Company of Liars

In the mood for some light winter reading, I picked up Karen Maitland's medieval mystery entitled Company of Liars, and enjoyed it immensely all the way through. It's the story of a small band of wanderers trying to avoid the plague and also too much scrutiny. They are all "liars" in some way, and as their stories are told or revealed, the reader grows to care about them as their companions do.

There are lots of secrets and lots of stories, and the fun of reading is in discovery, so I won't tell much about what happens, but there are lots of incidental pleasures. Maitland has done her research, and so the details of medieval life on the road are interesting in themselves; I'd never thought about the fact that glass-blowing apprentices had to be more than usually intelligent and disciplined: "get careless with a rod of molten glass and a man could be burned so badly his wounds might never heal. They were quick, eager lads and they needed to be. This was not a profession for dullards."

Even to a twentieth-century person living in a house with central heating, some universal truths appeal, like when one character asserts that "it is only when you get truly warm that you realise how cold you have been."

It's not until p. 314 of this 453-page novel that readers get the first big clue about the "lie" that the first-person narrator, a Camelot, or (according to the glossary at the back) "medieval peddler who also sold or carried news" has been carrying around. The very medieval kind of black or white judgment which puts lies absolutely on the side of evil finally leads to a confrontation at the end of the novel. And the last chapter, in which we learn "the truth about scars"--and a few other things that we might otherwise have believed were supernatural--is unforgettable, and a deeply satisfying end to a sometimes scary story.