The word on the street
An elegantly written but linguistically challenging medieval road trip to France.
Like the “pilgrims” travelling to Calais in this unusual and ambitious historical novel, the reader must encounter and overcome some difficulties.
Scottish writer James Meek has set his strange but memorable tale in the England of 1348, when three very different people are thrown together on the road to France.
Each is travelling for a different reason. Bernadine, an outspoken young gentlewoman dedicated to the alluring concept of Romance (definitely with a capital), is escaping a dreadful arranged marriage to a much older man. Young Will, a handsome ploughman in search of his freedom, is keen to join a group of battlehardened archers en route to fight across the Channel (we are in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War). The third character, who tells his own story, is Scottish proctor Thomas, who is returning to the town of Avignon where the plague is rife.
The narrative focuses on each protagonist by turns.
Of the three, Will is the most likeable and perhaps the most completely realised. He is both everyman and individual – a good man doing his best in hard circumstances. The surprising relationship he strikes up during the journey is tenderly and sympathetically delineated.
There is no question that
Meek makes his medieval world powerfully present and believable. Yes, there is detail, but not the tedious kind born of ill-concealed research. He allows the reader to readily hear, see and smell the farms, the countryside, the houses and the clothes. And there is no sense of the author writing,
with superior hindsight, from a more “advanced” and scientifically informed time. The evocation of the plague and its remorseless, terrifying ubiquity is particularly compelling.
Unlike, say, Hilary Mantel, in her superb Thomas Cromwell novels Wolf
Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Meek has dived even further into his chosen period by writing, particularly for Will, in a style and with a vocabulary that belongs to the 14th century rather than the 21st. With attention, readers will soon be able to understand from the context that “neb”, for example, is a face or “steven” a voice, or that “out-take” means except.
Readers will soon be able to understand that “neb”, for example, is a face or “steven” a voice.
Meek, who has done an immense amount of linguistic investigation, also modulates the language used by his trio of travellers: French-English for high-born Bernadine; a florid, multisyllabic dialect for Thomas, who writes in Latin; and robust, workaday English for Will.
Does it work? That will be largely a matter of personal taste. The technique can stand in the way of true identification with the characters, but it becomes easier as the book goes on. To Calais, In Ordinary Time is original and impressive. It has much of interest to say about gender, society and religion and there are many passages of undeniable beauty and power. Finally, though, it may be the medium rather than the message that stays longest in some readers’ minds.
TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME, by James Meek (Canongate, $32.99)