January 16, 2020 11
All historical fiction necessarily re-
flects on the present, but by placing the
problem of allegory center-stage (you
ne understand allegory?), Meek teases
us. He isn’t offering a historical paral-
lel but inviting us to consider how the
people of medieval England were en-
couraged to think about their world,
about good, evil, love, desire, and
morality, and so to consider the dif-
ferences—and similarities—between
then and now. But he is also asking us
to think about how we interpret stories.
Allegory is a mode of interpretation as
much as it is a genre of literature—so,
for example, the Bible can be, and has
been, read literally, allegorically, ana-
logically, or morally. One of the things
Meek’s novel reminds us is what fun it
is to puzzle out hidden meanings, and
how important it might be to get your
reading right. It’s a bit like the way we
take on the role of the detective when
we read detective fiction. It is pretty
clear what Will stands for—it’s in his
name. But we are given work to do in
figuring out his fellow travelers. There
are plenty of clues that the leader of
Meek’s band of archers, for example,
stands for more than an individual in
a novel, but what exactly? He might be
God, or he might be the Devil, and not
surprisingly the correct interpretation
turns out to matter quite a lot to Will,
and therefore to us too.
What these novels by Meek and
Townsend Warner share is an ambi-
tion to touch and taste the world of the
1300s. They are both works intensely
interested in what it means to use fic-
tion to understand human nature in
history. “A good convent should have
no history,” Townsend Warner writes.
“Its life is hid with Christ who is
above.” She lays down the challenge for
herself, and her reader, early on in The
Corner That Held Them. The princi-
pal storyline of the novel begins where
Meek’s ends, in the late 1340s, as the
Black Death courses through southern
England; it draws to a close in the early
1380s, in the aftermath of the Peas-
ants’ Revolt. But it takes place inside
an inconsequential convent established
in a leaky manor house, situated in a
marshy, out-of-the-way corner of En-
gland—when the villagers there talk
about the past, they argue over how
far up the local river the Vikings got.
“I still incline to call it People grow-
ing Old,” wrote Townsend Warner to a
friend about her work in progress. “It
has no conversations and no pictures, it
has no plot, and the characters are in-
numerable and insignificant.”
Prioresses come and go, novices prove
better or worse bets, there are squabbles
over dowries and inheritances, labor-
ers’ wages soar in the aftermath of the
plague, and the masons leave the new
chapel spire unfinished. The account
books tally wages along with butter and
prunes and tallow and cattle drenches.
Outside the walls of the convent, the
villagers suffer the impact of the wars
in France in taxes and levies, and the
nuns are powerless to act for or against
anything. For a start, they lack the
funds to assuage the anger of the peas-
ants: “Food, clothing, new thatching,
the gleaning bell rung an hour earlier,
a remission of dues—there is no way of
pleasing people that is not costly.” In
the end, the main effect of the Peas-
ants’ Revolt on the convent is the loss
of its silver altar ware. The nuns bury it
to save it from being pillaged, and then
can’t remember where they hid it. They
end up having to use pewter. Their task
is to continue to sing the unchanging
chant of the office, as English rural life
transforms around them.
About two thirds into the novel,
Townsend Warner seems to have lost
faith in her plotless, inconsequential
story, and felt it necessary to weave in
some drama. The thwarted desire of a
nun to become an anchorite, or recluse,
for example, or a pious nun taking mur-
derous revenge on a fornicating priest
and his lover—it’s not that these events
are too remarkable to have taken place
in the convent, but that they linger too
long in the narrative and bear too much
significance in the minds of the nunsthemselves. Years later, they are still of
consequence. It is as though Townsend
Warner wanted the convent to have its
own history after all, to weigh in the
balance against the Hundred Years’
War and the Peasants’ Revolt. But the
novel is most successful when it resists
significance. Its real subject is indeed
people growing old, and facing the fact
of their own ordinariness:And here am I, she thought, fixed
in the religious life like a candle on
a spike. I consume, I burn away,
always lighting the same corner,
always beleaguered by the same
shadows; and in the end I shall
burn out and another candle will
be fixed in my stead.Years later, another cloistered woman
experiences much the same feelings of
insignificance: “Even her melancholy
had forsaken her. She was a quite ordi-
nary nun, who would lead an ordinary
nun’s life, no better than the others and
no worse, and dying would suffer the
ordinary pains of purgatory, no sharper
and no lighter.” Townsend Warner’s
tone is often arch, and she has a sharp
eye for the capacity of the women in
this community to bicker and delude
themselves. But there is no mistaking
her empathy for them as they struggle
with their own mortality. Human na-
ture doesn’t change much, she implies,
and she clearly has no time at all for
the idea that modern subjectivity came
into being with the Renaissance. She
creates an interior voice that speaks
across the centuries.“Ordinary time” is that part of the
liturgical calendar, between Easter and
Advent, when nothing much happens.
