Plague on all houses
A satirical novel set during the Black Death deftly sends up both medieval and modern beliefs.
In the middle of a pandemic, what could be more appropriate than a novel about the Black Death, the bubonic plague that wiped out almost half the population of Europe in the 1340s and 50s? But what about a comic novel on this subject? Christopher Wilson now has a track record in novels that are at once fast, funny, grotesque, satirical and brutal. Hurdy Gurdy is his 10th novel, and it keeps up the pace.
Sixteen-year-old Brother Diggory is a trainee monk in the order of Saint Odo the Ugly of Here and There. A healthy young man, he chafes at rules of celibacy and has erotic dreams about women’s bodies. Brother Fulco is a wise monk who teaches young Diggory about plants and medicinal remedies. But Abbot Benedict is a stern old man who gives a chilling (and silly) sermon on sex, procreation and damnation. Comes the plague, and all the monks are wiped out save Diggory. Reverting to his birth name of Jack Fox, he flees the monastery and sets out to see the world.
A couple of British reviewers have already spotted the influence of Voltaire’s
Candide in this. Naive young man wanders wide-eyed through the world confounded by its realities. In his innocence, Jack is unaware that he himself is spreading the plague. But he discovers sex in joyful encounters with both prostitutes and a wife. He meets innumerable quacks with delusional theories on how the plague can be conquered by bleeding or astrology or self-flagellation. Preachers say the plague is God’s punishment for humanity’s sins. A pig is put on trial for heresy. One furtive dissident damns the church and all its works. Yet, forsooth, there are some kind and reasonable people in this nightmare. Hurdy Gurdy is a comedy after all, and what Jack has learnt about plants and medicinal remedies turns out to be of real value.
Wilson gives us all the squalor, stench, grossness and filth of cruder medieval life. But just as we’re settling comfortably into a standard exposé of ignorance, he throws a couple of curveballs at us. Saint Odo’s writing predicts a time when horseless
carriages will belch out unsanitary fumes, when people will become subservient to “thinking machines” and be confounded by their viruses and the untruths they spread, and when some “orange-faced king with straw-yellow hair” will say “the poor should build a wall to keep themselves out”.
It’s pretty crude as satire, but it gets us to ask if we’re any brighter than our medieval ancestors. Even better, Wilson allows his main character to see the world as medieval people would have seen it; he does not impose a 21st-century mindset on him. Although Jack learns what quackery and dishonesty are, he is still inspired by visions and still believes cures can be effected by prayers and folk remedies. Even as he moves towards an early form of real science, he is locked in the assumptions and prejudices of his own time. As we are in ours. l