Publisher's Weekly Review
Desperate to outrun the Black Death ravaging England during the sodden summer of 1348, nine disparate souls band together in this harrowing historical, which infuses a Canterbury Tales scenario with the spectral chill of an M. Night Shyamalan ghost story. Maitland (The White Room) gives each of the travelers a potentially devastating secret. How did narrator Camelot, a glib-tongued peddler of false relics and hope, really come by that hideously scarred face? What is magician Zophiel hiding inside his wagon? And just who is Narigorm, the spooky albino girl whose readings of the runes are always eerily on target? As the nine strangers slog cross-country through the pestilential landscape, their number shrinking one by one, they come to realize that what they don't know about each other might just kill them. Despite Maitland's yarn-spinning prowess, her narrative occasionally stalls because of unrelenting grimness and an increasingly predictable plot--that is, until its gasp-out-loud finale. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Nine pilgrims try to outrun the Black Death in first novelist Maitland's sensational take on The Canterbury Tales. It's 1348, and nonstop rain has been soaking England for months. Plague has struck the port cities, and a half-blind, disfigured peddler stops at a village fair to sell his fake religious relics. He plans to make for an inland shrine, in hopes of wintering far from the encroaching Black Death. The peddler haphazardly and reluctantly accumulates eight traveling companions. Zophiel, a magician and con man who has a wagon and horse, totes cargo (including an embalmed mermaid) that he won't let anyone touch. Pregnant Adela and her husband Osmond have been banished by their families. Venetian minstrel Rodrigo and his apprentice Jofre have been sacked by their lord. Cygnus is a man born with a swan's wing. Midwife/healer Pleasance is accompanied by her young albino charge, Narigorm, who casts runes. With echoes of The Seventh Seal and a nod to The Decameron, Maitland describes an England mired in superstition and paranoia as, destabilized by famine, pestilence and climate change, feudal society breaks down. The fugitive pilgrims can never shelter long in any town; either their own behavior (mostly Jofre's drunken homosexual escapades) or the arrival of plague drives them on. They're pursued by mysterious wolf-howls, and soon death stalks their numbers as well. After Pleasance is found hanged, they learn she was Jewish, concealing that fact because Jews are banned in England. Zophiel admits he's a disgraced priest who's being pursued by a "bishop's wolf," a holy hit man. Adela and Osmond may be brother and sister. One of the biggest mysteries here is why the group tolerates bad seed Narigorm. Although they believe in witches, vampires and werewolves, they apparently don't mind that Narigorm revels in their misfortunes, when she's not foretelling their doom or torturing small animals. Decidedly not your English teacher's Chaucer, but creepy, suspenseful fun. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Imagine a sinister version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, overlaid with a touch of And Then There Were None. Far from the royal court's pageantry, nine outcasts form an unlikely band that, beginning on Midsummer's Day, 1348, journeys across England in an attempt to outrun the Black Plague. Camelot, a disfigured peddler of fake relics, narrates; others include an expectant young couple, an Italian minstrel and apprentice, an ill-tempered magician, an herbalist, a storyteller with a swan's wing for an arm, and an albino child rune reader whose predictions are uncannily prescient. Each reveals his story; each hides a dark secret that proves his undoing. Maitland excels at describing the bleak, devastated landscape of a pestilence-torn country, with its rampant famine and superstitious, terrified inhabitants, although the pace approaches that of the travelers, trudging endlessly through the mud and muck. Likewise, some revelations are signposted too clearly. But interspersed in the cheerless realism, there's much to absorb about medieval folk customs, garments, guilds, and religion. These details, plus the intriguing characters and burgeoning suspense, keep pages turning.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Every historical novel has its "Aren't you glad?" moments. In COMPANY OF LIARS (Delacorte, $24), a jewel of a medieval mystery by Karen Maitland, those would be the times when you realize how lucky you are not to be living in England in 1348, when three separate plagues broke out among a population already beaten down by the deprivations of the Hundred Years War. The novel's aged narrator, a hideously scarred peddler of bogus religious relics called Camelot, finds himself leading a small band of outcasts to safe haven in the north of the country after word arrives that a pestilence has struck nearby. Each of the travelers on this grueling journey - including an albino child, two Italian minstrels, an ill-tempered magician and a one-armed storyteller - has a guilty secret, and one of them may be a murderer. Either that or the wolf howling at night whenever one of them is about to die is no metaphor. