10 The New York Review
Love in Plague Time
Clair Wills
To Calais, in Ordinary Time
by James Meek.
Edinburgh: Canongate, 392 pp., £18.
The Corner That Held Them
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
New York Review Books,
399 pp., $16.95 (paper)
It is 1348. Berna has stolen a book
from her father’s library, and now she
is getting the gardener to cut her a rose
from the grounds of their manor house
in Gloucestershire. These crimes, she
explains to her cousin Pogge, are noth-
ing compared to the one she had been
planning, which was to take her own
life by throwing herself into the moat.
“Your moat’s not profound enough for
drownage,” her cousin points out drily.
And anyway, she has a new plan, to
which the book and the rose are acces-
sories. Her father is forcing Berna, who
is fifteen, to marry a man of fifty. In
exchange, Berna’s father will be gifted
the groom’s daughter as his new young
wife. But Berna won’t be sold. She has
read the allegorical poem Le Roman
de la Rose, or part of it, and she recog-
nizes true love in the form of the real-
life Laurence Haket, a young squire in
the king’s army who, like the Lover in
her stolen book, has been pierced by
Love’s five golden arrows. More prosai-
cally, Haket has distinguished himself
at the Battle of Crécy, two years ear-
lier, and been granted land in Calais
as a reward. Berna is determined to
elope with him to France. She has not
yet communicated this information to
Laurence Haket.
Meanwhile, in another part of the
garden, eighteen-year-old Will Quate
(who cut the rose for Berna) is bargain-
ing for his freedom with Berna’s father,
the lord of the manor. Will’s father, who
was killed at Crécy, was a free man, but
his mother is bound. Will doesn’t know
his own status—bound or free—and as
Berna points out to her cousin, this un-
certainty is a deliberate strategy: “My
father prefers him to be unsure. He
tells him he’s at liberty, then offers him
villain land to farm.” Now the manor
is required to provide an archer to de-
fend the garrison at Calais, and Will
agrees to go in exchange for his deed of
freedom, to the disappointment of his
fiancée, Ness, a farmer’s daughter, who
wants to get married right away. Will
is a catch—good-looking and sweet-
natured—but strangely behind-hand
when it comes to courting. This reluc-
tance may or may not have something
to do with his friendship with Hab,
the pigboy. In an attempt to egg him
on through jealousy, Ness herself has
been dallying, with unfortunate con-
sequences. She has recently returned
from a visit to an apothecary in Bristol,
where she has managed to get rid of the
baby she was carrying by Squire Haket.
No one has yet communicated this in-
formation to Berna.
So the journey from Gloucestershire
to Calais begins as true love, individual
will, and uncertainty take to the road
in James Meek’s freewheeling, exhila-
rating novel To C a l ais, in Ordinary
Time. “You ne understand allegory,”
says Berna to Pogge, in one of several
winks to the reader early on, letting us
know what kind of journey we are in
for. There is an infectious energy to the
whole complicated set-up. For a start,
we encounter this fourteenth-century
drama through a trio of bespoke lan-
guages, designed to capture differences
of social status. Berna’s tale is told in
a slightly elevated English studded
with French coinages that have not yet
settled into modern usage (so Pogge’s
“profound” means physically, not met-
aphorically, deep). The narrator who
relates Will’s story appears to be one of
his fellow villagers, who speaks a lan-
guage almost untouched by French or
Latin. Here he describes the villagers
preparing Will for the journey: “We
cleaned his shoon, that he’d bett with
thick leather under-halves for a far
fare, and we thrang into church.” Here
is the reaction of the villagers to travel-
ing friars selling images of the virgin to
ward off the plague:Most folk, out-take Nack, reck-
oned the qualm was a tale the
priests wrought up to wring out
our silver. We ne thought us Christ
so stern as to slay us by sickness
when he took so many in the great
hunger thirty winter before. But
we wouldn’t that the priest weened
we unworthed him, so we bought
likenesses.Meek explains in a note that he re-
searched his various Middle English
dialects with the help of the OED.
Initially I read the villagers’ narrative
voice as largely invented. So, for exam-
ple, “out-take” is a lovely rendering of
what a Gloucestershire serf might say
if he didn’t have access to the word “ex-
cept.” It turns out it is also real MiddleEnglish. The negative “ne,” which ev-
eryone in the book uses, puzzled me. It
seems an obviously French borrowing,
so why are the serfs so familiar with
it? But it turns out that “ne” was com-
mon in Old English, as well as a host
of other languages, so use of the word
doesn’t tag someone as educated or
elite. Who knew? Such are the pleasing
rabbit holes that Meek’s thickly tex-
tured language led me down.
