The opening hundred pages or so chronicle the coming together of an apparently random assortment of nine characters the final hundred pages finally gets its teeth into becoming a psychological thriller the middle three hundred pages … meanders. There is an aimlessness about the journey – which has no end point save to avoid the plague – which seems to reflect in the meandering structure of the novel. What Maitland offers instead is a disreputable rabble – liars by profession or necessity or self-delusional – thrown together and roaming the cities, villages, forests and marshes of England. But many reviewers did and it is in no way a re-imagining of Chaucer. In fairness, I don’t think the author Karen Maitland makes that assertion. The reviews and comments on it make an obvious but – to my mind – highly suspect assertion that this somehow a re-imagining of The Canterbury Tales. A band of travellers in the England of 1348, travelling and telling tales to each other over the course of their journeys.
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