The Leper’s Companions by Julia Blackburn #ABookADayInMay No.26

I normally have little interest in historical fiction, particularly set during the medieval period, but I decided to have a gamble on The Leper’s Companions (1999). That was partly because it is such a beautiful book, and partly (moreso) because I’d read and enjoyed Julia Blackburn’s very unusual biography of John Craske. I thought if anyone could get me to enjoy a book set in 1410, it would be Blackburn.

We are thrown into a community of people who are mostly poor and ill, and often on the edge of some disaster. The miraculous and unexplained is commonplace – whether that be a mermaid washing up on the shore or a baby being born with the head of a fish (because of the mermaid’s curse, they assume). Things we’d recognise as severe illness sit alongside things that don’t make sense to a 21st-century audience. What I appreciated about Blackburn’s writing is that we are in this world on its own terms. There aren’t attempts to show what was really happening now that we have more medical and scientific knowledge, or a rationalising of medieval stories – rather, we see it all in modern English but contemporary understanding:

I walked through the village. Walls were pulled back like curtains so that I could see inside the houses. In one there was a woman lying in the sour stink of a dark room while a mass of devils crawled over her naked body. Her husband was with her, and even though his face was turned from me, I was suddenly afraid of him.

In another room in another house a woman was sitting upright while all her life walked before her eyes, fast and then slow, the years unfolding into each other as she watched them.

I appreciated how connected everyone was to their environment, and how open they all were to signs – whether from nature, from God, or from a mix of local and international beliefs. For instance, even those who would dismiss various of the omens that matter to this community would respect their recognition of the following omens. For the community, there isn’t a distinction:

Everyone in the village was filled with a sense of impending dread. They knew that the approaching winter was going to be very severe because there were so many warning signs. The geese were flying off in great creaking crowds even before the month had come to its end. The trees were much too heavily laden with fruit, anticipating that they couldn’t presume to survive and so had to trust in the scattering of their seeds. There was a feeling of time itself closing in, of a gate being clanged shut while the world waited with growing apprehension.

After various traumas and tragedies, as well as vows and wonders, three of the community decide to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Off go the leper of the title, a priest, the shoemaker’s wife, and fisherman’s daughter and the narrator of the book.

Here’s where I confess that I didn’t really get on with The Leper’s Companions. In the early sections, thanks largely to no attempt to put it in Ye Olde English, I was quite enjoying it. But I don’t think the quest narrative is for me in any of its myriad forms. The second half of the novel is basically the people travelling (though surprisingly little is told about the mechanics of this), meeting various people often in states of extreme misery, and going on their way. I have to admit that I didn’t find it particularly interesting.

I think Blackburn is a really good, interesting writer and she certainly creates vivid scenes. For me, there wasn’t quite enough to sustain interest in what she then did with those scenes strung together.

But it’s quite likely that I’m the wrong audience for The Leper’s Companions, and the fact that she got me to read to the end of a book set in 1410 is nothing short of miraculous in itself!