The novelist and essayist James Meek’s confident new medieval romance is conducted in brief passages separated out by three icons, a rose, a sickle and a quill, emblematic of the three estates of the realm. The nobility play at courtly love; the commons can only evade their bondage by war service; and the clergy are in charge of chronicling and calendars. It’s 1348 and, as the Black Death mutates from fake news to imminent apocalypse, the novel’s liturgical title gets more and more ironical.
The commons strand recalls in its stubborn Saxonicity of vocabulary (‘Some gnof had got her with child’) the ‘shadow-tongue’ employed by Paul Kingsnorth in The Wake, a Booker-longlisted saga of guerrilla resistance to William the Conqueror. The clerical account, fittingly closest in style to a contemporary idiom (‘It was not my intention to deliver a sermon’), may remind readers of Samantha Harvey’s genial priestly narrator in The Western Wind.
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