I continue to be amazed at the depth of the worlds that Maitland creates in her books. Not only can she take me back in time, but she can terrify me with the mysteries that she cooks up. Company of Liars is absorbing, educational, and frightening in the best way.
Company of Liars has been compared to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. But as I got deeper into the book, I started to think that it would be a lot like the Tales if Chaucer had been a horror or mystery writer rather than a bawdy comic. The first character we meet in this book is Camelot, a seller of fake relics (a cottage industry in the fourteenth century). Before long, Camelot reluctantly becomes a leader of a group of fugitives, a story teller, a mountebank, a pair of Venetian musicians, a Jew in hiding, and a seer. Though they travel to pilgrimage sites, they are not pilgrims. They’re all on the run from something. Instead of sharing stories, the characters in this tale hide their pasts.
Without beating me over the head with historical knowledge, I felt like Maitland was building up the world of 1348 England around me. The paragraphs are wonderfully descriptive, but Maitland never goes overboard. And as I read, I started to pick up on the fear that people must have felt as the plague moved in from the coasts and up from the south. As if this weren’t enough, historical records claim that 1348 was also the year that it rained every day from Midsummer until Christmas and the crops failed and the livestock got sick. It must have seemed like the world was ending to the people who lived through it, especially when they didn’t know what was causing it all. The church and the pious claimed that it was god’s punishment or a test. Others claimed it was the hand of the devil and demons. This the world that Camelot and the travelers find themselves in.
As if the setting wasn’t perilous enough, Camelot’s companions start to die. One murder might be dismissed–it was a dangerous world, after all. But you start to realize that something it out to get the travelers. In that sense, it reminds me of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None, except that it’s the murderer who has the upper hand and not the potential victims of blackmail. It takes a while for the mystery part to ramp up. Because there are so many motives, it’s hard to see the shape that it will take. The supernatural element is a delightful complication. And the twist at the very end…The solution and the twist are absolutely worth the wait.
Company of Liars has so much to recommend it. I’d recommend it to mystery fans and, especially, to fans of historical fiction. As I read it, I forgot about the twenty-first century around me. I swear that I could almost smell the mud as Camelot and the travelers made their way east towards the Fens. I could feel the hunger as they scrounged for food. And I wanted to warn them away every time they came upon a village. Excellent book. I can’t wait to see what Maitland cooks up next.