Novel of the week Jake Kerridge
Seeking respite from Chris “Memento Mori” Whitty popping up on the telly every five minutes, I thought that the last thing I was in the mood for was a book about a plague sweeping through Britain. But Christopher Wilson’s 10th novel, set against the backdrop of a medieval pestilence, is salutary: not only does it serve as a reminder that we’ve prevailed over this sort of thing before, but it’s also genuinely and therapeutically funny.
The narrator is 16-year-old Jack Fox – “So I rhyme, face and arse, with the Black Pox” – aka Brother Diggory, a novice friar of the Order of Saint Odo. Ingenuous and frustrated, he is a 14th-century Adrian Mole, fretting over his own venial sins and lustful dreams while not quite able to see through the hypocrisies and absurdities of his puritanical fellow monks.
Then the Black Death makes its way to Britain from China and Diggory succumbs, having an out-of-body experience before, miraculously, he wakes up cured – a superb set-piece that it’s hard not to associate with the account Wilson wrote in the Telegraph some years ago of surviving a cardiac arrest. As the other monks have not been so lucky, Diggory sets out to make his way in the world, where he is divested of his innocence in a number of ways.
Much of the fun comes from Diggory’s reflections on the prophecies of the Nostradamus-like St Odo (who has foreseen, among other things, an “orange-faced king, Small Hands, with straw-yellow hair wound round his head like a helmet, who said that truths were lies, and lies were truths”). Some of the modern idioms or fourth-wall-breaking jokes occasionally jolt one too far out of the distinctive world Wilson has created. But the book is authentically medieval – or at least Chaucerian – in its indiscriminate and infectious delight in all aspects of human nature – innocence and bawdry, goodness and wickedness.