Just Finished Reading: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland (FP: 2008)

The Year is 1348 and plague has come to England. A scarred trader in Holy Relics who calls himself Camelot considers his options at a county fair. Head inland, he thinks. That will be safest. Stay away from the ports and wait until the cold winter kills the pestilence as it always has before. Travel fast, travel light and travel alone. That’s the best and safest way. Fate, it would seems has other ideas. Before his journey inland starts he has already accumulated a pair of Italian musicians pretending to be English as well as a young girl and her adult guardian. Before many miles have been travelled a pregnant young woman and her husband, a storyteller and a travelling showman joins the group. Each has their own reason for being on the move in these dangerous times. Each has their story to tell and each has a secret or two to hide. But as stories are told and secrets inevitably come out it becomes apparent that someone in the group is much more than a simple refugee. Someone in the group is extracting each secret and is using it to extract a terrible revenge on each member in turn. With the plague spreading throughout the countryside the question on everyone’s mind is whether or not it is safer to stay in the ever shrinking group or if they should risk a different kind of horror lurking in the towns and villages on their path north.

This was yet another one of those books I picked up ‘on spec’ because it looked interesting and different. It was most certainly both of those. I had expected a straight historical tale of human survival during the Great Plague which devastated large portions of Europe in the 14^th Century. This I got – in spades – what I also got was a kind of mystical, horror, magical tinge that added an extra and rather disturbing dimension to the whole thing. Written 12 years after her award winning first novel this book is well plotted, peppered with well realised three dimensional characters and very evocative of time and place. It was one of those books that seduces you into getting lost between its covers and where you find it difficult to disentangle yourself from the beautifully written narrative and re-engage with the real world. This book has a real magical quality about it – in more ways than one. It is an excellent study of what people will do in extreme circumstances when everything they know and believe in is slowly being stripped away from them. Each character in the book slowly reveals their true selves to the rest of the group and to the reader in such a way that is deeply engrossing. We feel, along with the villain of the piece, that the secrets must be revealed at any cost. We simply must know the truth being the interlocking web of lies and liars. This book haunted me long after I closed the last page and I am looking forward to reading more of he works. Highly recommended.