To Calais, In Ordinary Time
by James Meek
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Pub Date 4 Jul 2020 | Archive Date 30 Aug 2019
Canongate | Canongate Books
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Description
England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon, and a young plowman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais.
Coming in their direction from across the English Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers’ past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires.
A tremendous feat of language and empathy, it summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien, and eerily reflective of our own. James Meek’s extraordinary To Calais, In Ordinary Time is a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender, and desire—set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history.
Advance Praise
'Fans of intelligent historical fiction will be enthralled by a story so original and so fully imagined. Meek shows the era as alien, which it is, and doesn’t falsify it by assimilating it to ours. But his characters are recognisably warm and human'
HILARY MANTEL
'A glorious imaginative feat, full of complex, compelling, believable characters. Rarely have I been so captivated by a novel, so keen to hurry back to it and reimmerse myself in its world'
SARAH WATERS
'I was incapable of ripping myself away from this novel once I began it. James Meek is the bold creator of a world that I felt I could see, hear, smell and taste with complete clarity. What an excellent storyteller he is'
CHARLOTTE HIGGINS
PRAISE FOR THE PEOPLE'S ACT OF LOVE:
'A quite extraordinary novel'
PHILIP PULLMAN
'Once in while a novel comes along that is so startlingly original as to defy categorisation . . . This is powerful storytelling indeed'
Mail on Sunday
'Meek is a novelist of Dostoevskyan intensity and seriousness'
Guardian
'A savagely colourful, always astonishing entertainment of elegant and bold storytelling'
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
'This is historical fiction that transcends the genre – as intense as a thriller, imagined on an epic scale'
The Times
'Spellbinding . . . A truly great read'
Guardian
'One of the country’s finest writers'
GQ
'The narrative drive is amazing. So is the cold clarity of Meek’s imagination'
STEPHEN KING
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781786896742 |
| PRICE | US$27.00 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Maria M, Librarian
This ARC was courtesy of netgalley - all thoughts and opinions are mine and unbiased
Loved this - this is very much my genre.
Very evocative and descriptive, you really do need to pay attention but I read this on a horrible, rainy day snuggled in a chair with blanket and I feel, able to really immerse myself which, I think, enhanced the whole experience for me
If you are looking for a real epic of a novel, this one is definitely for you
Keith C, Educator
Love, Romance, Catastrophe
Bernadine, a damsel fated to an unwanted marriage, flees her father’s manor in pursuit of a romantic ideal; Will, a young herdsman, is sent to join a company of archers as part of the king’s levy; Thomas, a failed scholar, is assigned to the company of archers in lieu of a priest to take confession. All make their way together with the bowmen, battle-hardened at Crecy, to Melcombe in Dorset in order to take ships to Calais. Coming in the opposite direction is the pestilence known as the Black Death.
This is a quite brilliant novel which sets so many challenges to the reader and succeeds on so many different levels. In historical fiction it seems to me quite unique: its closest companions might be Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Hodd by Adam Thorpe. Before beginning to read you need to know that much of the novel is written in a (simplified) form of Middle English, while other sections, when Thomas is narrating, are written in an elevated form of Latinate English – indeed these sections are to be imagined as actually written in Latin. So, for example, the Black Death is the qualm among the common English speakers, but pestilence among the educated. Now I enjoyed this immensely, but I am not sure how many others will do so.
There is a lot going on in the plot also: a sustained conceit involving the mediaeval romance Le Roman de la rose, the breaking down of social hierarchies in the wake of plague, gender swapping and confusion of sexual identity, as well as a tale of retribution for a crime committed by the bowmen in France years earlier – and of course the cataclysm of the plague itself creating havoc among the certainties of the times. Is it too much to read into the arrival of the plague from Europe a foreshadowing of our own impending catastrophe at the precipice of Brexit? Certainly, despite the antiquity of its language, this novel reads surprisingly modern in so many ways.
In conclusion, I found the narrative quite outstanding, a contender for my novel of the year.
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