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, the wanderers pass the long nights telling tales. And it's only natural that supernatural elements should permeate their stories, since that was how the people of this profoundly superstitious world tried to make sense of the inexplicable events of their lives. But woe to those whose fantasies become too real. "Storytellers are always suspect," Camelot observes. "They are exotic strangers. . . . They don't belong." Sure enough, when a child is murdered, the enraged mob turns on Cygnus, the mesmerizing fabulist who believes himself to be half swan - and has the wing feathers to prove it. Maitland's own narrative strength is her skill at setting scenes that connect the harsh realities of medieval life with the no less cruel pagan customs and Christian rituals meant to explain and contain those realities. At every stop, the travelers become participants in some sad or horrific event, from the macabre "cripples' wedding" meant to fend off disease to the live burial of a suspected witch. Throughout it all, they remain pariahs, abandoned outside the walls of the not-so-civilized society of their day. No wonder they told stories to keep themselves warm. Say you're an Irish writer of hard-boiled crime novels and you have this character, a serial killer who strangles women with green rosary beads ("I like the color"), and you want to hide him in plain sight. What would you do with him? In ONCE WERE COPS (St. Martin's Minotaur, $22.95), Ken Bruen, whose bullet-in-the-brain prose style is the envy of many a noir scribbler, dispatches his psycho, Matthew Patrick O'Shea, to the New York Police Department on an exchange program with the Irish Garda. O'Shea isn't all bad - the evil lies in just one half of his split personality. The other half wants to be a good cop, and much of this bluntly brutal narrative is about his attempts to fit into a foreign environment, to learn the drill without giving away his homicidal secret or losing his national identity. (One point of honor is that he inflicts his beatings in an Irish manner - with a hurling bat.) Language is crucial to this tense masquerade; and while O'Shea prides himself on learning the lingua franca, the more American idiom he absorbs, the more his language flattens out. Back home, his raging thoughts came out in bursts of ragged poetry, but by the end of this book he's beginning to sound like just another smartaleck New Yorker. A painterly eye for a scholarly subject confers considerable charm on Ruth Brandon's CARAVAGGIO'S ANGEL (Soho Constable, $25), in which an ambitious art curator, Reggie Lee, tries to make a good impression in her new job at London's National Gallery by mounting a small Caravaggio exhibition. Reggie is a bit of a romantic goose when it comes to men; even her appreciation of the painter's 17th-century altarpiece of a saint and an angel has carnal undertones. ("Whichever way that Angel swung he was a sexy creature.") But once she starts making trips to France to secure the Louvre's copy of the painting and finds yet another version in the country home of an old woman who frolicked with the Surrealists in her youth, the contrivances of the plot yield to the appeal of the setting. This part of France was the beating heart of the Resistance, and Brandon catches past and present in one frame, juxtaposing the picturesque beauty of the countryside with vestigial war memories and glimpses of the dark political clouds just beyond the horizon. The landscape of the American Southwest is so gorgeous it leaves some people speechless. It inspires others to write mysteries. Aimée and David Thurlo have a robust regional series going with Ella Clah, a Navajo Tribal Police officer whose investigations usually involve a standoff between tribal tradition and modern ways. In COYOTE'S WIFE (Forge/Tom Doherty, $24.95), the culture clash erupts with murderous attacks on a company trying to install a satellite phone system on the reservation. Despite hints of witchcraft and fierce vigilante groups that seem transparent plot misdirections, Clah is always good company, on and off the reservation. Christine Barber is new to the Southwest in the sense that THE REPLACEMENT CHILD (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) is her first novel. But she has a great feel for the territory and for the family connections that enforce its strong community bonds. Her heroine, Lucy Newroe, a Santa Fe newspaper editor who turns sleuth when someone murders an anonymous tipster, may also be new to the area, but her sensitivity to its social nuances makes her a welcome presence. Each of Karen Maitland's medieval travelers has a guilty secret, and one may be a murderer.
