Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland, blends elements of The Decameron, The Masque of The Red Death, with And Then There Were None, and a little bit of a darker Canterbury Tales, for a story of friendship, secrets, and betrayal in plague-ridden England.
Our narrator is a camelot, a trader in religious relics, and an experienced traveler with a soft heart for other travelers in need. These includes a young couple expecting a baby, two traveling musicians, a story-teller with a swan’s wing for an arm, and a creepy white-haired child with uncanny rune-reading abilities. The company all have secrets, as you might expect of rootless travelers in plague times, but they’re not the secrets you might first expect. At times, they’re also not expressly spelled out in the text, forcing the reader to ask “but then why did he — oh!” and realize a bit more than was actually written. The company hopes to escape the plague, and individually restart their lives in new places, but can anyone really outrun the past?
Reading this right now, the novel’s biggest suspense came from the spread of the plague. As the company travels, they’re constantly rerouting, and avoiding villagers where there may be sickness, and finding signs that the plague has been through a town. This is a supernatural story, but the spreading disease is very, very real.
These days, it barely means anything to say I stayed up late reading. I’m furloughed from my work, so I don’t have to be up to teach classes, and sleep is elusive anyway. But I stayed up to finish this one, and other people’s plague secrets were a really solid distraction from the ongoing reveals about the spreading virus.
