call of the horns and the fierce joy of the hounds as they run, chasing down the boar as it crashes through the undergrowth.

Hear the alliteration and the rhythm to it. The story of Bisclavret is originally a poem, and Longman never lets that stray too far from memory either. There are three perspectives the story is written in, chapter by chapter, and one of those (labelled "other") is consistently in blank verse, its flow even closer to the poetic than even this crafted language.

For the other two, Bisclavret's chapters (labelled "him") are in close third, watching him from outside even though we know his thoughts, and the unnamed king's in second. This shifting gives a clear distinction to the different character perspectives, feeding into how they are in fact characterised, and what Longman wants to focus on in how they tell the story. Bisclavret feels at odds with himself, distracted and distant, and so we cannot be a part of his authentic thought process. The king meanwhile is the opposite, buried deep under his anxieties, his depression (never named as such but clearly described), his sadness and loneliness, his care and determination to be a better king than his father. And by giving us his sections in the second person, and the present tense, there's an immediacy to him, an intimacy to the experience of inhabiting his headspace because Longman puts us right there, thinking those thoughts through alongside.

Which pairs even more beautifully with those poetry sections of the Other. There... person is eschewed as much as possible. The Other is the wolf who overtakes Bisclavret and steals his skin and his self, and is divorced from humanity. There is no person, only scattered, ungrammared feeling and action, interspersed with italic moments of Bisclavret's humanity breaking through in the first person.

And Longman knows what they're doing with this, naming it on the page in one of these sections:

The mind of a man is difficult to lose: 

it whispers human, whispers I,

first person, self-absorbed, tangled up

with the gut instinct that pinpoints revenge 

The prose has us thinking about the how of the story just as much as the story itself.

But where this is all high romance and abstract, the text also provides details to ground the story in the physical where needed. One of the recurring themes that arises in Bisclavret's sections is his intense focus on his hands. It is the loss of his hands that he mourns when he loses himself to the wolf, and it is those same hands he finds himself touching, welcoming, when he returns to human form. They become totemic of his humanity as a whole, and his focus on them recurs at critical moments to focus the story's attention on his mental state and sense of self.

There are also many moments just of physical action - it's a story full of knights so there's a fair bit of sparring, but also the clasping of hands, kisses given in loyalty, skin touched to skin in passion. It's a hard thing, I think, to entwine the formalised world of the medieval and the mythic with a more naturalistic approach to human interaction, but Longman does it well, never breaking one for the sake of the other.

To linger on that clasping of hands, one of the central themes of the story is to do with medieval kingship, and the duties, fealties, powers and relationships that run in both directions from the person of the king. The unnamed "you" of the story is coming into kingship unready, learning the ropes, and is intended as a deeply thoughtful character besides, so there's a lot of wondering on exactly how his performance of kingship and his development and use of relationships with his retainers and knights is working. The king has relationships of a loving or sexual kind with several people during the story, too, and those factor into his wondering. It is a very modern concern to be preoccupied with the abuse of power differentials, but the way the king thinks it through never slips out of that medieval atmosphere, breaking immersion by this modern concern, because the king frames it in terms that feel in place for the time, predominantly duty and fealty. He is aware that he can but ask, and his subjects will give. He highlights that a lord could be asked to sleep in the royal bed chamber and this intimacy (named as such) would be considered a mark of high favour, rather than a one-sided wielding of power in counter to desire. This is a story conscious of contemporary medieval mores, rather than imposing modern ones, for the most part, and that allows Longman to think through this concern without feeling inauthentic. It becomes more part of the king's character - and Bisclavret's, though in different ways - to be overthinkers, doubters and worriers. To the point that the knight in green, a friend to both, comments on it to each in turn. 

I suppose that is the uniting feature - Longman likes to name things on the page that they are doing, the things that might be contrasts or awkwardnesses or disjoints, and by naming them in text smooth their path, just as they do right at the beginning with that historical note. It is an incredibly knowing story, the sense of Longman's knowledge of the period - they have a PhD in medieval literature - suffusing the whole without the need for the sometime-problem of historical stories where the author feels they must demonstrate the research on the page no matter what. In The Wolf and His King, that knowledge is in every word, and so crowbarring it in would be redundant.

But it isn't a perfect story, though very accomplished. In the original poem, Bisclavret is betrayed by his wife, who steals the thing that allows him to return to human form, and marries another knight in his absence, when all think him dead. Longman cleaves close to the facts of the original, and while it works in all other places, when it comes to the wife, it feels a little of a let down. When first we meet her, she is sweet, kind, loving, understanding. It is very clear why Bisclavret falls in love with her - she sees the man and only the man, he thinks, not the wolf within - and why she with him, and their courtly romance does feel perfect and lovely, even up to their fumbling but passionate marriage bed consummation. But once it switches, once the story requires that she betray him, she (and the other knight, who in this telling is Bisclavret's cousin, who knows his nature and has helped him until they fall out) becomes suddenly unknowable to the story. Her motives become opaque to us, and any sympathy the story had for her - which, in the beginning, it did aplenty - is absent. Her suffering as the wife of a man who keeps disappearing for days and won't tell her why is not explored, and she is granted no grace. For a book so strong on the interiority and humanity of its other characters, this feels like a failing.

It doesn't fit the schema set up that she might have chapters in her perspective, but I almost wish she did, or the cousin. But we get to see their betrayal only through the eyes of the king (who doesn't know until it is revealed) or through the experience of the wolf, who cannot provide emotional depth and understanding the way Bisclavret as a man can. The wolf only wants revenge.

And so the bloody culmination and revelation feels... a little undermined. Thankfully, the story has as its climax not that but the aftermath, ensuring that there is a genuine emotional payoff waiting in the final chapter and epilogue, but it does mean that all rings a little hollow in contrast. The king, and Bisclavret, have both been characterised by their gentleness, their courtesy, their dedication to peace or understanding of things which many would not. That it does not hold here, for those they have loved, however understandable that might be, seems like a betrayal, almost, in order to remain true to the shape of the original narrative.

But for all that, I could not help but love it nonetheless. As well as this repeated theme of what a medieval king was and could be, there is another thread about love and perception. Bisclavret falls in love with his wife because she sees him only as a man. When he meets the king, and continually afterwards, he notes that the man seems to see through him. His gaze pierces him, flays him, unmasks him. He fears he sees the wolf inside. And, in the end, that knowing gaze is the one he needs, not the one that only sees the surface. It's a little corny, but well... it is an Arthurian-inspired romance. We have to have some high ideals in there, right?

The Knight and His King is, in the main, an incredibly accomplished novel, full of linguistic control, beautiful atmosphere, vivid prose and a fully realised impression of a mythic medieval court. Longman does a difficult thing of managing to wed the right quantity of realism with the stylisation and formality of a courtly romance, in the old sense, resulting in something that feels distinctive and emotionally authentic, even as it holds true to tropes that have been around for nearly a millennium. It is also, for all its formality, an incredibly intimate, personal and passionate book, as only something with such a committed interiority could be. Longman understands, and I emphasise, that duty, honour and fealty are just incredibly sexy things when done right. And here, they absolutely are.

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The Math

Highlights: beautiful prose, two deeply feeling main characters, a world drawn straight from medieval myth

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Finn Longman, The Wolf and His King, [Gollancz 2025]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social