Company of Liars

Title: Company of Liars

 

Author: Karen Maitland

Publisher: Delacourt Press (2008)

 

Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction

Length: 453 pages

Synopsis:  Plague has come to medieval England.  Some are hopeful that it will burn itself out.  Some cling to rites and rituals, hoping they will keep the disease at bay, and some just hope to outrun it.  This story's narrator is one of the latter, a camelot, or seller of religious relics (of dubious provenance).  His flight is not a solitary one, however.  On his way, he meets Rodrigo and his apprentice Jofre, musicians who've lost their place in a nobleman's house.  They're not the last to join this band of misfits.  Before long they're joined by Zophiel, a traveling magician, Pleasance, an herb woman, Osmund the painter and his pregnant wife Adela, and Cygnus, a storyteller.  The strangest member of their company, however, is a young girl called Narigorm, a girl with hair as white as snow and a complexion like skimmed milk.  She's a fortune teller, reading the future in runes that never lie.  Everyone in this company has a secret, some dangerous, some horrible.  For them, one who can see the truth in the fall of the runes could be even more destructive than the deadly plague.

 

My Rating: 5 Stars

My Opinion:  I took a chance on this book.  Knowing nothing of it, I spotted it on the top shelf at the library.  Eying the seven other books I already carried, I decided I might as well add it to the stack.  It was well worth it.  The book weaves a wonderful tale, walking a fine line between history and fantasy.  The characters are unique and diverse, the hints at their secrets subtle and tantalizing.  There's an air of magic about it, not quite enough to call the book a fantasy, but enough to make it a world apart.  It's like a ghost story or a fairy tale, not quite believable in the telling, but perfectly believable to the characters it contains.  Maitland's created a grim world: a soggy, sour, stinking England rotting from the plague and corruption.  The fear is contagious as well, fear of dangers both known and unknown.  Fate has a role to play in this book as well as magic.  The terrible inexorability of what will befall this strange company is as frightening as the plague rolling across the country.  It's a complex, subtle story that's quite difficult to discuss without giving anything away.  It's unexpected, dark, funny, bitter and poignant.  In short, read it.  You'll be glad you did.

Saga

Title: Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland

Author:Jeff Janoda

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers (2005)

Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction

Length: 353 pages

Synopsis: Life is hard in medieval Iceland.  The earth is rocky and difficult to farm.  The winters are long and dark and bitter.  The people are hard too, as they must be to survive in such a place; men, and women too, use their influence to their own greatest advantage..  Saga presents the tale of one valley and the chieftains that rise and fall from power there.  Inheritance and murder, legal maneuvering and cold-blooded revenge, ghosts, gods, and the ever-present, whispering elves combine to tell a story that is both immediately accessible, and yet just a bit out of reach, a saga of another time and another place, remembered in the telling.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion: The word "subtle" is not exactly the first to my mind when someone mentions vikings, and yet this tale has shown a great capacity for it.  At its most crude and basic, we have here a fight over farmland, and yet Janoda was deepened the tale to include so much more.  It's as much a novel of political intrigue, familial ties, and courtroom drama as it is a violent viking vendetta (if I may be superfluously alliterative).  "Never kill more men than you can afford to pay for," a character says at one point, and it's quite true throughout the story.  Relatively little blood is shed, but the conniving machinations of the various chieftains in this story are quite gruesome enough.  There are faint elements of the supernatural: malicious little elves flit at the corners of vision, and several deaths have a rather otherworldly bent, but this is not a fantasy.  Here we don't have horned-helmet wearing, dragon-ship sailing Norse raiders.  These are Icelandic farmers, solid, dependable, and utterly ruthless.  Intriguing though the premise is, the story itself is somewhat slow and methodical, grinding relentlessly forward like an Icelandic glacier.  It's never quite slow enough to be dull, but at the same time, one can't help but feel as if the story hasn't quite gotten started yet, even well into the book.  It's as though we're waiting for that one moment when the tale stops being back-story and becomes the narrative we feel we're expecting, but it's not a moment that ever really comes.  By the time I finished, I realized I never did get the story I was expecting, but the one I got was certainly worth the read.

On Libraries, Private and Public

It might surprise readers to learn that my personal library is very small.  I have copies of some classics: Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, and two copies of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.  One copy is a gigantic single volume with the movie covers I bought out of desperation, as the final book had been checked out of the local library for ages; the other is a gorgeous boxed set of the illustrated trilogy with artwork by Alan Lee, one of my favorite fantasy artists.  Speaking of Alan Lee and fantasy art, I also have several books of art by both him and Brian Froud, the creative mind behind the Jim Henson films Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.  He also did the inspiring artwork for a book by Patricia McKillip, Something Rich and Strange.  McKillip is also the author of the Riddle-Master trilogy, which I have in one volume, wedged between Spindle's End and Sunshine by Robin McKinley and The Ropemaker by her husband Peter Dickinson.  All seven Harry Potter books are lined up in order (hard cover, with the original dust jackets, of course), and an assortment Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern books have their own section as well.  There are dictionaries in English and Spanish and a well-thumbed thesaurus.  As I am also a student, a large part of my limited shelf space is given over to text books on statistics, environmental health, cellular biology, and (tangentially) literature and writing.  I have copies of the literary magazine See Spot Run, for which I was the editor-in-chief.  There are also copies of Cicada magazine, which I subscribed to in high school, back when it was perfect bound (like a little paperback book).  But really, that's it.  If you scan through the books I've reviewed recently, you might notice something.  I don't own a single one of them.

My private library may border on pathetic, but thankfully, that's where the joys of the public library come in.  The last time I went to visit those hallowed halls, I had three books I'd planned to grab... 45 minutes later, I walked out with eight I just couldn't leave behind.  I've used inter-library loan to hunt down historical sources and to borrow $50 pattern books to fuel my dressmaking hobby.  It's often my go-to printing spot when I'm away from home, and a great resource for music and movies.  As an undergrad, Friday nights found me and my roommate perusing the DVDs in preparation for Roomie Movie Nights.  I'm even a fan of library discards; I make altered books and journals in my free time, and old engineering textbooks are one of the few books I don't feel guilty tearing apart and painting.

When I moved on to my graduate studies, I was a bit surprised to discover the zeal with which the university libraries were guarded.  True, they are treasure troves: a ten story tower of stacks at the main library alone, separate law, health, and theological libraries, rare books and manuscripts.  In undergrad, the library was one of the few places where the local community and the college met.  Everyone was welcome.  Now, as a master's student at a large university, I've found that students have to card their way past turnstiles to even glimpse the wealth of pages within.  I understand that the libraries exist for the students and faculty, and survive because of the funds these students bring, but it still seems miserly to hide such a wealth of information and storytelling away for only a select group.  I consider myself lucky to still be in that group; the sheer number of books at my disposal are astonishing.  Even if it does feel a bit like sneaking past a dragon every time I swipe my card and climb into the ten stories of stacks, the riches I find are worth it.  And, of course, so is the pleasure of finding a little gem to share here with you.