Library Journal Review
Set in 14th-century England, Maitland's U.S. debut has nine strangers fleeing the plague. Each traveler tells a tale, revealing secrets of the troupe, one of which proves deadly. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Chapter One The Midsummer Fair They say that if you suddenly wake with a shudder, a ghost has walked over your grave. I woke with a shudder on that Midsummer's Day. And although I had no way of foreseeing the evil that day would bring to all of us, it was as if in that waking moment, I felt the chill of it, glimpsed the shadow of it, as if something malevolent was hovering just out of sight. It was dark when I woke, that blackest of hours before dawn when the candles have burnt out and the first rays of sun have not yet pierced the chinks in the shutters. But it wasn't the hour's coldness that made me shiver. We were packed into the sleeping barn too snugly for anyone to feel a draft. Every bed and every inch of floor was occupied by those who had poured into Kilmington for the Midsummer Fair. The air was fetid with sweat and the belches, farts and stinks of stomachs made sour by too much ale. Men and women grunted and snored on the creaking boards, groaning, as here and there a restless sleeper, in the grip of a bad dream, elbowed his neighbour in the ribs. I seldom dream, but that night I had dreamt and the dream was still with me when I woke. I had dreamt of the bleak lowland hills they call the Cheviots, where England and Scotland crouch, battle ready, staring each other down. I saw those hills as plainly as if I had been standing there, the rounded peaks and turbulent streams, the wild goats and the _wind-_tossed rooks, the Pele towers and the squat Bastle farmhouses. I knew them well. I had known that place from the day I first drew breath; it was the place I had once called home. I had not dreamt of it for many years. I had never returned to it. I could never return. I knew that much on the day I walked away from it. And through all the years I have tried to put it from my mind and, mostly, I have succeeded. There's no point in hankering for a place you cannot be. Anyway, what is home? The place where you were born? The place where you are still remembered? The memory of me will have long since rotted to dust. And even if there were any left alive who still remember, they would never forgive me, could never absolve me for what I have done. And on that Midsummer's Day, when I dreamt of those hills, I was about as far from home as it is possible to be. I've travelled for many years, so many that I have long since ceased to count them. Besides, it's of no consequence. The sun rises in the east and sinks in the west and we told ourselves it always would. I should have known better than to believe that. I am, after all, a camelot, a peddler, a hawker of hopes and crossed fingers, of piecrust promises and gilded stories. And believe me, there are plenty who will buy such things. I sell faith in a bottle: the water of the Jordan drawn from the very spot where the Dove descended, the bones of the innocents slaughtered in Bethlehem, and the shards of the lamps carried by the wise virgins. I offer skeins of Mary Magdalene's hair, redder than a young boy's blushes, and the white milk of the Virgin Mary in tiny ampoules no plumper than her nipples. I show them blackened fingers of Saint Joseph, palm leaves from the Promised Land, and hair from the very ass that bore our blessed Lord into Jerusalem. And they believe me, they believe it all, for haven't I the scar to prove I've been all the way to the Holy Land to fight the heathen for these scraps? You can't avoid my scar, purple and puckered as a hag's arsehole, spreading my nose half across my cheek. They sewed up the hole where my eye should have been and over the years the lid has shrunk and shrivelled into the socket, like the skin on a cold milk pudding. But I don't attempt to hide my face, for what better provenance can you want, what greater proof that every bone I sell is genuine, that every drop of blood splashed down upon the very stones of the Holy City itself? And I can tell them such stories-how I severed a Saracen's hand to wrest the strips of our Lord's swaddling clothes from his profaning grasp; how I had to slaughter five, nay a dozen, men, just to dip my flask into the Jordan. I charge extra for the stories, of course. I always charge. We all have to make a living in this world and there are as many ways of getting by in this