From Publishers Weekly
Ackroyd (
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde;
Hawksmoor; etc.) brings late medieval London to life in this latest of his fascinating historical novels. Working with a cast of characters drawn from
The Canterbury Tales, Ackroyd deploys his usual meticulous research to reconstruct the background of Chaucer's England in a prose idiom congenial to modern readers. The thriller plot concerns a visionary nun, a sect of violent religious heretics and a shadowy group of power brokers trying to orchestrate the ouster of King Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke. But the rather creaky conspiracy narrative, supposedly based in fact, is just a peg on which to hang a panorama of 14th-century life that takes in the cathedrals, cloisters, brothels, taverns and law courts while instructing readers on all things medieval, from medicine (dove droppings applied to the feet is the recommended cure for insomnia) to fast food (at street stands, roast finches can be had two for a penny). It's a society where elaborate courtesy balances gross indecency, pious ritual shades into sadomasochistic fetish, reflexive orthodoxy is troubled by new philosophies from the universities, corrupt and worldly churchmen contend with anti-clerical revolutionaries and science struggles to be born from a morass of superstition, alchemy and astrology. The characters seem both secure within and frustrated by the confines and mysteries of their narrow worldview and are badly in need of a renaissance. Ackroyd's brilliant evocation of their ideology and psychology lets us recognize the traces of our own time in this archaic past.
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From Booklist
London in 1399 is rife with suspense and intrigue. Richard II is about to lose the crown to Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster. In the House of Mary in Clerkenwell, the prioress has her aristocratic hands full, literally of her pet monkey, figuratively of 18-year-old Sister Clarice, who is having visions and concocting veiled prophecies. Meanwhile, friar William Exmewe guides a cabal of heretics--all commoners--in a series of terrorizing explosions in church precincts, which he reports on to Dominus, a cabal of atheist materialists--all aristocrats--avid to be powers behind the throne of the prospective Henry IV. And closely related bystanders notice Clarice's tete-a-tete with Exmewe, among other odd encounters. Most of Ackroyd's characters have the same occupations, but not the same personalities, as those of their contemporaries, the storytellers of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales. The thrillerlike scenario through which they career, and in which some of them fatally crash, should enthrall history buffs far more than fiction readers who prize deep characterization. Make sure said buffs don't miss it.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