The third voice is in the first person.
It belongs to Thomas Pitkerro, proc-
tor of Avignon—where, in defiance of
Rome, the pope had his seat through
much of the fourteenth century. Thomas
has been sent on papal legal business to
Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire but—
though the job is over and there is noth-
ing to keep him in Malmesbury—he is
reluctant to head back home. There are
practical difficulties with undertaking
the journey, as he explains in the ac-
count he writes in precise, fussy, Lati-
nate diction: “It is impossible to be a
solitary traveller in these times. I must
find company for the journey, yet the
roads to the southern ports, previously
dense with viators, lie vacant.” But the
greater problem is his fear of what he
will find when he arrives. He last heard
from his household four months earlier,
when his servant wrote to explain that
“the pestilence” had overtaken the city.
The Black Death was brought into
Europe by ship from Central Asia in
late 1347 and traveled quickly north-
ward through Italy, Spain, and France.
Thomas doesn’t know, but we can eas-
ily Google and find out that the death
toll in southern France is estimated to
have been as high as 75–80 percent. He
fears, and we assume, that his friends
are dead. In writing to them, he resur-
rects them: “In perscribing this com-mentary I create a substitute for my
faith in the continued existence of
home.”
Thomas’s narrative, written in
snatches to his servants Marc and Ju-
dith, is part philosophical treatise (he
nods to Aquinas, for example), part
confession and self-examining auto-
biography (Augustine), part a record
of the experiences, stories, and crimes
of the archers with whom he travels to
Calais. He is like Chaucer in his tales, a
clerk recounting travelers’ adventures,
some of which touch on brutal rape
and murder, and here Thomas becomes
Dante, stepping into the underworld.
Berna, Laurence Haket, Will Quate,
and Hab the pigboy think they are in a
different book altogether. Their genres
are medieval romance, pageant, battle-
epic, adventure, pastoral eclogue, and
the kinds of fairy tales in which serfs
get to bed queens. As they travel from
Gloucestershire to the ship waiting for
them at the Dorset port (picking up
Thomas and the band of archers on the
way), they meet giants, cloven-headed
men, Welsh bards, a wise boar, and evil
men keeping captive damsels in dis-
tress. The sheer brio with which Meek
introduces yet another literary conven-
tion, stock character, or unlikely sce-
nario into his still-somehow-realistic
story is thrilling.
At the center of the book is a be-
guiling tale of lovers mistaking and
finding each other in the forest, com-
plete—thanks to two identical wedding
dresses—with Shakespearian cross-
dressing. At one point, Berna plays her-
self being played by Hab the pigboy’s
sister, who herself is played by Hab,
in a kind of triple or quadruple cross.
And at this point readers—particularly
those familiar with Meek’s political
commentary on Brexit in the London
Review of Books, his book about the
privatization of public services in Brit-
ain (Private Island, 2014), his work as
the Guardian’s Moscow correspon-
dent (one source for his prize-winning
novel The People’s Act of Love, 2005),
or his novel about a journalist in Af-
ghanistan after September 11—may
be wondering whether there are two
James Meeks. Or they may simply be
wondering, Why this project? By quite
explicitly flagging Le Roman de la Rose
as a “key” to the novel, Meek forces us
to ask, If this is an allegory, what is it an
allegory of?There is a small but highly respectable
tradition of English novelists turning
to medieval and quasi-medieval worlds
in times of crisis. Tolkien’s story of
Middle- earth, like the Arthurian ro-
mance in T. H. White’s The Once and
Future King (based on Malory’s Le
Morte d’Arthur), was largely written
during World War II. Sylvia Townsend
Warner’s novel set in a fourteenth-
century nunnery in the Fens, The Cor-
ner That Held Them, just reissued by
New York Review Books, was written
between 1941 and 1947, in rural Dorset.
Arguably in all three cases the Middle
Ages offered respite from the contem-
porary “pressure of reality” (as Wal-
lace Stevens put it in 1942) while at the
same time holding a mirror up to the
warring world.‘Joy’; from the Lombardy edition of the Taqw i m as- Si h ha, an eleventh-century
medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad, circa 1390National^ Libraryof^ Austria