Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Holy Relic Swindler’s Tale

It is I suppose comforting for some to believe that the social issues of today’s Britain are perennial, that there is a national character, perhaps, which continuously muddles through the same problems over and over. This is one explanation for Karen Maitland’s imagined world of England in the Middle Ages. The way she portrays the state of the nation - from immigration to the condition of the roads; from sexual harassment to fake news - suggests that the problems we have to deal with have a constancy that define the country.

I further suppose that without such presumed continuity, there wouldn’t be much of a market for her type of historical fiction. In order for a story set in the 14th century to be comprehensible there has to be something more than geography which connects us culturally to that distant era. So Maitland projects our fears and anxieties into the past, not unlike much of sci-fi projects them into the future. Among other things, in the latter such a literary tactic allows for some familiarity about the problems as well as creativity in imagining their solutions or their ultimate consequences.

But there is a clear difference between historical fiction and sci-fi. We already have (and are) the solutions to the problems of the past. So the genre of historical fiction can only work if it can suggest how we arrived where we are. If there’s not much sociological variation from where we started, the setting of the story is quaint but largely irrelevant, and, from a literary perspective, fraudulent, an unintentional parody. Why not set the tale in Ancient Rome? Or Victorian England? Or contemporary New York City? The allusions to things like xenophobia, commercial fraud, knife crime, child and substance abuse, and the English Summer weather could be made where and whenever. ’Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose’ would seem sufficient to get the point across.

Casting faux historical references in terms of a sort of hippie Canterbury Tale (with neither the wit nor the elegance of the original) is, therefore, of dubious merit. Dropping in archaic period terms like ‘camelot’ and ‘kirtle’ don’t do much to divert attention from the Hobbesian misery of the lives of the characters - solitary, nasty, brutish and short. These characters inhabit a land of superstitious squalor in which the principle recreations are alcoholism and GBH. Whatever secrets they might be hiding seem insignificant in light of their existential reality, which has little to do with their place in history.

It could be that I’m being unfair. Perhaps the Company of Liars is an allegory about the 21st century rather than a projection to the 14th. Could it be that we can only recognize the extent of our depravity by considering it in terms of some distant condition? If so, The book might have some merit. Otherwise it is a tedious journey to nowhere. Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, to name just one parallel story, is a far superior alternative - established firmly in a time and place with no pretensions to period color, and consequently much more honest..

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