life as there are people in it. Compared to some, my trade might be considered respectable and it does no harm. You might say it even does good, for I sell hope and that's the most precious treasure of them all. Hope may be an illusion, but it's what keeps you from jumping in the river or swallowing hemlock. Hope is a beautiful lie and it requires talent to create it for others. And back then on that day when they say it first began, I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies. I was wrong. That day was counted a day of ill fortune by those who believe in such things. They like to have a day to fix it on, as if death can have an hour of birth, or destruction a moment of conception. So they pinned it upon Midsummer's Day 1348, a date that everyone can remember. That was the day on which humans and beasts alike became the wager in a divine game. That was the cusp upon which the scales of Heaven and Hell swung free. That particular Midsummer's Day was born shivering and sickly, wrapped in a dense mist of fine rain. Ghosts of cottages, trees, and byres hovered in the frail light, as if at cockcrow they'd vanish. But the cock did not crow. It did not hail that dawn. The birds were mute. All who met as they hurried to milking and tending of livestock called out cheerfully that the rain would not last long and then it would be as fine a Midsummer's Day as any yet seen, but you could see they were not convinced. The absence of the birds unnerved them. They knew that silence was a bad omen on this day of all days, though none dared say so. But, as they predicted, the drizzle did finally dry up. A sliver of sun shone fitfully between the heavy clouds. It had no warmth in it, but the villagers of Kilmington were not to be downcast by that small matter. Waves of laughter rolled across the Green. Bad omen or not, this was their holiday and even in the teeth of a gale they would have sworn they were enjoying themselves. Outlanders had poured in from neighbouring villages to sell and to buy, barter and haggle, settle old quarrels and start new ones. There were servants looking for masters, girls looking for husbands, widowers looking for good strong wives, and thieves looking for any purse they could cut. Beside the pond, a gutted pig turned on a great spit and the smoke of sweet roasting meat hung in the damp air, making the mouth water. A small _red-_haired boy cranked the spit slowly, kicking at the dogs that jumped and snapped at the carcass, but the poor brutes were driven to near frenzy by the smell and not even the spitting fire or the blows from a stout staff deterred them. The villagers cut juicy chunks from the sizzling loins, tearing at them with their teeth and licking the fat from greasy fingers. Even those whose teeth were long worn down to blackened stumps sucked greedily at wedges of fat and _pork-_crackling as the juices ran down their chins. Such a rare extravagance of fresh meat was to be savoured down to the last succulent bone. Gangs of barefoot boys tore through the gossiping adults, hoping to distract the _scarlet-_clad jugglers and bring their clubs crashing to the ground. Lads and lasses made free, oblivious of the damp grass and the disapproving scowls of priest and clerk. Peddlers bellowed their wares. Minstrels played upon fife and drum, and youngsters shouted loud enough to wake the demons in hell. It was the same every year. All made the most of their fair, for there was precious little else to make merry with for the rest of the year. But even in the jostling, noisy crowd you could not fail to notice the child. It was her hair, not blond but pure white, a _silk-_fine tumble of it like an old man's beard run wild, and beneath the snowcap of her hair, a face, paler than a nun's thighs, white eyebrows, white lashes framing eyes translucent as a dawn sky. The fragile skin of her bony limbs glowed ice blue against the _nut-_brown hides of the other market brats. But it wasn't just the absence of colour in her that drew my attention; it was the _beating. Nothing unusual in a child getting a thrashing; I'd probably seen half a dozen already that day, a switch across bare legs for a carelessly dropped basket of eggs, a tanned backside for running off without leave, a cuff about the ear for no good reason except that the brat was in the way. All of the young sinners trying to dodge the blows and yelp loudly enough to satisfy the chastisers that the punishment had been fully appreciated; all, that is, except her. She neither yelped nor struggled, but was as silent as if the blows to her back were inflicted with a feather instead of a belt, and this only seemed to infuriate the beater more. I thought he'd whip her senseless, but finally, defeated, he let her go. She stumbled a few yards away from him, unsteady, but with her chin held high, though