The Herald - The Herald Magazine
A comic take on the Black Death
better about our own screw-ups.”
Vogue columnist author of The Panic Years, was 12 when Bridget Jones’s Diary was first published in
1996, and her mother wouldn’t let her read it. “She just wanted to protect me from the archetype of the neurotic selfhating woman. In a funny way that was a real feminist act on my mum’s part. She knew I had enough baggage about my weight and my looks and didn’t want me to have that exacerbated by the book.
“But I look back at Bridget Jones and the ‘Smug Marrieds’ and her feelings of being out of sync with so many people around her and of running out of time, and I completely understand. Bridget Jones is still really relatable because unfortunately, we have not changed the way men think about commitment and fertility, and therefore women are [often] still expected to do that heavy lifting on their own.”
In terms of the workplace sexual harassment Jones puts up with, Frizzell says: “The #MeToo movement has shown that stuff is still happening in quite a lot of industries which we think of as aspirational and glamorous
– film, TV, theatre. The way it’s handled in the book and films, in a Carry On, bum-pinching, cleavage-ogling way, is now more uncomfortable with an audience.
“But a lot of people are still sleeping with their bosses and massively regretting it.”
whose debut novel Insatiable is published in February, read the books as a teenager. “I think it’s relevant today. What’s really sad is that we’ve become a lot more earnest and I wish we could learn to laugh at ourselves a little more.
“I think in this day and age the single Bridget would have Tinder binges with diary entries like: ‘Must find sensible, functional man and not look at Tinder because it’s all a disaster’ and the next day would write: ‘Hungover. Frantically swiping.’”
Bridget Jones’s Diary (And Other Writing): 25th Anniversary Edition by Helen Fielding is published by Picador, priced £14.99. Available February 4.
HURDY GURDY
Faber & Faber, £14.99
REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING
HOW best to write about the Black Death and the notion of all-consuming plague when we are facing our own deadly pandemic? James
Meek’s novel, To Calais, In Ordinary Time, was a serious attempt to enter the Middle Ages and understand the terrors of unfathomable disease.
Yet while that ambitious book predated Covid-19, and could be read with a sense of historical distance, Christopher Wilson’s Hurdy Gurdy lands when it is in full swing.
Meek’s tone was sober but Wilson, whose last novel, The Zoo, turned Stalin’s terror into black comedy, takes a different path. He aims to find amusement in the midst of horror and make us laugh. Whether he will succeed depends on what you find funny.
There were moments of wit that worked, and pages of tedium that did not. Wilson’s take on the medieval mind is unsubtle, the voice of his irrepressible narrator irksome. The comparisons he invites us to make between the superstition, faith and ignorance of 14th-century clergy and peasants and our own times are hardly original.
As becomes clear during this tale – perhaps indeed the point of it – the difference between today and then is the advance of scientific knowledge and intellectual rationality. In some quarters, at least.
Just as in The Zoo, Wilson’s narrator is youthful, naive and credulous. Known as Brother Diggory, he is a novice in an English monastery. This order follows the footsteps of Saint Odo, whose relics include a pair of skulls. Among Odo’s many talents, Diggory learns, was the power of prediction, as in his apprehension of our era, a time of “heavy metal carts”, when people asked apothecaries to stretch the skin on the cheeks “until they looked like skulls”.
Diggory’s mentor is Brother Fulco: “He taught me the four humours and the four elements, to speak the French like a noble, to write the Latin like a scholar, to speak the
Rhetoric like a lawyer, to work the numbers like a merchant, to use the herbs like an apothecary, to play the Hurdy Gurdy till it sings like a musical instrument ...”
Knowing the plague will soon be upon them, the Abbot recommends they take urgent action: “fasting, crawling on all fours, mortifications, including scourging ourselves with knotted rope, cutting our flesh open with knives, or piercing our skin with nails ...”
When it arrives, Diggory succumbs and almost dies. Recovered, he discovers everyone else has either perished or fled. So begin his wanderings through a country in which nobody can outrun the disease. He sets himself up as a healer, but soon notices that wherever he goes, the plague swiftly catches up.
Hurdy Gurdy follows Diggory over the time it takes to grow from boy to man. In so doing, he questions religion, discovers sex, and realises his future lies in medicine.
Throughout, Wilson shows the medieval mind at its most ridiculous and credulous. Animals are put on trial for murder, and people in league with the devil can turn themselves into pigs or other creatures at whim.
It is in Diggory’s youthful fascination with sex that the novel grows most wearisome. The fate of the women with whom he grows close is unhappy to say the least, grotesquely so in one instance. As this grisly episode demonstrates, the core of Hurdy Gurdy is the human striving for understanding, be it spiritual or medical, and our capacity for self-delusion. In the effort to fathom the invisible forces that control people’s lives, terrible mistakes can be made.
Thus, as Diggory attempts to fend off death, he resorts to desperate measures. Who can blame him? Yet what is so ghoulish about Wilson’s narrator is that one who would conquer disease is shown to be as lethal as any illness.