But ordinariness also stands for life
lived under temporal constraints, for
the commonplace experience of being
human. Questions of free will and the
shape given to private thoughts and
desires hover at the margins of both of
these novels. And it cannot be a coin-
cidence that in both novels those ques-
tions are posed by a clerk who takes
on the role of a priest, without having
the authority to administer the sacra-
ments or to shrive sins. In The Corner
That Held Them, the false priest is
Ralph Kello, a clerk who turns up at
the convent gate in 1349, claiming to
be a priest because he is hungry, and
who becomes trapped by his lie for
thirty years. In To C a l ais, it is Thomas,
a religious scholar but not an ordained
priest, who is forced by circumstance to
hear the last confessions of dying vic-
tims of the plague. In the act of confess-
ing to the living, rather than to God,
whose pardon is required? In the ab-
sence of the sacrament, the confessions
are nothing but stories—nothing more
or less than a means for people to ask
forgiveness of one another, and to give
it. In this scenario confessing is like
talking, or thinking, and the basis of
enlightenment measured on a human,
and ordinary, scale.
Some reviewers have suggested that
Meek’s novel offers parallels with life
today under Brexit. To back this claim
up they have not only Meek’s book
Dreams of Leaving and Remaining,
published earlier this year, which anat-
omized the “dream visions” powering
opposing views of Europe in Britain,
but also the fact that Edward III’s wars
with France were a struggle for control
of European cultural capital, with Cal-
ais the gateway to power. Then there
is the role of language in class differ-
ence and the ways language affects
notions of “country” or “nationhood.”
The novel prompts its readers to think
about community and defense and vio-
lence, not least the idea of “pestilence”
coming from across the Channel. Some
have argued that the book is about en-
vironmental catastrophe, and they can
point to Meek’s own comment that he
began writing it in 2013 as a novel about
climate change—the Black Death an
allegory for near-total human destruc-
tion. Both these readings seem to me
to be true-ish but not true enough.
The trouble with them is that they as-
sume the various love stories woven
through the novel are vehicles for
weightier subjects. But at its heart this
is a book about the transformative
power of love.
Meek has a lot of fun with “romance”
in the novel. There are moments, as
Berna and Laurence spar with each
other, when we could be reading Jane
Austen or Muriel Spark. Berna’s stolen
book, Le Roman de la Rose, provides
the template for a series of dressing-up
and gender-bending plot twists—and I
am being careful here not to reveal too
much—but it also lays the ground for a
debate on the true nature of love: “the
very mystery is that there is only one
Love. Where does he have his habita-
tion?” Is true intimacy grounded in
friendship or in sex, and is it possible
to have both?
It is in these debates that Meek’s con-
temporary commentary becomes clear-
est. He offers us a fourteenth- century
typology of love and fear, and asks usto confront it, and the parts of it that
we still live by, with a more challenging
typology of love’s forms and possibili-
ties for the present moment. He is writ-
ing about characters who leave home
to make new lives—migrants, in fact.
These travelers are English migrants
crossing the border into new worlds
on the continent. As Thomas reflects,
there are men who travel in order to
come home again (the man whose
“concept of liberty demands his ability
to enjoy it on his native terrain”). And
there are those who travel in order to
change themselves. The word “imagi-
nation,” with its French root, is not
known to the archers or to the Glouces-
tershire villagers Will and Hab. Berna
explains that “it is the sleight of mind
that gives the speed to know things not
as they are, but as they might be, were
God or man to work them otherwise.”
The novel has its share of haters as well
as lovers, but Meek is unequivocally on
the side of those who embrace dreams,
desire, and hope in all their uncer-
tainty, simply for the chance that things
might be otherwise.
This is a novel in praise of the cour-
age of the young, whose hunger for
freedom and connection may be all
that will save Europe, if not the world.
It does not seem fanciful to imagine
the young people currently sailing the
earth to summits on the environmental
crisis as characters in Meek’s book. But
the voice that stayed with me belongs
to Thomas—middle-aged, regretful,
and piercingly honest about his own
past failures of imagination. His ac-
count of his journey, punctuated by his
series of confessions to his servants, be-
comes a love letter written too late—in
effect a letter written only to himself,
in which he unravels the nature of the
self-deceptions that have kept him im-
prisoned, fearful of his own desire. He
has behaved well, and generously. He
has understood himself and others. But
he has not lived, because he has not
truly loved, and he knows it.
And on the other side of love: “un-
mitigable loneliness.” Sometime in the
1350s, Dame Alicia, one of Townsend
Warner’s beleaguered Norfolk prior-
esses, makes a bid for friendship with
the nuns in the community. She is wor-
ried about the convent’s finances, and
she decides to take the sisters into her
confidence. They offer no response at
all, and she is overwhelmed by a feeling
of isolation:There can hardly be intimacy in
the cloister: before intimacy can
be engendered there must be free-
dom, the option to approach or
to move away. She stared at their
faces, so familiar and undecipher-
able. They are like a tray of buns,
she thought.The last sentence is typical of Townsend
Warner—with a sudden telescoping
of perspective, we are inside Dame
Alicia’s weary worldview, shaped by
years of keeping going in the same
domestic, constricted sphere. All the
women have come out of the same oven:
“One hand pulled them apart from the
same lump of dough.” T homas Pitkerro
also knows there is no intimacy with-
out freedom, and no transformation
without love. But Meek’s strange novel
about a young man named Will sug-
gests that for those with the courage
to take it, freedom is possible and may
change the world. QSylvia Townsend Warner, Inverness,
Scotland, 1920sDorset^ County^ Museum