Company of Liars: A Novel of the Plague. Karen Maitland. 2008.
It really must have felt like the world was ending. It’s an interesting thing to think about - the psychology of an ordinary person in medieval Europe when the plague was raging is so alien from mine, because that person’s material circumstances were so alien from mine, that I can just barely empathize. They must have experienced time differently, must have had a completely different way of coping with being alone. Things must have been slower, in that information and things moved more slowly through the world, work took more time, and people had to be used to waiting for things. But they may have been faster too, in that because things took time, those things filled all the time there was. I’d imagine that those people were rarely bored, in the way that I am so often.
But the plague - people really did know it was different. As much as we sometimes think a medieval person’s life was an undifferentiated mass of shit, they knew (they had to have known) when things were worse. And what accounts we have show the survivors of the plague grappling, in different language than we would use maybe, with existential questions. What did it mean, to be alive? How could you tell who deserved good fortune and who deserved bad? Was God punishing the world, or this village, or the king? Did God exist at all? Was there a point to anything?
This is a book about the middle ages that reads like a post-apocalyptic dystopia, which is pretty appropriate I suppose. The first and most obvious comparison, one the novel invites, is really to The Canterbury Tales, in that it’s about a diverse group of people traveling together and taking turns to talk about their lives. But it’s Chaucer by way of someone like Cormac McCarthy - the travelers have no destination in mind, and can never stop anywhere long. There are no safe places left, for anyone, and though there is some comfort and security in companionship no one really ever trusts anyone else, and they shouldn’t. The reader can’t even trust the narrator.
There’s an almost…existential tone to this novel that I liked a lot. Even more than some dystopian novels it reminded me of plays by people like Beckett or Brecht. The descriptions of place are so sparse that I imagined everything happening on a bare stage; the world of this story had been so thinned out by the plague that it was easy to think that the characters you saw were the only people left alive, that maybe they had been traveling in a circle for decades or centuries, and that nothing else existed outside of what they saw.
This is another book I don’t want to spoil too much; there are twists, most of which come from information being held back from the reader. The twists are well constructed and convincing, though - I never felt manipulated, and the book is worth reading even without surprises. But the surprises should be surprising. It’s really very good.