her legs almost gave way beneath her. Then she turned her head and looked at me as if she sensed me watching. Her pale blue eyes were as dry and clear as a summer's day, and around her mouth was the merest shadow of a smile. The beater was not the only one who'd been enraged by her silence. A fat beringed merchant was shaking his fist at the man, demanding recompense, purple in the face with rage. I couldn't hear what passed between them for the shouts and chatter of the small crowd that had gathered around them, but at last some deal seemed to be struck and the merchant allowed himself to be led off in the direction of the tavern, with the onlookers bringing up the rear. The beater doubtless intended to pacify the outraged merchant with a soporific quantity of strong wine. Clutching the merchant ingratiatingly on the elbow with one hand, he didn't waste the opportunity to cuff the girl one last time with the other as he passed her, a practised blow, delivered without apparently glancing in his victim's direction. The blow sent her sprawling on the ground and wisely, this time, she stayed there until he was safely inside the tavern. Then she crawled into a narrow gap between a tree trunk and the wheels of a wagon and crouched, arms wrapped tight around her knees, staring at me with wide expressionless eyes, like a cat watching from the hearth. She looked about twelve years old, barefoot and clad in a grubby white woollen shift, with a bloodred band about the neck that made the whiteness of her hair shimmer. She continued to stare, but not at my scar, at my good eye, with an intensity that seemed more imperious than curious. I turned away. Whatever had transpired had nothing to do with me. The girl had been punished for some crime, thieving probably, and doubtless deserved what she got, though she was obviously well hardened to it, since it had had so little effect on her. So there was no reason for me to speak to her. I pulled a pastry from my scrip, broke it in two and tossed half to her, then hunkered down with my back pressed against the tree trunk to eat my share. I was hungry and it was a quiet spot to eat, now that the crowd had moved on. And I couldn't have eaten and not offered the child a bite, now could I? I gazed out at the bustle of the fair, chewing slowly. The pastry was as dry as the devil's hoof, but the salt mutton inside was sweet enough. The girl was holding her pastry in both fists as if she feared someone might snatch it from her. She said nothing, not even a thank-you. I took a swig of ale to wash the dry mouthful down. "Do you have a name, girl?" "Narigorm." "Well, Narigorm, if you're going to thieve from his sort you'll need to learn your trade better. You're fortunate he didn't send for the bailiff." "Wasn't thieving." The words came out muffled from a _well-_stuffed mouth. I shrugged and glanced sideways at her. She'd finished the pastry already and was licking her fingers with fierce concentration. I wondered when she'd last eaten. Given the man's mood, I doubted he was going to feed her again that day. But I half believed her about the stealing. A girl who stood out so vividly from the crowd was not likely to survive long as a pickpocket, and it occurred to me that with her looks her father or her master, whichever the man was, might well have found a good living renting her out by the hour to men whose taste runs to young virgins. But she'd clearly angered the customer this time. Maybe she'd refused the merchant, or else he'd tried her and discovered he was not the first to come banging on her door. She'd learn ways to conceal that in time. More experienced women would teach her the trick of it, and she'd doubtless earn a good living when she mastered the art. She'd a good few years ahead of her in the trade, more than most I reckoned, for even when the bloom of her youth was gone there would still be plenty who'd pay handsomely for a woman who looked so different from the rest. "You want me to do it for you now, for the pastry?" Her voice was as cold as her gaze. "We'll have to be quick before Master comes back; he'll not be best pleased if you don't pay in coins." Her small icy hand tried to insinuate itself into mine. I put it back in her lap, gently but firmly, sad for her that she had already learned not to expect any gifts from life. Not even a crust comes free. Still, the younger you learn that lesson, the fewer disappointments you'll have. "I'm past such things now, child. Much too old. Besides, it was only a bite of food. Take it and welcome. You're a pretty girl, Narigorm. You don't need to sell yourself so cheaply. Take some advice from an old camelot: The more people pay for something, the more they believe it's worth." Excerpted from Company of Liars by Karen Maitland All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
